How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels, a film by Craig Welch

angels.jpg

Craig Welch’s 11-minute film was made in 1996. It’s a beautifully drawn and conceived piece of work, vaguely surreal as animated films often are but also with some Symbolist qualities:

Welch has stated that one of the original influences for the film was Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead as well as Norman McLaren’s 1946 NFB animated short A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting, which incorporates the Böcklin work.

A pity, then, that Welch doesn’t appear to have made anything since. Watch How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels here. (And thanks to Jescie for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
Secret Joy of Falling Angels, a film by Simon Pummell
Les Jeux des Anges by Walerian Borowczyk
L’Ange by Patrick Bokanowski

La Ronde du Sabbat

hugo1.jpg

This is too late for Walpurgisnacht (although it’s still night at this moment) but the 1st May is Beltane, and this is a very pagan drawing. The artist is Louis Boulanger, a friend of Victor Hugo’s here illustrating one of the author’s poems for Cent Dessins: Extraits des Oeuvres de Victor Hugo, illustrations for Hugo’s poetry, fiction and drama. Much of the work is mediocre or dull but this surprisingly excessive picture would have stood out even among better company. Many of the illustrations are engravings from paintings—one is an adaptation of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—but the copy of Boulanger’s painting wanders freely from the original which is a much more typical piece of Romantic art. The engraver was Fortuné-Louis Méaulle who really ought to share a credit with the original artist.

hugo2.jpg

A few of the more notable illustrations follow, one of which is yet another artwork on the perennial theme of man versus cephalopod.

hugo3.jpg

Continue reading “La Ronde du Sabbat”

The case of the fin de siècle fleuron

artnouveau.jpg

I said yesterday that poppies are a common feature of the fin de siècle magazines for the convenient way they combine long-stemmed flowers—ideal for all those Art Nouveau flourishes—with narcotic connotations that signal Decadence. The spiralling fleuron above is one example that readers of Savoy books may recognise, an occasional company logo which has been in use since the mid-1980s. David Britton chose the design from one of the Dover Pictorial Archive books, Carol Belanger Grafton’s Treasury of Art Nouveau Design and Ornament, and I later made a digital version from this page scan.

heroes.jpg

One of the earliest Savoy uses, a label design for Heroes (1986) by PJ Proby.

Having spent a great deal of time in recent years trawling through Art Nouveau magazines I was sure I was going to run into the original printing of the fleuron eventually. Some of the page decorations in Jugend are very similar but it wasn’t there or in Pan, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration or The Studio. I don’t have a copy of the Grafton book, and Dave says his copy is lost, so I’ve no idea whether there’s a credit for the source of the designs; not all Dover books credit their source material in any detail. Earlier this week I decided to look in Art et Décoration, a magazine that was the French equivalent of The Studio, since the header at the top of the scanned page implied that the other designs might be from the same magazine. Aside from a couple of copies at the Internet Archive this means looking through the poor-quality scans at Gallica; by a fluke—because they don’t seem to have a complete run of the early issues—the January 1898 edition contained the page below showing the Savoy fleuron, an endpiece for an article devoted to another French art magazine, L’Image.

Continue reading “The case of the fin de siècle fleuron”

Cocorico graphics

graphics01.jpg

A final visit to Cocorico, the French humour magazine of the fin de siècle. Where graphics are concerned I’ve ignored the cartoons to concentrate on the Art Nouveau decoration which is plentiful in the early issues. The star here is Louis Popineau, an artist I only knew from the excessively florid page above which is reprinted sans poem in one of my design books. Popineau enjoyed foliage running riot in this manner but the magazine also features several of his excellent coloured prints. There’s a lot more of this type of work in the complete run of the magazine which may be found at the Internet Archive.

graphics02.jpg

A paean to the poppy by Jérome Doucet illustrated by Adolphe Cossard. Poppies were a very popular plant in the 1890s for obvious naroctic reasons. Cossard made them a feature of his cover for issue 32.

graphics03.jpg

Continue reading “Cocorico graphics”

Kupka in Cocorico

kupka1.jpg

As noted yesterday, Czech artist František Kupka produced a cover for French magazine Cocorico together with this handful of interior illustrations, all of which date from around 1900. Kupka was living in Paris at the time, and several of these drawings reflect his connections to the Symbolist movement. I’ve posted his Poe illustration before but everything else here is new to me. The most striking piece is Terre de Songe (Land of Dreams) which illustrates a text piece with the same title. Kupka aficionados will recognise this as a variation on a print he made in 1903, Resistance, or The Black Idol, a drawing which today seems to be his most popular (or most visible) work. I’ve wondered a few times whether a tiny speck visible in The Black Idol was meant to be a human figure, something which Terre de Songe confirms. A fantastic drawing in all senses of the word.

The four pictures which follow Terre de Songe are less impressive, a series of double-page satirical drawings whose obscure meaning isn’t helped by their being folded into the centre of the magazine. They’re included here for the sake of completeness.

kupka2.jpg

Magic.

kupka3.jpg

The Conqueror Worm (after Edgar Allan Poe).

kupka4.jpg

Land of Dreams.

Continue reading “Kupka in Cocorico”