A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Illustrators
Another handful of macabre illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag. As before, these are minor works compared to the Golem illustrations and his illustrated Poe but it’s good to find something new. The Ancestress (1816) was a tragedy by Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer in which a woman killed by her husband for infidelity returns to haunt future generations. Steiner-Prag’s illustrations date from 1919, and may be seen at the Google Cultural Institute.
Chimère du soir (1961) by Leonor Fini. Réalisme irréel is an exhibition of Fini’s work currently running at the Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.
• ” ‘Paris invented the flâneur,’ he notes, ‘and continues to press all leisurely and attentive walkers into exercising that pursuit, which is an active and engaged form of interaction with the city, one that sharpens concentration and enlarges imaginative empathy and overrides mere tourism.’ ” David L. Ulin reviewing The Other Paris by Luc Sante.
• “A lot of posters promise so much that how can they ever deliver?” Nicolas Winding Refn talking to Mat Colegate about his book, The Act Of Seeing, a collection of posters for exploitation films.
• “Sexuality is present throughout and often subverts a narrative we might read entirely differently from a straight poet.” Callum James reviews Physical by Andrew McMillan.
This movie will lose a lot of people along the way, but then again, as far back as 1962, Ballard wrote a manifesto for a new form of science fiction, Which Way to Inner Space?, in which he insisted that “from now on, most of the hard work will fall, not on the writer, but on the readers. The onus is on them to accept a more oblique narrative style, understated themes, private symbols and vocabularies.” This is exactly what Wheatley wants from his audience.
Mike Holliday comparing Ben Wheatley’s forthcoming film of High-Rise with JG Ballard’s novel. Ballard’s suggestion for a new SF now seems increasingly like a road not taken. But that’s another discussion entirely…
• The Lost Library of John Dee, an exhibition of books owned by the Elizabethan magus, opens at the Royal College of Physicians museum, London, in January.
• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has been writing about his illustration heroes including Alexander Alexeieff.
• Cameron: Cinderella of the Wastelands. The exhibition has just finished but the art is still online.
• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 518 by Fis, and Secret Thirteen Mix 165 by Damien Dubrovnik.
• At Dirge Magazine: Tenebrous Kate on Fantômas, the French King of Crime.
• Suitably seasonal: Polish Night Music by David Lynch & Marek Zebrowski.
• Kickin’ In, a previously unreleased EP of music by Patrick Cowley.
• Jean-Michel Jarre‘s favourite albums.
• Seeing It As You Really Are (1970) by Hawkwind | Seeing Out The Angel (1981) by Simple Minds | Seeing Red (1998) by Red Snapper
Metzengerstein by Wilfried Sätty.
One of the horses in yesterday’s post seemed familiar until I realised it had been used by Wilfried Sätty for his final Metzengerstein illustration in The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (1976). This has been happening a lot since I started delving into the book scans at the Internet Archive, Sätty’s collage sources leaping abruptly from old engravings. The horse is a good example of Sätty’s evolved approach to collage which often reversed the printing of assembled artwork, or used a printing press (or PMT process) to duplicate and mirror his collage elements.
Not all Poe illustrators bother with this Gothic pastiche, and those that do don’t always provide an effective rendering of the climax when the clouds of smoke above a smouldering castle assume the form of a colossal horse. Byam Shaw’s illustration is typical, with the horse standing inertly above the flames. Sätty’s picture only occupies half a page but is much more successful, as are many of the other illustrations in a volume that remains one of the very best Poe collections, and the finest of Sätty’s books.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The original Gandharva
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
I keep intending to write some longer pieces, including a review of Aleksei German’s unforgettable Hard To Be A God, but the workload has been heavy again so here’s another illustrated book.
Illustrations by John Dickson Batten (1860–1932) have appeared here before, all of them for collections of fairy tales compiled and adapted by Joseph Jacobs. Indian Fairy Tales (1892) is another Batten/Jacobs collaboration, and is as fine as their other books, with Batten enclosing many of his full-page drawings in elaborate frames. Most of the figures look nothing like Indian people but that’s standard for books of this period. The Internet Archive has several copies of this title, including a limited, numbered copy with hand-coloured illustrations. I prefer the illustrations in black-and-white, however, so that’s what you see here.
This is the third time this drawing has appeared here but the first time I’ve been able to fully credit the artist. Walpurgisnacht appeared in issue 604 (April 26, 1917) of Austrian humour magazine Die Muskete. Dier was Austrian, and contributed to many issues of Die Muskete around this time, always credited as “Amadeus” hence the difficulty in tracing his identity. Most of the other magazine illustrations I’ve seen are a lot less memorable than this one; as I’ve said before, Walpurgisnacht could easily have been drawn in 1971. The erotic qualities of the drawing may be deliberate if the attribution of a pornographic series (see below) is accurate. I’ve not been able to find authoritative confirmation for this so don’t take my word for it.
Big thanks to Kuinesis for sending the solution to this mystery. The drawings above and below are also from Die Muskete, and via Kuinesis’s Tumblr, as is one of the bookplates.
Continue reading “The art of Erhard Amadeus Dier, 1893–1969”