{art nouveau} – Page 30 – { feuilleton }

Design as virus 10: Victor Moscoso

Continuing an occasional series.

A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull is a stylish series of Indian book jackets from 1964 to 1984. These impress partly for the way they rework western design approaches, and they consequently look very different from the florid visuals one might (lazily) expect of Indian cover design. Western culture borrowed more than enough from India in the 1960s, from clothes to music, so it only seems right that the sub-continent should be free to take something back.

Luna Toon by Victor Moscoso (1968).

Will at A Journey Round My Skull mentions the above cover design as reminding him of this Krautrock bible, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, a book which happens to be a favourite repository of musical obsession. The cover reminded me more of the weirdly abstract comic strips created by artist and graphic designer Victor Moscoso for the early run of Zap Comix in the late Sixties. Moscoso was one of the most graphically revolutionary of the West Coast poster artists, and his approach to comics looks surprisingly fresh today next to the work of fellow artists like Robert Crumb. Those limitless vistas go back to Giorgio de Chirico but it was Salvador Dalí who made deserts raked by evening shadows reflect interior landscapes of his own, and it was Dalí’s immense popularity that in turn popularised that endless plane as a stage for surreal events. Moscoso borrows from the Surrealists and comic artists like George Herriman as much as he borrows from Disney; in his posters he was one of many artists taking motifs or whole designs from Art Nouveau. Our Indian egg may well be an original work but the first example in Will’s post is a very Saul Bass-like hand, so I’m guessing that the designers of these books were looking around for inspiration. And that eye-in-a-hand? Moscoso had done that as well.

Blues Project Poster by Victor Moscoso (1967).

While we’re discussing Victor Moscoso, it’s convenient to draw attention to a slight mystery connecting his poster art and the great album cover designer, Barney Bubbles. The poster above was one of a number that Moscoso made incorporating Victorian or Edwardian photographs, and two at least of these use antique erotica as their central image.

Space Ritual interior, design by Barney Bubbles (1973).

This particular photo always stands out for me. The woman is familiar to anyone who’s seen the interior of the fold-out sleeve Barney Bubbles created for Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album in 1973. Barney spent some time in San Francisco in the late Sixties and was undoubtedly familiar with Moscoso’s work, as he was with all the great designs coming from the West Coast at that time. What surprises me is that he should have somehow found the same image to use as Moscoso did. Was there a popular book of Edwardian erotica which everyone was familiar with? Did he ask Moscoso where he’d found the photo? Did he find it by chance? Barney Bubbles experts don’t know the answer (I’ve asked) and the question is in any case a rather trivial one. But I’m still curious… As early porn photos go it’s a particularly fine one and I’d like to know whether there are more like it and where it came from. Needless to say, if anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus 9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus 8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus 6: Cassandre
• Design as virus 5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus 4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus 3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus 2: album covers
• Design as virus 1: Victorian borders

The Studio & Studio International

Back in February I posted some pictures from a 1971 collection of Art Nouveau illustration and design, some of which were competition entries from The Studio magazine. The Studio, which later became the long-running Studio International, can be seen from issue 11 onwards at the Internet Archive now that they’ve started uploading Google’s book scans. I’ve only looked at one of these so far, Volume 11–13 which runs over 850 pages and so takes some time to go through, as do all these rather unwieldy PDF books. The issues are missing their covers and so aren’t dated but would appear to be from around 1896 to 1898, one of the final entries being a memorial piece for Aubrey Beardsley who died that year; The Studio was the magazine which had introduced Beardsley to the public only five years earlier.

The Studio ran regular competitions among its readers and the examples shown here are from some of those. I especially like these type designs; dare we assume that the “Dorian” design below is named after Dorian Gray? As a whole the magazine is an odd mix of very dull Victorian art of the landscapes and artisans type, with occasional flares of interest when they devote a feature to the emerging Art Nouveau style or profile a Symbolist artist such as Giovanni Segantini.

A note for anyone wishing to download Google scans from the Internet Archive: some of the PDF links lead you to a Google page where they’re trying to sell you an e-text or get you to buy a book. To see the available files you need to click “All Files: HTTP”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine

The Great God Pan

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

Continue reading “The Great God Pan”

Louis Rhead’s peacocks

La femme au paon (Woman with peacocks): from L’Estampe Moderne (1897).

Two works by British Art Nouveau poster artist and illustrator, Louis Rhead (1858–1926). The first of these is very typical and resembles many of his magazine covers of the period. The cover illustration for The Century, meanwhile, must count as the only time I’ve seen a peacock presented as a possible Christmas dish.

The Century Christmas Number (December 1894).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé

Taking Woodstock

I mentioned Ang Lee’s forthcoming film, Taking Woodstock, last week and this poster by Mojo makes a decent fist of capturing some of the West Coast psychedelic style. I thought at first that the rainbow hues were garish in the wrong way, the San Francisco poster artists used bold colours but limited their palette since many of them were working for screenprinting. But since this film concerns the story of a gay man, Elliot Tiber, and his attempt to provide a home for the Woodstock festival in 1969—and since the rainbow flag is now a gay symbol—it makes sense even if the overall impression is of colour clash. I like the subtle touch of making the poster look worn, something I’ve done myself on a recent book cover design which is also styled as a cinema poster. I’ll be posting that here in due course.

That’s the film promotion; the posters for the original event can be seen at Woodstock posters. The pencil sketch on the left is an elaborate Art Nouveau-styled design intended for the festival before the original choice of venue was refused. The sheet in the centre looks like a hasty promo piece for the new venue while the poster on the right is the final version with the famous dove graphic by Arnold Skolnick. That dove came to symbolise the whole event, hence its appearance on the Taking Woodstock one-sheet.

Taking Woodstock opens in the US on August 15th, 2009, the 40th anniversary of the festival.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Over the rainbow
• Dutch psychedelia
• Family Dog postcards