A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Illustrators
top: William Henry (1967); Victor Moscoso (1967).
bottom: Victor Moscoso (1967); Kelley/Mouse (1967).
Marvellous. Oldhandbills.com has a lot of this stuff, loads of designs I’ve never seen before. Via Arthur.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Marian Zazeela
Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).
There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which is released next month. This is another CGI-heavy confection along the lines Polar Express, with the actors being given digital bodies via motion-capture, and it’s something I’d probably have ignored until I saw this picture of Grendel, the story’s principal monster. Beowulf is one of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems and Grendel, the bloodthirsty creature which Beowulf battles, is one of the ur-fiends of English literature, along with his equally monstrous, lake-dwelling mother and the dragon which fatally wounds the hero. The trio give us a peek back into the dark imagination from a time before recorded history and Grendel especially has always had something raw and primal about its character. So when you see a beast with such a history portrayed as little more than a diseased muppet you wonder what’s going on. Are the creators inept? Ignorant? Were studio restrictions at work? How does an industry with the talent to give splendid life to the trolls and Balrog of Lord of the Rings, or Davy Jones and crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, screw up so badly?
Britannia à la Beardsley by ET Reed (1895).
Pickings grow slim for the dedicated Beardsleyphile after you’ve bought a few books. Despite his prolific career, Aubrey B was dead at 25 and the better collections of his work, especially Brian Reade’s essential monograph, Beardsley (1967), tend to contain almost his entire corpus, juvenilia and all. So you find yourself seeking out the work of his imitators, his successors, and even the weak but not altogether unsuccessful “Nichols” fakes from the 1920s.
Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.
This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the cover of this one seems more suited to Borges (as much as he can be illustrated) than the somewhat bland Surrealism of illustrator Peter Goodfellow. René Portocarrero (1912–1985) was a Cuban painter with a post-Picasso style who specialised in hallucinogenic profiles like the one here. And it’s a guess but I’d bet the “C. Marker” who photographed the painting is French filmmaker Chris Marker (who I compared to Borges last year), director of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Marker worked as a photo-journalist for many years and made a documentary entitled ¡Cuba Sí! in 1961.
Continue reading “Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal”
A cover design by the great cartoonist and pioneer animator. Typical of a compulsive fantasist to add a huge dragon head to an otherwise regulation piece of Chinoiserie. No date or any indication as to whether McCay’s work was also featured inside but there’s another design of his for the same establishment here. The latter version could almost be a page from Little Nemo in Slumberland.
• Bud Plant’s Winsor McCay page
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive