{occult} – Page 99 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 28

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The Expansion of the First Great Ornamental Age: 3 Distances (2009) by Seher Shah.

• Great Female Artists? Think Karachi. “One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who administers the internationally renowned Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Until very recently, creatively inclined males tended to focus on fields such as advertising or illustration, leaving the art field wide open for some very talented women.” Related: artist Seher Shah (and also here).

• Hardformat looks at the luxury/collectors/whatever edition of the forthcoming Brian Eno album. “What’s the music like?” Colin asks. Indeed.

• Strange Flowers is “a celebration of the most extraordinary, eccentric and unfairly forgotten figures of the past 200 years”.

• Warsaw Warble: Illustration and design in Poland, 1917 to 1938. More marvels from A Journey Round My Skull.

• Strange Attractor hosts talks at London’s Little Shoppe of Horrors throughout the autumn.

• Barney Bubbles in Mojo and more details of the new edition of Paul Gorman’s BB book.

• A blog devoted to all things having to do with Howard Pyle (1853–1911).

• Erik Davis on Dreaming, Writing, Philip K Dick and Lovecraft.

• 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books.

• Secular Exorcisms by Evan J Peterson.

• RIP Jean Benoît.

• Street haikus.

• I Put A Spell On You (1965) by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; I Put A Spell On You (1965) by Nina Simone; I Put A Spell On You (2001) by Natacha Atlas.

Mucha’s Zodiac

Another zodiac poster. Alphonse Mucha’s design was a calendar produced for arts review La Plume in 1896, and typically with Mucha great attention is paid to the decorative details. Close examination reveals a sunflower behind the sun symbol in the lower left while poppies accompany the symbol of the moon on the right.

Mucha was also commissioned for the Exposition Universelle four years later, with work including these designs promoting the Austrian exhibits. This seems surprising when it was his work in France which made his name but there was a great deal of national prestige at stake in 1900 and the French authorities wouldn’t have wanted a foreign artist involved with their official art. Mucha was also a foreigner to the Austrians, of course, but they regarded him with more benevolence, and their decorative arts exhibit included one of his carpet designs. If it was galling to be ignored by France he at least had the satisfaction of seeing many of the participating nations showing work in the Art Nouveau style which he’d done so much to evolve.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900
• Owen Wood’s Zodiac
• Palladini’s Zodiac
• Exposition Universelle films
• Exposition jewellery
• Exposition Universelle catalogue
• 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

Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900

Here at {feuilleton} the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 is never far away. This post is linked to those of the previous two days via the zodiac signs which decorate the lavish canopy on the Palais de l’Optique, one of the smaller exposition halls. The zodiac signs seem oddly inappropriate for displays of scientific endeavour until you discover that the principal attraction was François Deloncle’s Grande Lunette, or Great Telescope, one of the largest refracting telescopes ever built.

The astrological signs, then, signify the heavens which the telescope allowed an audience to view on a giant screen. The elegant poster advertising the attraction is by Georges Paul Leroux (1877–1957), and was discovered at Gatochy’s Flickr pages. The diagram below shows the colossal scale of thing and—appropriately—ought to be viewed at a larger size on Pignouf’s page. When you consider the small scale of film projections in 1900 the screenings from this monster must have been quite spectacular. The Exposition Universelle 3D Project has additional photos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle films
• Exposition jewellery
• Exposition Universelle catalogue
• 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

Owen Wood’s Zodiac

Yesterday’s zodiacal illustrations reminded me of this grubby item (depicting the twelve houses of the zodiac and four elements) which I took the trouble to scan since there’s no other example of it on the web. (Click for a larger version.) The artist, Owen Wood, was a highly-regarded illustrator commissioned to produce a poster in 1969 for the landmark magazine Man, Myth & Magic which was serialised weekly in the UK the following year. MMM had a few other giveaways in their early issues but Wood’s poster was by far the best piece. I thought I might have another copy somewhere but it didn’t turn up in a cursory search; if I find it I’ll replace this one. Wood’s very fine and intricate line-drawing deserves better appraisal than this dishevelled item which suffered from being pinned in too many smoke-filled rooms over the years. This obituary of the artist has details of his career.

Fire (detail).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Palladini’s Zodiac
• Austin Osman Spare

Palladini’s Zodiac

David Palladini’s poster for Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre has been mentioned here twice in the past week so it seemed only fair to see whether any of his other work matched that splendid piece. The artist has worked for years as a book illustrator but seems to receive most attention these days for his Aquarian Tarot deck, first produced in 1970 and still being sold today. Many of the card designs show something like the kind of stained-glass window approach he used for his film poster but with less decoration. Far closer to the Herzog piece is a series of posters he made in 1969 depicting his own interpretation of the signs of the zodiac. Every mention I’ve seen of these notes their scarcity which is a shame when many of them are such striking designs. Of particular interest to this Aubrey Beardsley obsessive is seeing that the scale shapes which Palladini put into the “N” of his Nosferatu lettering may, as I guessed, go back to the similar shapes which Aubrey borrowed from Whistler’s Peacock Room; see the peacock-like bird in Aquarius below.

This page has some examples of the Major Arcana designs from Palladini’s Tarot. More of his zodiac posters follow, all of which are courtesy Meibohm Fine Arts.