{art} – Page 500 – { feuilleton }

The Dark Ledger

The boundless depths of Chris Mullen’s VTS site continue to yield treasures. The documentation for these pictures is somewhat vague but they seem to be illustrations for Fantômas stories which Mullen has grouped under the title The Dark Ledger, part of a larger selection of pages devoted to the Lord of Evil. The depiction of the Eiffel Tower is of interest here for its showing a view over one of the Paris expositions, possibly the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The opium den, on the other hand, seems remarkably overlit and well-appointed compared to the more customary renderings of such places.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas

Weekend links 1

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the AIDS awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format‘s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The random circles no doubt relate to those which the doomed Stevie Verloc occupies his time in drawing. More at Caustic Cover Critic.

• Artspeak? It’s complicated. Jon Canter at The Guardian makes a blazingly obvious point which few in the art world would ever admit: that the specious pronouncements of many galleries and contemporary artists are the worst kind of bullshit.

• I helped judge the Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition whose winners were announced last week.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook enjoys Neu! and Wendy Carlos.

• Nuit Blanche, a short film by Spy Films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

The art of Laurie Hogin

Song of Retail #1 (Pink Skull Monkey) (2004).

Retail might be more interesting if it involved pink monkeys beating skulls. There’s more at Laurie Hogin’s website and at Littlejohn Contemporary. Via Chateau Thombeau.

Diorama with Palliated Species (2007).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Margaret Armstrong book designs

Millionaire Households and their Domestic Economy (1903).

More Art Nouveau cover designs, this time by celebrated American designer Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944) whose life and work is documented here. The University of Rochester has examples of her work, as does the Atheneum of Philadelphia and the University of Alabama’s Publisher’s Bindings pages, the latter being an incredible resource for 19th and 20th century cover designs.

The Golden Key (1926).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Bradley does Beardsley

Browsing various bookbinding sites this week turned up a gorgeous cover design I hadn’t seen before by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962). The Beardsley influence is unmistakable, of course, and more pronounced than one usually sees in Bradley’s work. Richard Le Gallienne is a familiar name to scholars of the London fin de siècle scene although I can’t testify to the quality of this novel which was published in 1898, the year of Beardsley’s death. If you want to give it a go, the Internet Archive has the entire thing in its Bradley livery.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks