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Eyetoon, a film by Jerry Abrams

“Fuck for Peace” declares a title card at the end of Jerry Abrams’ Eyetoon, an 8-minute slice of psychedelia from 1968 whose second half has a hippyish couple doing exactly that as they run through a few hardcore Kama Sutra moves. The rest of the film is comprised of rapid editing and some brief animated overlays, together with street shots of the residents of what I’m guessing is San Francisco. The buzzing, twittering electronic score is by David Litwin. A year before this Abrams had documented the Human Be-In, the first major hippy gathering in Golden Gate Park in January 1967. His equally psychedelic film of that event can be seen here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Street Fair, 1959
• San Francisco by Anthony Stern

Dürer’s Instruction of Measurement

Underweysung der Messung (1525), a book of drawing instruction by the great Albrecht Dürer, predates Hieronymus Rodler’s “useful booklet” by six years. This also includes some perspective work although the lessons here are mostly concerned with the careful construction of various shapes, tesselated patterns and solid figures. Two of the illustrations at the end showing an artist using drawings guides are very familiar from reproduction in numerous art books; once again it’s good to see these pictures in their original context. This is also the book in which Dürer demonstrates the construction of letters of the alphabet. His lettering guides are almost as familiar as the illustrations, they often turn up in histories of typography, and now form the basis of several font designs. Durer Caps from P22, and Durer Initials from GLC, both give you an option of construction lines or solid fills; they also supply the letter U which is missing from the artist’s alphabet. Elsewhere there’s a free font, Duerer (sic) Latin Constructions and Capitals, available from l’Abécédarienne although this design lacks the U. Dürer’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Rodler’s Fine, Useful Booklet

Another treatise on perspective, and an older one than Pozzo’s so the drawings are somewhat cruder. Eyn schön nützlich büchlin und underweisung der kunst des Messens (A Fine, Useful Booklet and Instruction in the Art of Measurement) by Hieronymus Rodler was published in 1531, and features a number of full-page views where the perspective is accurate but also alarmingly severe in places. The emptiness and unusual appearance of the scenes has an unintentional charm, they remind me of the illustrations from The Dumas Club (1993) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte where the mysterious drawings—based on old alchemical illustrations—contain subtle variations. Rodler’s book made an appearance at Giornale Nuovo in 2005 so I’ll point you there for further discussion of its technical qualities. The book itself may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Rules and Examples of Perspective Proper, 1693

I’m working on more engraving collage at the moment so I’ve been delving into the scanned books at the Internet Archive once more in search of raw material. I still tend to use things scanned from paper volumes but the Internet Archive is useful for small details, and searches there also have the advantage of turning up things you might not otherwise see. This is one such book, an English guide to perspective for painters and architects adapted from the two-volume Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). The title page declares the instruction to be “wholly free from the confusion of occult lines” which it certainly is, the plates would still serve as guides to the trickier aspects of perspective today. The engravings in this edition are by John Sturt.

Pozzo was a master of trompe l’oeil painting, and when you see ceilings such as this it’s no surprise that he might have a thing or two to say about perspective. The plates begin with simple shapes then graduate to the construction of the columns and capitals used in Classical architecture; at the end you have some intimidatingly complex pediments and porticoes. The University of Heidelberg has copies of Pozzo’s original books, including the second volume where things become even more elaborate.

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Antony Little’s echoes of Aubrey

The Dancer (1967) by Antony Little.

My thanks to Sweet Jane this time for alerting me to her post about a series of Beardsley-inspired illustrations from 1967 by Biba designer Antony Little. The Wandering Jew and Other Stories was the first translation in English of Apollinaire’s 1910 collection L’Hérèsiarque et Cie. I’ve known about this book for a while but few of the illustrations have been on view anywhere until this post. There are eight in all, each of them very adeptly capturing different phases of Beardsley’s drawing style, from the spare black-and-whites to the more detailed renderings seen in his later work. The drawing below is another in the series from a post of Callum’s which also includes a favourite of mine by Beresford Egan.

Little’s designs, and the prominence of the Biba stores, did much to make Art Nouveau in general, and Beardsley in particular, a crucial component of London fashion in the late 1960s. For more on that subject see this Sweet Jane post featuring yet more Beardsley borrowings and monochrome design, plus Osborne & Little’s fantastic Chinese Dragon wallpaper which made a memorable appearance last year in Only God Forgives.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive
• The illustrators archive