Parade de Satie

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The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

Jean Cocteau (again), writing in The Difficulty of Being about the opening night of Parade, the “ballet réaliste” he created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Erik Satie wrote the music, Léonide Massine choreographed the dance, and Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and decor, with assistance from Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists. The reception for Parade wasn’t as thoroughly hostile as that received by Le Sacre du Printemps a few years earlier but there was bait enough for the reactionaries, with ragtime quotes in the dance and the music, and an everyday setting in which a group of street performers attempt to summon a crowd to see their show. Other details were overtly avant-garde: some of Picasso’s costumes were more like wearable cardboard sculptures, while Cocteau further antagonised the audience (and the composer) by adding the sounds of a typewriter, siren, pistol and steamship whistle to the music. The most significant response came from Apollinaire when he described the ballet in the programme notes as “une sorte de surréalisme“, giving the world a new word which we still use today.

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Parade de Satie by Koji Yamamura is an animated presentation of Satie’s music which sees the characters from the ballet—a Chinese magician, a small American girl, the acrobats, a pantomime horse—jumping and dancing around the screen while Satie, Picasso and Cocteau observe the proceedings. It’s a lively and witty film, probably more lively than the ballet itself when the hand-drawn performers are less encumbered by gravity or their unwieldy outfits. Yamamura has directed a single animated feature, Dozens of Norths, and many more shorts like Parade de Satie, including films based on a story by Franz Kafka (A Country Doctor) and the life of Eadweard Muybridge (Muybridge’s Strings). Being a pioneer of motion photography and inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge is an attractive subject for animators. The naked figures from his studies of human and animal motion turn up in Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, while Gérald Frydman directed a short biographical film about Muybridge, Le Cheval de Fer, in 1984.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu
Orphée posters
Cocteau and Lovecraft
Cocteau drawings
Querelle de Brest
Halsman and Cocteau
La Belle et la Bête posters
The writhing on the wall
Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau’s sword
Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Orphée posters

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Not a film poster. Orphée aux Yeux Perlés (1950) by Jean Cocteau.

After watching Jean Cocteau’s Orphée again this weekend I went looking for the film’s posters. There was more variety out there than I expected. Nothing as lavish as the posters for La Belle et la Bête but then you’d expect a fairy tale to be presented with more visual flair than Cocteau’s modernist myth. Most of the early examples are collaged arrangements of stills that give little idea of the film’s originality or dream-like qualities. I was hoping there might be some interesting Polish, Czech or Japanese designs but if there are they didn’t show up in my searches.

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France, 1950.

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France, 1950.

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France, 1950.

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Belgium, 1950.

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Edward Wadsworth woodcuts

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Englische Graphik (1923).

More art that caught my attention this week. Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) is one of those artists with a single work that turns up regularly in social media, prompting a “Wow!” response before everyone moves onto something else. Dazzle Ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool (1919) is the Wadsworth that everyone likes, a painting that combines the artist’s persistent theme of ships and shipping with his experience as a member of the Vorticists, and a designer of “dazzle” camouflage for marine vessels. The dazzle fad didn’t last very long, and was of doubtful utility in any case, but it did give us many pictures of destroyers and batteships painted like floating masses of abstract art.

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Platelayers’ Sheds (1914/1918).

Wadsworth’s prints, which include a few dazzle ships, are the kind of bold black-and-white art I always enjoy seeing, pictures that push their representations to the edge of abstraction. The woodcuts differ so much from his later paintings—quasi-Surrealist accumulations of tidal flotsam and other objects arranged against views of the seashore—they might be the work of a different artist altogether.

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Liverpool Shipping (1918).

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Dock Scene (c.1918).

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Townscape (1920).

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The Twilight Magus

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Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

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Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Ulrich Eichberger album covers

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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.

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

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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.

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

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In The Groove (1972) by Charly Antolini.

Included mainly because of the title.

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