{illustrators} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 783

An illustration by William Heath Robinson for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914).

• New music: How To Shoulder The Radiance Of Revelations by Dadub; Leviathan by Stephen Roddy; and Echoes Of The Hollow Earth by Cryo Chamber.

• At Sight & Sound: “Every time I look at the film, it gets better.” Stephen Soderbergh on Jaws.

• At Public Domain Review: The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920).

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron on the evolution of French science fiction after Jules Verne

• Mix of the week: A Twin Peaks mix for The Wire by Lori Eschler & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Kefir.

• Patrick Wolf’s favourite albums.

• ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

• Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires (1990) by Cocteau Twins | Midsummer Night (2010) by The Time And Space Machine | Midsummer Boulevard (2022) by Hawksmoor

Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal

It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-siècle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.

Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.

Continue reading “Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal”

Weekend links 780

An early illustration by Burne Hogarth from Federal Illustrator, Winter 1931–1932, credited to the artist’s original name, Bernard Spinoza Ginsburg. (Via)

• RIP Simon House, a musician whose death was announced in the same week as news of a remixed edition of Hall Of The Mountain Grill by Hawkwind, the first of the group’s albums to feature House on violin and keyboards. House’s keyboards made a considerable difference to Hawkwind’s sound, expanding the range of their songwriting; the melodramatic scale of Assault And Battery/The Golden Void wouldn’t have been possible without those massed Mellotrons. Post-Hawkwind it was House’s violin that was sought after during his time as a session musician, on songs like Yassassin by David Bowie, and Talking Drum by Japan. He’s also one of the musicians credited on Thomas Dolby’s biggest hit, She Blinded Me With Science (violin again), although his contribution there is easy to mistake for a synthesizer.

• “We did want the name to be weighty and metal-related because it is a kind of a metal band. So what is heavy and what is metal: that was the answer.” Hildur Gudnadóttir talking about Osmium, an experimental quartet comprising Gudnadóttir with James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater.

• At Criterion: Stephanie Zacharek on Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, films from a time “when delighting audiences meant more than catering to the predetermined whims of a dogged fandom”.

• The week in maps: At Public Domain Review, Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (ca. 1920 edition); at Nautilus, the first maps of the Earth’s magnetic field.

• The eleventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Not on any map: Mark Valentine describes the time he tried to buy a phantom island from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

• At Colossal: “In surreal portraits, Rafael Silveira tends to the garden of consciousness“.

• New music: Osmium by Osmium, and Along The Wind Spear by Survey Channel.

• Anne Billson chooses Anjelica Huston’s ten best roles.

• Owls in Towels

• Five Owls (1970) by Canned Heat | Night Owl (1996) by System 7 | Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly

Weekend links 779

The Crystal World by JG Ballard. An illustration by Virgil Finlay for the Summer–August 1966 issue of Things To Come, the Science Fiction Book Club mailer.

• At Blissblog, Simon Reynolds looks back on 20 years of limited-edition electronic music reissues by the Creel Pone label. (Previously.) A bootleg enterprise but a very worthwhile one since most of the reissues would otherwise remain deleted and largely forgotten. I thought the releases had finished years ago but it seems not, Discogs now lists over 300 of them.

• “Everyone recognized the brilliance of Robinson’s eventual script: they just didn’t want to make it.” David Cairns on the miserable magnificence of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I.

• Coming soon from Top Shelf: More Weight: A Salem Story, Ben Wickey’s illustrated account of the Salem Witch Trials.

• The tenth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• At Colossal: “A unique portfolio of Hilma af Klint’s botanical drawings communes with nature’s spiritual side”.

• At Nautilus: The Visual Language of Crystals—Chemistry becomes art in Thomas Blanchard’s timelapse video.

• At Unquiet Things: Supernatural field notes and incomprehensible eldritch frequencies: The art of Ed Binkley.

• See some of the entries from the 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year.

• New music: Instruments by Water Damage, and Reverie by Deaf Center.

• The Strange World of…Editions Mego.

• Strobe Crystal Green (1971) by Gil Mellé | Crystal Leaves (1983) by Ippu-Do | Crystalline Green (2002) by Goldfrapp

Ulrich Eichberger album covers

El Condor Pasa (Paul Nero In South-America) (1970) by Paul Nero Sounds.

It’s the groovy look again. Since compiling a list of artists and designers working in this post-psychedelic style I keep finding practictioners I hadn’t noticed before. German designer and art director Ulrich Eichberger is someone I might have spotted earlier if I’d examined his discography, especially when several of the albums he worked on are ones I’ve owned for many years. The covers of those albums aren’t very psychedelic, however, and don’t even look like the work of the same designer until you scrutinise the credits. The examples here are those where he was working as a cover artist as well as designer, favouring the ones where the pop-psych hallmarks are in evidence: vivid colours, bold outlines, and faces or figures treated to various degrees of stylisation. Elsewhere, the influence of Heinz “Yellow Submarine” Edelmann may be seen in the watercolour blooms that fill the backgrounds. Most of these designs are for the German wing of United Artists Records (or its Liberty affiliate) which means that Eichberger got to work for two of the major German groups of the early 70s, Can and Amon Düül II.

Partyrausch – Das Ideale Tanzalbum 70/71 (1970) by Various Artists.

Tago-Mago (1971) by Can.

I’ve never thought this was a very good cover but it’s the most popular album of those listed here.

Partyrausch 71/72 (Das Ideale Tanzalbum) (1971) by Various Artists.

In The Groove (1972) by Charly Antolini.

Included mainly because of the title.

Continue reading “Ulrich Eichberger album covers”