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The beers of Pan

Bacchus has the wine so I suppose Pan can have the beer. Back in May the blog was stalled while I was contending with various computer problems but I did manage to do some work despite the turmoil. One job was a request from Grebhan’s, a small German brewery, who wanted help altering the design of their beer label. The results can be seen above. My contribution mostly involved making a neater arrangement of the Pan piper and symbols, and also changing the fonts. Once we had Futura selected as the main typeface I put a capital G behind the Pan figure. This was subsequently made into the minimal variant you see below, the head being the one from the Pan figure enlarged.

Earlier today Tobbi from Grebhan’s sent me a photo of the new labels. I’m very impressed with the way these have turned out, from the combination of matt and gloss to the diamond shape and the general minimal style. The black-on-black logo for the schwarzbier is a nice touch. I’m not a beer drinker (whisky, please) but if I was I’d want to try some of these.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• The Great God Pan
• Peake’s Pan

The art of Victor Linford, 1940–2002

Victor Linford was a British artist who relocated to the Netherlands so his work seems to be more familiar there than elsewhere. According to the Johfra Museum site, Linford was part of the Dutch Meta-Realist group in the 1970s, along with Johfra Bosschart himself and five other painters. Johfra’s art has been mentioned here before but I hadn’t heard of the others, Linford included. You’d think someone who spent so much time producing detailed oil paintings of surreal/alien landscapes would be better known. Some of his works were used on a series of Dutch sf paperbacks in the 1970s, unsurprisingly when many of his paintings resemble the alien landscapes being produced by Bruce Pennington for British sf books throughout the decade.

There are two main sites showing Linford’s works, here and here. I prefer the landscapes that don’t have too many human figures inserted into them but even the ones that do are worth a look. (None of the paintings are titled or dated.)

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American Art Posters of the 1890s

Selections from a 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhbition catalogue which features many more colour plates. My choices gravitate as usual to the American Beardsley, Will Bradley. The other artists here are EB Bird (above) and Louis Rhead, both of whom also produced bookplate designs (see here and here).

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Salon de la Rose + Croix

Carlos Schwabe’s poster from 1892 for the first of Joséphin Péladan’s art and music Salons de la Rose + Croix. The “Sâr” Peladan’s imposition on the artistic life of Paris in the 1890s may have the smack of a vanity project but he caused enough of a stir to give Rosicrucianism an unlikely fashionabilty for a while. The roster of contributing artists is also impressive, almost a who’s who of Symbolist art. There were six salons in all, the last being in 1897. The poster for the fifth salon by Armand Point & Léonard Sarluis shows Perseus holding the decapitated head of Émile Zola. The evangelist of literary realism was one of Symbolism’s arch-enemies but that didn’t prevent Carlos Schwabe from producing illustrations for Le Rêve.

The pages below are from Peladan’s many books, La Queste du Graal: Proses Lyriques de l’Éthopée; La Décadence Latine (1892). The illustrations aren’t the best reproductions, and they aren’t the greatest artworks either, but they give a sense of what Peladan wanted to see embellishing his own brand of artistic mysticism. Gallica has a Salon de la Rose + Croix catalogue (also from 1892) but like many of the documents archived there the quality leaves a lot to be desired.

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The art of Carlos Schwabe, 1866–1926

Le Faune (1923).

Yesterday’s Pan prompted me to repost Carlos Schwabe’s wonderful painting of a faun, one of my favourite faun/satyr depictions, and easily one of the best in the entire Symbolist corpus. Other satyr aficionados of the period such as Arnold Böcklin and Franz Stuck had an unfortunate knack for making their goat gods look rather foolish.

Schwabe was a German artist, and one of the more mystical of the Symbolists, with a fondness for winged figures and a preoccupation with death. The mystical end of the Symbolist spectrum is the one I enjoy the most so I often point to Schwabe or Jean Delville as exemplars of this type of art. Both Schwabe and Delville were connected briefly by Joséphin Péladan’s very mystical Salon de la Rose + Croix although Delville later gravitated to Theosophy. Schwabe produced illustrations for an edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and would have featured in the Baudelaire posts last week if some of those drawings hadn’t appeared here already. The title page was a new find, however, so it’s included below.

Jour de morts (1890).

La mort du fossoyeur (1895).

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