Wilfried Sätty – Page 4

The Royal Natural History by Richard Lydekker

The second surprise of the weekend came, as in the best Lovecraftian tradition, with the chance discovery of a small sheet of paper, a reminder from the librarian when I was at sixth form college to return three overdue books. This was an odd survival from my schooldays since I kept hardly anything from that period. One of the books was this volume, The Royal Natural History (1894), vol. 1, sec. 2, written by Richard Lydekker with engraved illustrations by a variety of artists. I said goodbye to higher education when I quit sixth form after a year; the interval there was miserable but the place did have a very good library in which I spent a lot of time reading instead of attending classes. Many of the books there were better than those in the town library—my first sight of James Joyce’s Ulysses was on those shelves—and included a small number of older titles which were in surprisingly good condition for school books.

What’s nice about tracing this book is finding the title of one of those volumes whose engravings I found so fascinating and whose identity I’ve wondered about for years. The pictures are all excellent renderings, far better than the illustrations in a set of similar books I own which are forty years older and where the animals tend to be goggle-eyed comical things. Although this was the one I borrowed I suspect the library may have had more in Lydekker’s series since I recall one depicting fish and other marine creatures. The copies here are from the Internet Archive, of course, where they have a complete set that I’ve yet to look through. (There are twelve books in the set.) I wondered at first why I’d borrowed a book about the larger mammals until I saw the picture of a lynx below which I remember using as reference for a drawing. The Lydekker and the purchase a year later of Wilfried Sätty’s illustrated Edgar Allan Poe is where my engraving obsession really took off.

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The Occult Explosion

So here’s a strange thing: having spent another working week sifting through scanned books at the Internet Archive what do I find but scans of album booklet art by Wilfried Sätty only a couple of days after writing about his album covers. The album in question may be familiar to some readers but it was a new one to me. The Occult Explosion (1973) was a collection of recorded interviews with people such as Alan Watts and Anton LaVey discussing subjects pertinent to the title, although the general tone is more in the direction of catch-all mysticism than occultism as such. Anton LaVey is there to pronounce about Satanism, of course, and the album also features two songs by British rock band Black Widow, one of which, Come To The Sabbat, has since achieved a kind of novelty notoriety. (There’s a nice video-feedback recording of them playing the song live on Beat Club in 1970.)

Nat Freedland was the author of a book entitled The Occult Explosion for which the album acts as an audio appendix. This is all so typically 1970s: witchcraft, Satanism, rock music, yoga, Alan Watts, UFOs, ESP, and the whole thing packaged in Sätty’s post-psychedelia collages. The entire album is available at the Internet Archive: the recordings are here while the badly-scanned insert pages are here. (There’s a better view of the cover art at Flickr.) Some of the more impressive pieces of Sätty’s art follow, work which has been buried for almost forty years. Just to add to the net of coincidences this week, the last of the pictures below borrows a demon from Gustave Doré’s Divine Comedy, the same source as yesterday’s Rick Griffin poster.

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Lucifer Rising posters

Lucifer Rising: A Love Vision by Kenneth Anger (1967) by Rick Griffin.

The status of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising as a kind of poly-cultural crossroads even extends to its poster art. The original poster by Rick Griffin dates back to the earliest drafts of the film, and with its swipe from Gustave Doré makes me think it’s the kind of thing Wilfried Sätty might have produced for Anger had he been asked. (They were both living in San Francisco at this time.)

The San Francisco poster artists happily plundered the past for unusual images; Doré was a popular choice since his images are frequently striking and copies of the books (or reprints) would have been easy to find. This is one of the illustrations from the Purgatorio section of his illustrated Divine Comedy (1867) showing Dante being ferried up Mount Purgatory (“like Ganymede”) by a giant eagle.

From Dante and Virgil to Virgil Finlay, one of whose illustrations was used on this promo sheet advertising a limited run of Bobby Beausoleil’s soundtrack for the film.

Earth’s Last Citadel (1950) by Virgil Finlay.

The illustration this time is for a reprint of Earth’s Last Citadel by CL Moore and Henry Kuttner in Fantastic Novels Magazine for July 1950. I’ve never seen any mention of William Burroughs meeting Kenneth Anger which is a shame since they had acquaintances in common and Burroughs occasionally showed an interest in some of Aleister Crowley’s ideas. The Henry Kuttner connection in this case would provide a link to some of the borrowings Burroughs himself made from Kuttner’s writing. But no, it’s too much of a reach.

Lucifer Rising (1980) by Page Wood.

After all that the final poster is an original piece of work by Page Wood for a premier screening at the Whitney Museum, New York in 1980. The art avoids the overt occultism in favour of making a resolutely low-budget piece seem like a Hollywood epic. Given Anger’s lifelong obsession with Hollywood’s myths and tragedies I think he would have appreciated that.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Externsteine panoramas
• San Francisco by Anthony Stern
• The art of Alia Penner
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Wilfried Sätty album covers

Gandharva (1971) by Beaver & Krause. Cover art by Sätty, lettering by David Singer.

There aren’t many, unfortunately, and half the ones here have already featured in previous posts, but since I’m often referring people to Sätty’s work it seems worthwhile gathering them together. His album cover art shows he was equally adept at working with colour as with black-and-white, and might have done a lot more in this line had he been given the opportunity. (Sätty’s first book, The Cosmic Bicycle, does include some colour plates.)

The Gandharva album is the oddest in this small collection, one side being a blend of blues, gospel and Beaver & Krause’s Moog doodlings while the other side comprises an improvised Moog-inflected jazz suite recorded live in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. The setting of the latter is apt since cover artists Sätty and David Singer both came to prominence among San Francisco’s psychedelic poster designers in the late 1960s. Film director Robert Fuest liked Gandharva so much he hired Paul Beaver, Bernie Krause and Gerry Mulligan to play similar music for the soundtrack of The Final Programme.

Of the other albums the Sopwith Camel is obviously closest to Sätty’s familiar style. The covers for George Duke suit the mid-70s trend of jazz/funk albums with “cosmic” sleeve art exemplified by Tadanori Yokoo’s fantastic (in all senses) collage for Agharta by Miles Davis. Documentation of Sätty’s non-book work is still sparse so if anyone knows of any other covers please leave a comment.

Update: Added The Occult Explosion. See this later post.

The Miraculous Hump Returns From The Moon (1973) by Sopwith Camel.

The Occult Explosion (1973) by Various Artists.

Feel (1974) By George Duke.

The Aura Will Prevail (1975) by George Duke.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty

Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty

Interest in the work of collage artist Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982) increases by slow degrees, and did so again last year although I completely missed the occasion. Better late than never. Nature Boy is a 12-inch single by Jesper Ryom on the Berlin-based Power Plant label which comes adorned with this Sätty collage of a tattooed boy. The picture appears as a vignette in the posthumous Visions of Frisco (2008) but this is the first time I’ve seen the larger work. Power Plant promoted the single by staging an exhibition of Sätty prints, photos of which can still be viewed here. Nature Boy can be heard in full at YouTube.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty