{illustrators} – Page 81

The art of Toshiaki Kato

Toshiaki Kato isn’t the first contemporary Japanese artist to work variations on Aubrey Beardley’s style but he’s one I’d not come across before. Kato’s cover illustrations run a gamut of familiar styles, not only Beardsley but Harry Clarke, Gustav Klimt, Tamara Lempicka, Maxfield Parrish and no doubt a few more I haven’t recognised. Beardsley’s influence is something I like to follow so it’s the black-and-white work you see here. It’s particularly fascinating seeing Japanese artists playing with Beardsley motifs when so much of Beardsley’s early style was derived from Japanese prints; a rare example of cultural influence finding its way back home after a century or more.

There’s surprisingly little information about Toshiaki Kato on Anglophone websites but scans of his gorgeous paintings proliferate. This page is a good place to start but there’s plenty more at Pinterest and elsewhere.

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George Barbier’s Mirages

Mirages (1919) is a book of poems by Renée de Brimont with illustrations by George Barbier, an artist whose work has featured here on several occasions. This is a minor addition to the Barbier oeuvre with fewer illustrations than I would have hoped for, a handful of designs that show a different style to his more familiar pochoir prints. Many illustrators vary their styles—even Beardsley did—but Barbier seemed happy maintaining a single drawing style. (Note: The copy of this book at the Internet Archive is missing the cover picture above.)

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The Scottish Fairy Book

A post with some connection to the main news of the week, namely the vote for Scottish independence. At the time of writing the outcome is still in a quantum superposition between Yes and No. I’ve lived in England all my life but I’m half-Scottish (and a quarter Welsh) so the question has a personal relevance beyond being a citizen of the United Kingdom. For the record I would have voted Yes if I’d had the opportunity.

The Scottish Fairy Book (1910) is a popular retelling by Elizabeth Grierson of fairy stories and folk tales. The illustrations are by Morris Meredith Williams (1881–1973), an artist who was born in Wales but lived in Edinburgh for several years. This is only a small selection of Williams’ illustrations for the book which also include many half-pages, vignettes and two self-contained pictorial sequences: Times to Sneeze, and a dialect version of Monday’s Child. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

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Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror

This is more like it. In 2008 when I posted one of Jacques Houplain’s etchings for a 1947 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror there were none of the other pictures in the series to be found. Now there’s a website devoted to Houplain’s work which features a page of his Maldoror illustrations. There’s a crude vigour to these pieces that gets much closer to Lautréamont’s fervour and viciousness than do the illustrations by Houplain’s famous contemporaries. Houplain is also one of the few illustrators to pay some attention to Lautréamont’s frequent digressions into the animal kingdom. The artist’s other work is worth a look; Legendes is a series of prints of medieval demons.

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Pierre-Yves Trémois’s Fleurs du Mal

A couple of works by Pierre-Yves Trémois appeared in one of the very first posts here back in 2006 as part of the feature that began the long-running Recurrent Pose series. I like Tremois’s work a great deal so it’s good to find these pages from his 1971 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. There were ten illustrations in all, some of them in the clear-line etching style familiar from his many prints. The Tremois edition is unusual in having some (all?) the poems written out by the artist. He’s also one of the few illustrators to do justice to Baudelaire’s scandalous lesbian verses by showing women who actually seem attracted to one another. Earlier illustrators—if they depicted the theme at all—were much more coy.

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