Max (The Birdman) Ernst

birdman.jpg

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).

Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka Hapshash & the Coloured Coat. Sharp’s homage to the great Max was one of a number of his designs produced on metallic foil sheets, the reflective nature of which often presents difficulties for reproduction in other media.

performance.jpg

Performance (1970).

I wonder how many people who admired Sharp’s poster puzzled over the meaning of the image, one of twenty-eight similar collages from the fourth chapter of Ernst’s 1934 “collage novel” Une Semaine de Bonté. Chapter four—Wednesday; Blood—concerns the criminal travails of a series of bird-headed individuals (or possibly the same individual in different guises) which end in abduction, possible rape/murder, and suicide. This picture of Ernst’s has always struck me as a very obvious rape metaphor with the woman stretched over the birdman’s lap and the knife piercing her foot. Ernst’s dark imagination—informed by Freudian concerns, as were most of his fellow Surrealists—separates the picture from the more lightweight Art Nouveau/Beardsleyesque stylings of the other London artists. Martin Sharp was producing collages of his own during this period so it’s easy to see why he was attracted to Ernst. And the popularity of his poster may explain why the birdman turns up in a painted version in Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, seen when Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) goes to pick mushrooms in the greenhouse. Ernst’s sinister birdman suits Performance very well, a token of the film’s atmosphere of weirdness and violence. (“A heavy evil film, don’t see it on acid” warned underground newspaper International Times.)

sharp_dylan.jpg

Bob Dylan: Blowing in the Mind (1967).

And to compound the connections a little more, Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan collage portrait (another foil sheet production) also turns up in Performance as part of the collage-covered screen in one of Turner’s rooms. Unlike his fellow Hapshash artists, Sharp’s work is under-documented on the web beyond pages such as this one. The same goes for Ernst’s collage novel but then the best way to experience that is to buy the Dover book edition.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Robing of The Birds
Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
The New Love Poetry
Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
Further back and faster
Quite a performance
Borges in Performance

The Robing of The Birds

birds.jpg

Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (1940). Compared to some Czech and Polish posters, the associations here aren’t so surprising; Ernst identified his alter-ego as a bird-headed individual named Loplop. Birds and bird-headed humans recur throughout his work. Hitchcock, meanwhile, famously commissioned Salvador Dalí to design the dream sequences in Spellbound (1945). One of Ernst’s few appearances as an actor is in Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) a very Surrealist film which also features scenes informed by Ernst’s work. It’s a shame more directors didn’t take the opportunity to employ these talents while they were still alive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Ballard and the painters
Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
Czech film posters
Hitchcock on film
Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
Dalí and Film

Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

beckett1.jpg

This 1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy is one of my favourite paperback cover designs. The “illustration” (as it’s described on the back) is a photograph of an artwork by artist/designer Russell Mills and the minimal credit gives no indication as to whether it was Mills who was responsible for the striking type layout. I’ve noted previously the equally striking Picador designs by the Quay Brothers who were responsible for both art and layout on their covers. Mills extended his work into graphic design later with album cover designs (and some book design) for Brian Eno, David Sylvian, David Toop and others so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in this case.

beckett2.jpg

The Picador edition of Murphy was published in 1983 and comprises part of this week’s book haul. The three small Mills paintings suit the novel but I prefer his sculptural and collage works. I’ve taken to collecting more of these older Picador editions in recent years since they don’t turn up secondhand as often as they used to. As with the Quay Brothers and Italo Calvino, I wonder now how many Beckett covers Mills produced for Picador. The books list More Pricks than Kicks and Company in addition to these titles. He was still working for them up to 1986 when he and Brian Eno collaborated on the graphics for Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Unlike the world of Penguin collecting, this area lacks adequate documentation; further investigation is required.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
Crossed destinies revisted
Beckett directs Beckett
Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
The art of Shinro Ohtake
Not I by Samuel Beckett
Film by Samuel Beckett

The Best of Michael Moorcock

mm1.jpg

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.

The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very long time but I’ve also been fortunate during that time to get to know the writer and Linda Moorcock, his wife. Mike likes the work I’ve done in the past for Savoy Books and we did have an anthology of his favourite pieces by other writers planned for Constable & Robinson back in 2005. That book didn’t work out so this makes up for its cancellation. This is an excellent anthology, put together initially as a private enterprise by editor John Davey who managed the difficult task of compiling a collection which ranges over forty years of writing. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer came aboard as co-editors for the Tachyon edition.

I’ve been working mainly on the interior design of the Tachyon volumes (although I’ve also done the cover for Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming Booklife) and for this title I took a cue from Ann Morn’s cover design which features a pair of gates emblazoned with large letter Ms. The title spread above takes the letter M from the typeface used for the author’s name and multiplies that to create an equivalent set of gates for the reader to pass through. I try to play down the pyrotechnics for fiction—the words are the important thing, not the graphic design—but since this was a story collection I thought I’d try illustrating each piece using the title typography alone. Most of these are done by using a suitable typeface but for a few pieces I managed to create an arrangement that reflected the story. Behold the Man (below) is the Nebula Award-winning story of a journey back in time to find the historical Jesus. The cross shape not only relates to the Biblical theme but also implies the crossed time streams and Moorcock’s layered, cross-cut narrative.

mm2.jpg

The Best of Michael Moorcock is available now from the usual sources and received a glowing review in the Guardian. Later this month, and other work permitting, I’m hoping to make a start on what will effectively be a companion volume, Savoy’s long-delayed Into the Media Web, another collection by John Davey which this time collects the best of Moorcock’s copious essays, reviews and other non-fiction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Designing Booklife
The Sonic Assassins
Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
An announcement redux

Gramato-graphices

gramato-graphices.jpg

Or Gramato-graphices. In quo varia scripturae emblemata, belgicis, germanicis, italicis, hispanicis, gallicis characteribus exaata… scripta, aeri incisa, et impressa per Cornelium Boissenium Enchusanum to give the full title. A treatise on penmanship and calligraphy from 1605 by Cornelis Dirckszoon Boissens. Also another free scan at the Internet Archive. Searching for better reproductions turned up this stunning engraving by Boissens in the Rijksmuseum collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive
The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
Letters and Lettering
Studies in Pen Art
Flourishes