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Raphaël Drouart’s Fleurs du Mal

It seems to be Fleurs du Mal Week here. Raphaël Drouart (1884–1972) was another French artist who specialised in woodcut illustrations. The pictures here are from a 1923 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal found on an auction site.

Despite (or because of) the scandalous nature of Baudelaire’s poetry, there are many illustrated editions of this particular collection, not all of them by artists suited to the material. This is often a common fate of those books whose popularity makes them a magnet for illustrators. One thing the various editions do have in common is the portrait of the poet as a frontispiece, although even there the author of Spleen can be made to look dopey or silly. By contrast, Raphaël Drouart captures the familiar scowl well enough, and also fares better than many when it comes to the poems. The combination of woodcuts and skeletons is reminiscent of Posada’s calaveras.

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Tony George-Roux’s Fleurs du Mal

More illustrated Baudelaire. This edition of Les Fleurs du Mal dates from 1917 but the illustrations by Tony George-Roux have a distinctly Symbolist quality even though Symbolism as an art movement was pretty much over by this point. Baudelaire died twenty years before the first Symbolist manifesto was published but that manifesto named him as one of the leading poets of the movement so the connection is a fitting one. There’s a touch of Félicien Rops in some of these plates.

Tony George-Roux (1894–1928) was French, and if he produced more work along these lines I’ve yet to find it. The illustrations, engraved for this edition by Charles Clement, aren’t the best reproductions so I’ve added an additional plate at the end found on another site.

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Percy Walter Wolff’s Die Vorhölle

Another name to add to the long list of Beardsley followers, Percy Walter Wolff is so obscure as to be almost completely absent from web records. This suggests that Die Vorhölle: Eine Lyrische Nachlese (1911), a Baudelaire collection, may be the only book he illustrated. The drawings make me wonder what Beardsley himself—who put a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal on a shelf in Salomé—might have done with the same subject.

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Weekend links 223

Step Up (2014) by Angelica Paez.

• Lots of attention this week for Kevin Martin whose latest album as The Bug, Angels And Devils, is out now on Ninja Tune. The previous Bug release, London Zoo (2008), was a fierce collection that stood apart from the Grime pack not only for its guest vocalists but also for being informed by Martin’s broad range of influences: industrial and extreme electronics, heavyweight dub, metal and avant-garde jazz. Martin was interviewed by The Quietus and FACT who also asked other musicians to choose their favourite Martin recordings. Elsewhere, The Wire has Swarm, a track not included on the album.

Related: Martin’s four superb compilation albums for Virgin Records have been deleted for years but are worth seeking out: Ambient 4: Isolationism, Macro Dub Infection Volume One & Volume Two, and Jazz Satellites Volume 1: Electrification (Virgin cancelled volume 2). From the NME, 1995: Kevin Martin’s Ten Commandments For All Time.

• “…it never becomes quite clear why two grown men would want to write to each other in the guise of a horse and a cat.” Henry Giardina reviews The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell.

• Shufflepoems: A Deck of Poetry by Lydia Swartz. “100 cards, four suits, one stanza per card. Shuffle for a new adventure every time.” The project needs a last-minute push to gain Kickstarter funding so if this sounds interesting go, go, go!

• The Haxan Cloak’s favourite heavy metal albums. Metallica’s Master Of Puppets still gets my vote. More from The Quietus: David Stubbs on the Werner Herzog soundtracks of Popol Vuh.

• At Strange Flowers: Waking the witch, a remembrance of occult artist Rosaleen Norton and other characters from Sydney’s Kings Cross area, with news of a planned Norton documentary.

• A nine-note motif has for decades signalled “Asian” in popular music. Kat Chow looks at the history of a musical stereotype.

• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the subject for entrants in the Folio Society’s latest illustration competition.

• Irradiating the Object: Rhys Williams talks to writer M. John Harrison.

• Does the Sea Serpent Really Look Like an Art Nouveau Oar-fish?

• Schrödinger’s cat caught on quantum film.

• 70s sci-fi art: a Tumblr.

• Demodex Invasion (1995) by Techno Animal | Piranha feat. Toastie Taylor (2001) by Techno Animal | Poison Dart feat. Warrior Queen (2008) by The Bug

Chinnamasta

The saintly cephalophores may be reconciled to their martyrdoms but none of them decapitated themselves, unlike Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric goddess. The most common representations show her sitting or standing on a copulating couple while blood from her neck spouts into the mouth of her severed head and the mouths of her attendants, Dakini and Varnini. In other depictions she should probably be classed among the cephalophores when she goes for a walk or a ride on a lion. The fourth picture here is of Chinnamunda, a related, wrathful form of Vajrayogini from Tibetan Buddhism.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cephalophores
• Decapitations