{religion} – Page 37 – { feuilleton }

The art of Melchior Lechter, 1865–1937

The first issue of yesterday’s arts and crafts magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration includes an article about Melchior Lechter, a German artist and designer whose illustration work I knew from books by gay poet Stefan George but who seems unjustly neglected by fin de siècle art histories. The reminder prompted me to search a bit more actively and doing so turned up another Internet Archive document, Melchior Lechter, a monograph from 1904 by Maximilian Rapsilber. These are Google scans and the quality is very good for once, with a collection of impressive graphic works in Lechter’s religious Art Nouveau style, as well as photos of his furniture and stained glass window designs. I can’t say much more about artist since all the available documentation is in German but the visuals in Rapsilber’s book make me wish we could see more of his work.

(Note: if you want to download the full PDF, do so here.)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration

Weekend links 3

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.

Winter light

Dolmen in the Snow (1807).

Some paintings for the Winter Solstice by one of my favourite Romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Snow scenes tend to inspire picturesque cliché but in Friedrich’s paintings winter is merely another season in which to evoke his Christian mysticism through the depiction of landscape. The pagan dolmen above is an unusual subject, far more common are churchyard ruins and mountainside crosses although he was also happy enough painting luminous landscapes, especially of mountains and the sea. His treatment of natural light is quite extraordinary and his photo-realist style makes an interesting contrast with the similar effects captured by JMW Turner‘s palette of blurs and smears.

Monastery Graveyard in the Snow (1819).

I hadn’t noticed before until I looked through some online galleries that Friedrich was painting the same trees over and over. The gnarled trunks in the dolmen painting are almost identical (but reversed) to the foreground trees in the graveyard picture and similarly-shaped trees occur in other paintings. If you’re wondering why the graveyard picture is in black and white, the original was destroyed during the Second World War. Colour copies can be found but I think these may have been tinted from a monochrome photo print.

Winter Landscape (1811).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Winter Solstice
• The art of John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836–1893
• The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841

Philip Pullman ranked second on US banned books list

Temples for Future Religions by François Garas

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue en cours de construction (1897).

Another artist discovered whilst searching for something quite unrelated. The Musée d’Orsay are custodians of this drawing by François Garas (1866–1925), and they also have the most substantial appraisal of his career.

François Garas remains a mysterious architect, whose artistic pantheon included Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as John Ruskin, Richard Wagner, Jean Carriès and Edouard Manet. He obtained his diploma in 1894, and until 1914 regularly exhibited utopian architectural projects at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. His career started with the exhibition Architects’ Impressions in 1896 at the Le Barc de Bouteville gallery, alongside his fellow architects Henri Sauvage, Henry Provensal and Gabriel Guillemonat. This exhibition, accompanied by a rebellious booklet by the architect Frantz Jourdain, wanted to get rid of “the mental slavery produced by the exclusive study of Greek and Roman architecture, and by a knowledge of nothing but the Italian Renaissance”. This drawing featured in the exhibition; then it was seen again, the same year, in an exhibition by the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, as part of a collection entitled Artists’ Interiors.

From 1897, Garas exhibited increasingly oneiric projects at the Salon – “temples for future religions”, dedicated to Beethoven, Wagner, Life, Death and Thought. While his companions from the early days were designing social housing, Garas continued along the same fanciful path, then disappeared from the architectural scene without any of his projects ever having been built.

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue perspective depuis l’arrière du temple (1897).

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, visions du temple, clair de lune (1900).

The museum has several pages of various plans and sketches for these Temples for Future Religions, and also some quasi-Gothic designs for “Artist’s interiors” which would benefit from being seen at a larger size. Among his other works are a series of very diffuse pastel studies which look more like Claude Monet drawing the ruins of Angkor than architectural designs.

Un temple pour les religions futures (1901).

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