{symbolists} – Page 24 – { feuilleton }

Delville, Scriabin and Prometheus

Another striking design found by chance. Symbolist artist Jean Delville (1867–1953) created this sheet music title page for Promethée by Scriabin in 1912, and the pair are well-matched given their shared predilection for mysticism (Theosophy in Delville’s case). Delville had also dealt with Prometheus in a typically dramatic, if sexless, picture a few years earlier (below). Once again it’s unfortunate that one of the really great artists of the Symbolist period is so poorly-served by the web that one has to discover his work by accident. There’s a dedicated site here but the gallery pages are only harvesting what’s already scattered around. Delville had a long and consistently high-quality career; he deserves better.

Prometheus (1907).

Update: Dave C reminds us of another Delville site with a better selection of pictures including a photo of the artist at work.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The faces of Parsifal
• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials
• Angels 4: Fallen angels

The art of Julien Champagne, 1877–1932

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli himself. Whatever the solution to that mystery, the alchemist’s book is rather more visible than the artist’s distinctly Symbolist paintings. There’s a French blog devoted to his life and works here but little else around. I wouldn’t mind seeing a decent online gallery of his pictures at some point.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Digital alchemy
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

The eyes of Odilon Redon

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).

Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the way inevitably to Surrealism, especially in dream lithographs like the one below.

Vision from Dans le Rêve (1879).

I compounded that Symbolist/Surrealist association when I was drawing The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 by showing Ardois-Boonot’s Dream Landscape (which Lovecraft doesn’t describe beyond the word “blasphemous”) as being a Max Ernst-style frottage canvas with a Redon eye rising from the murk. Cthulhu’s presence reduced to a single ocular motif like the eye of Sauron.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

And while we’re on the subject there’s Guy Maddin’s typically phantasmic short, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity made for the BBC in 1995. Ostensibly based on the balloon picture above, this manages to reference a host of other Redon lithographs and charcoal drawings in the space of four-and-a-half minutes. Sublimely weird and weirdly sublime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours
• The Heart of the World

The art of Elihu Vedder, 1836–1923

The Last Man (1886–1891).

Vedder was one of the principal American Symbolists, possibly the leading one although there wasn’t the same degree of competition in the United States as there was in Europe. Last time I was casting around the web for his work he wasn’t so visible but that’s changed recently with a dedicated website. Vedder’s 1884 edition of the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is highly-regarded and at least one of those drawings—The Cup of Death—was reworked as a painting. Compared to his Continental contemporaries he’s a particularly gloomy artist, with sombre subjects rendered in a sombre palette. The Last Man is typical as well as being curiously inexplicable; is the serpent there a Satanic presence? And why is there a dead (?) angel boy at the feet of the Last Man?

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a set of the Rubáiyát illustrations.

Soul in Bondage (1891–1892).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels 5: Angels of Death

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”