Montague Summers – { feuilleton }

The art of Justin Todd

I was pleased to find a copy of this book recently, a slim volume published in 1978 which isn’t especially rare but which usually sells for much more than the £2 I paid for it. Justin Todd is a British illustrator whose work was a familiar sight on book covers in the 1970s, especially when his commissions weren’t restricted to a single genre. Cover artists who work on fantasy novels are often asked to do horror covers (and vice versa), or edged towards science fiction when the material suits their style; Todd worked on fantasy, horror and the occasional SF title while also providing covers for mainstream novels, offbeat non-fiction, historical fiction and children’s stories. Fully-illustrated children’s books evidently became his main line of work in the 1980s—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, a collaboration with Angela Carter—which would have left him no time for cover commissions. I was amused to find him illustrating crank titles (previously) in the early 70s when he did the paperback cover for one of the great anti-crank books, John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha, a few years later.

The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972) by John C. Lilly.

Todd’s style is easy to recognise once you’ve seen a few examples: meticulous gouache renderings that tend to be slightly naive even when they’re depicting a wholly realistic story like Treasure Island. Gouache is a water-based paint that’s useful when you want a flat, even finish, but it doesn’t give you the depth of colour or contrast provided by oils or acrylics. Todd’s paintings embrace the limitations of the medium, with gradients and shadings that are so soft and diffused they might be taken at first for pencil drawings.

The Journey to the East (1972) by Herman Hesse.

The Magical Paintings of Justin Todd isn’t a comprehensive study of Todd’s illustration work, more a snapshot of a career in progress. In addition to 64 full-page reproductions there’s a two-page interview by editor and art director Mike Dempsey which provides valuable biographical details. I was pleased to find that many of the cover paintings were ones I hadn’t seen before, including a few Arcimboldo-like faces. Todd had a flair for this kind of visual invention, constructing faces or even whole figures out of disparate objects. I’ve had a copy of The Journey to the East for many years but until this week I don’t think I’d ever looked closely at all the tiny figures making up the central figure that strides across the landscape.

Mike Dempsey maintains a blog which includes a reminiscence of working with Justin Todd.

Stories of Five Decades (1972) by Herman Hesse.

Secret Places of the Lion (1973) by George Hunt Williamson.

Continue reading “The art of Justin Todd”

Weekend links 533

Cover art by Domenico Gnoli, 1959.

• After decades of ignoring the output of Tangerine Dream it feels strange to be interested in the group once again; musicians you’re compelled to dismiss seldom manage to recapture your attention later on. Stranger still when the group itself is now completely detached from its origins following the death of founder Edgar Froese in 2015. But it was Froese’s departure, and with it the disappearance of many years of poor aesthetic choices, that helped renew my interest. At FACT the group take up the against-the-clock challenge in which musicians are given 10 minutes to create a new piece of music.

• “We were both working at Sounds at the time and we thought that instead of listening to these terrible ’80s records like Haircut 100 we’d go off and look for Montague Summers books, so off we went!” Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) on his enthusiasm for Summers, Austin Spare and Louis Wain.

• At the Paris Review: Valerie Stivers bakes pies for Italo Calvino. I’d like to see someone create a series of dishes based on every location from Invisible Cities. Elsewhere there’s William N. Copley on Joseph Cornell: “No art historian ever prophesied the coming of the box.”

• On the experimental realism of an eccentric Russian Anglophile: “For Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, strangeness was a matter of perspective,” says Caryl Emerson.

• Nova Reperta: John Boardley on a series of 16th-century prints showing new inventions.

• RIP David Graeber. From 2014: “What’s the point if we can’t have fun?”

• “Damn your blood”: John Spurr on swearing in early modern English.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine maps the esoteric in Britain, 1920.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Seijun Suzuki Day.

• Big Fun/Holly-wuud (Take 3) (1972) by Miles Davis | Funtime (1977) by Iggy Pop | Funny Time Of Year (2002) by Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man

Weekend links 203

A Dune-inspired piece by Joshua Budich for In Dreams: an art show tribute to David Lynch at Spoke Art.

• “[Montague] Summers was a friend of Aleister Crowley and, like [Jacques d’Adelswärd] Fersen, conducted homoerotic black masses; whatever eldritch divinity received their entreaties was evidently propitiated by nude youths.” Strange Flowers goes in search of the Reverend Summers.

• More Jarmania: Veronica Horwell on the theatrical life of Derek Jarman, Paul Gallagher on When Derek Jarman met William Burroughs, and Scott Treleaven on Derek Jarman’s Advice to a Young Queer Artist.

• Robert Henke of Monolake talks to Secret Thirteen about his electronic music. More electronica: analogue-synth group Node have recorded a new album, their first since their debut in 1995.

This hypertrophied response to decay and dilapidation is what drives the “ruin gaze”, a kind of steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past because we cannot enlarge the present. When ruin-meister Giovanni Piranesi introduced human figures into his “Views of Rome”, they were always disproportionately small in relation to his colossal (and colossally inaccurate) wrecks of empire. It’s not that Piranesi, an architect, couldn’t do the maths: he wasn’t trying to document the remains so much as translate them into a grand melancholic view. As Marguerite Yourcenar put it, Piranesi was not only the interpreter but “virtually the inventor of Rome’s tragic beauty”. His “sublime dreams”, Horace Walpole said, had conjured “visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour”.

Frances Stonor Saunders on How ruins reveal our deepest fears and desires.

• Gustave Doré. L’imaginaire au pouvoir: Four short films from the Musée d’Orsay to accompany their current exhibition, Gustave Doré (1832–1883): Master of Imagination.

• At Dangerous Minds: Remembering Cathy Berberian, the hippest—and funniest—lady of avant-garde classical music.

• “Merely a Man of Letters”: Jorge Luis Borges interviewed in 1977 by Denis Dutton & Michael Palencia-Roth.

• Luke Epplin on Big as Life (1966), a science-fiction novel by EL Doctorow which the author has since disowned.

• The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky: Eric Benson talks to the tireless polymath.

• A video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz for the 10th anniversary of David Milch’s Deadwood.

• Eugene Brennan on Scott Walker’s The Climate of Hunter (1984).

• Dune at Pinterest.

• Prophecy Theme from Dune (1984) by Brian Eno | Olivine (1995) by Node | Gobi 110 35′ south 45 58′ (1999) by Monolake

Alembic and Ligier Richier

Current reading is Alembic (1992), a curious novel by Timothy d’Arch Smith whose publishings prior to this were all non-fiction, among them a study of the Uranian poets, a bibliography of Montague Summers, and The Books of the Beast, one of the many books about Aleister Crowley. Alembic reflects some of these interests and blends them with others, notably alchemy and rock music, delivering the result in a digressive, comma-strewn prose style which I imagine many readers would find off-putting. From the jacket description:

Alembic is an unsettling novel about madness and alchemy, epistemology and rock and roll, magic and perversion. Thomas Graves, a young antiquarian, works for ALEMBIC, a British government office investigating the contemporary applications of the secrets of alchemy. The strange world of alchemy, however, is as eerie as the rock and roll world of Thomas’s friend Nicholas Spark, leader of a Led Zeppelin-like band called Celestial Praylin. Moving between these worlds, colourfully conveyed in d’Arch Smith’s sonorous prose – at times elegant, at times comic – Thomas Graves feels his grip on reality constantly imperilled; his attraction to the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues complicates his existence further. A dramatic turn of events brings all of his fears and fancies out in the open, suggesting finally that the world is as mad as Thomas thought himself to be. Alembic is itself an alembic, a vessel that allows things to disintegrate and be transformed into new, refined substances. Set largely in the early 1980s, Alembic ends in the early years of the twenty-first century as alchemy engineers a new world order of darkness and perfection, destruction and eternal life, concluding a novel of great originality and ill-boding.

I don’t mind the style, it’s preferrable to the rudimentary bestsellerese that passes for much genre writing today. D’Arch Smith’s writing is witty, and there’s enough going on to sustain the interest. I thought at first the uncredited cover design would have had little to do with the contents but Ligier Richier’s celebrated sculpture of René de Chalon is referred to early on:

Nicholas had done himself to death. That was unequivocally stated in the garish red and black drawing depicted above the lyrics. In a grotesque parody of Ligier Richier’s funerary monument at Bar-le-Duc of the skeletal knight holding out his heart to God—possibly viewed by Ma during her historical tour of Alsace-Lorraine—Nicholas had been delineated in the same mortified yet exultant posture. The original figure was macabre enough, in the flaying of the naked body and the exposure of leg and arm muscles not yet rotted from the bones, to command attention, but the figure was imbued by Richier’s art with an enduring majesty that, though his design had been closely followed, was utterly overturned by the specious caricature of Nicholas Spark emblazoned down the waitress’s white cotton vest.

Given this, it’s a safe bet that the author would have asked for the capital “A” in the title to be given the same phallic connotations as it has in Aleister Crowley’s signature.

The web has plenty of photos of Le Transi de René de Chalon (c. 1545) but this view of Richier’s sculpture shows it to better effect than those where the background reduces the impact of the figure. The photos are from Ligier Richier, l’Artiste et Son Uvre (1911) by Paul Denis. As for Alembic, that’s currently out-of-print but copies are easy enough to find online.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atalanta Fugiens
• Splendor Solis revisited
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Digital alchemy