{illustrators} – Page 195

Wladyslaw Benda

The American Magazine, May 1933.

An atypical piece by Wladyslaw Theodor Benda (1873–1948), a Pole who moved to the US to work for the magazines. His illustrations are rarely this splendid but he gained a later reputation as a mask-maker, a talent that would have helped with his cover depicting the Mask of Fu Manchu for Collier’s.

Collier’s, May 7th 1932.

This page has a great succession of images showing how Benda’s original mask design managed to survive reinterpretation by subsequent Rohmer illustrators—what you might call a case of visual Chinese whispers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vintage magazine art II
• Vintage magazine art

The Codex Seraphinianus

It had to happen…the entirety of Luigi Serafini’s masterpiece (US edition, 1983) scanned and Flickr-ised for your viewing pleasure.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel
• Surrealist cartomancy

Metropolis posters

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece via some of its posters, all from 1927.
This site is a great source of information about the film.

Designer: Heinz Schulz-Neudamm.
As of 2005, the world’s most expensive film poster, selling for $690,000.

Continue reading “Metropolis posters”

Angels 4: Fallen angels

The Treasures of Satan by Jean Delville (1894).

Some more favourite paintings today. Jean Delville produced a splendidly strange portrayal of Satan as an undersea monarch lording it over a sprawl of intoxicated, naked figures. When Savoy Books decided to put together the definitive version of David Lindsay’s equally strange fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, I felt this was the only painting adequate to the task of filling out the cover. That was in 2002; a year later Gollancz used the same painting on the cover of their Fantasy Masterworks paperback edition of the book. Lindsay’s book has been plagued by bad cover art for years so we managed to raise the bar for future editions. Delville was one of the great painters of the Symbolist school, all his work is worth looking at.

There are numerous representations of Lucifer but Franz Stuck’s is especially striking and apparently caused viewers to cross themselves before it when it was first exhibited.

Gustave Doré’s tumbling figure is from his illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, a book full of armour-clad, spiky-winged angels. Some of those wings have even found their way into my work via the miracle of Photoshop.

Lucifer by Franz Stuck (1890).

Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Häfner, 1928–1985

The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

Mrs Amworth.

Another great artist of the macabre and supernatural, Virgil Finlay was the one of the most talented and imaginative illustrators of his generation. Unlike older contemporaries such as Joseph Leyendecker, who became wealthy producing elegant yet often bland advertising art, much of Finlay’s best work was for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories which paid a pittance and printed his finely-hatched scratchboard drawings on the cheapest paper. The advantages to this work, such as they were, came in the access to a huge and appreciative audience, and the chance to provide the first illustrations for what would turn out to be classic genre stories. Finlay illustrated a number of HP Lovecraft’s tales and received the highest praise from the author in doing so. His illustration for Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep (below) contains a slight nod to Harry Clarke’s Valdemar picture (see previous post) with its distant, highlighted doorway, a detail that Clarke himself borrowed from the celebrated Las Meninas by Velázquez.

Therionweb has five galleries of Finlay’s pictures and Bud Plant again has a brief biography.

Abercrombie Station.

The Thing on the Doorstep.

Six and Ten.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive