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The art of Atelier Heinrichs & Bachmann

Who were Heinrichs and Bachmann? That’s a good question because neither I nor anyone else who’s written about their book covers can offer any more information beyond their names and the dates when they were active. What we do know is that from the mid-60s to an unspecified point in the 1970s Heinrichs and Bachmann’s studio was credited with many cover designs for books published by Heyne in Germany. By the 1980s the studio was still working for Heyne but with a credit now changed to Atelier Heinrichs & Schutz.

The designs featured here date from 1969 to 1971, and are part of a longer run of Heinrichs & Bachmann covers for science fiction titles published from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I’d run across a few of these in the past but hadn’t gone looking for more until this weekend. I always enjoy seeing unusual approaches to SF illustration, and I especially enjoy anything which adopts this kind of post-psychedelic Pop-collage style. The influence of Heinz Edelmann’s art is evident in places, in particular the Edelmann look as it was filtered through the artists who worked on the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine. The Frank Herbert cover above could easily be added to the Sea of Heads. Also evident are faces that look as though they’ve been lifted from film stills. I’d guess that most of the figures in these collages were clipped from magazine pages then run through a photocopier once or twice to give that posterised effect.

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Painting with Light

The Quantel Paintbox was one of the first computer systems designed to create and manipulate digital graphics in a manner that was much closer to painting and drawing than computer programming. The technology was launched in 1981, and was essentially Photoshop ten years before Adobe Inc. announced its own image-editing system. Rather like the Fairlight CMI, being a pioneer had its disadvantages for Quantel, one of them being the enormous expense of the Paintbox system. Photoshop was never really cheap if you were buying it new but it was still only a software package; with the Fairlight and the Paintbox you also had to buy the computer and all the peripherals that ran the software. Consequently, Paintbox systems were mostly used by TV studios for on-screen graphics during throughout the 1980s, although Quantel also created a parallel system for print graphics which was used for image processing and photo collaging until Macintosh and Adobe started to dominate design studios.

David Hockney.

Painting with Light was a BBC series intended to explore Quantel’s technology by inviting six artists to spend a day playing with the Paintbox. It was the recent news about David Hockney that reminded me of this series. I definitely remember watching the first episode when it was broadcast in 1987 but couldn’t recall anything of the rest, which suggests I may not have seen them all. Each episode is narrated by Leslie Megahey who also receives a credit as executive producer. Nearly everything that Megahey was involved with at the BBC had some connection with art or painting which suggests the series may have been his idea.

Larry Rivers.

It’s been fascinating watching these programmes after 40 years of technological development. In 1987 I was working with pens and sheets of paper most of the time, and didn’t give much thought to the idea of creating computer art since all the most interesting gear was prohibitively expensive. How things change… I now find myself watching the reactions of these artists as they struggle with a rudimentary version of the kind of technology I use every day. I also sympathise with their frustrations. The Paintbox was a magical device for the time but the brush settings are very limited when compared to the endless variety that Photoshop offers. The drawing table and stylus of the Paintbox are also big and bulky in comparison to one of today’s small and very precise Wacom tablets.

Howard Hodgkin.

David Hockney was an obvious choice to open the series when he was often described as “Britain’s favourite artist”. Popularity aside, he was a good choice for his restless curiosity and interest in all forms of pictorial representation. That curiosity prompted his famous and controversial theories about the use of optical devices in the creation of paintings from the Renaissance on; it also kept him experimenting with different media, leading eventually to the iPad paintings he was making in the last years of his life. Of the other contributors we have an American Pop artist (Larry Rivers), a British abstract painter (Howard Hodgkin), an Australian painter (Sidney Nolan), an American painter (Jennifer Bartlett), and a British Pop artist (Richard Hamilton).

Sidney Nolan.

Hockney and Bartlett both use the technology for painterly improvisation, with Hockney drawing continually over the same piece, while Bartlett draws different versions of a glass of water. The latter sounds boring but her curiosity about the new medium makes her the only artist of the six to try out all the available drawing tools. Rivers, Nolan and Hamilton all begin with scanned photographs which they manipulate in various ways, Rivers by painting over his, Nolan (via a Quantel assistant) creating photographic collages that are forerunners of the familar Photoshop style.

Jennifer Bartlett.

Hamilton does something similar but also takes over from the Quantel assistant in order to paint onto the image in a much more careful manner than the rest. Of the six artists he’s the only one who attempts to create something that might be exported as a properly finished piece. He also notices how the cut-and-paste concept which was becoming widespread in word processing was now applicable to digital graphics. As for Hodgkin, I’ve always regarded him as a limited and not very interesting abstractionist, so it was no surprise to see him creating a pixel imitation of the same lines and blobs he was always doing in his paintings. Hodgkin’s film is the least interesting one to watch but his encounter with the technology is just as revealing about his character as an artist as the other films are for the individuals involved.

Richard Hamilton.

• Further reading: The Quantel Paintbox

Weekend links 834

A Bigger Splash (1967) by David Hockney.

• I was interviewed this week at Retrofuturista, the first interview I’ve done in a while, and more wide-ranging than they sometimes are. Subjects covered include illustration, design, weird fiction, the Reverbstorm comics, the Bumper Book of Magic, underground culture, and the deficiencies of AI art. Also my ongoing, mostly unseen, Axiom project.

• At Nautilus: Kristen French conducts a lengthy and fascinating interview with Andrew Gallimore and Donald Hoffman, a pair of reseachers seeking to upend theoretical physics by making consciousness the foundation of reality, rather than its inconvenient and inexplicable by-product.

• “My audience is film-smart, and I always say, ‘If they don’t get something, then do your homework.’ Sometimes you have homework when you come to see my movies to figure out what the references are.” John Waters talking to Marya E. Gates at RogerEbert.com.

• The Morgan Library & Museum in NYC launches an exhibition later this month: Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions. At Colossal there’s a look at some of the 20th-century art, while Smithsonian Magazine has a selection of older card designs.

• Inferno by Boards Of Canada is “probably as close to a political statement as these mystery men will ever approach.” Thus Simon Reynolds looking back over the history of the group following the release of their marvellous new album.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Necromancers by Robert Hugh Benson.

• New music: Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive by Horse Lords; A Wave Of Alarm by Comdex; Teleportations by Danalogue.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2026 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• At Public Domain Review: Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th and 18th Century Art.

• At Door of Perception: Sibylle Ruppert—The Inward Gaze of the Flesh.

• RIP David Hockney and James Blood Ulmer.

• The Strange World of…Melinda Gebbie.

• Splash One (Now I’m Home) (1966) by 13th Floor Elevators | Splash (1968) by Miles Davis | Splash (1974) by Can

Hello Dali! revisited

After mentioning Salvador Dalí in the previous post, here’s the man himself in a UK TV profile from 1973. I wouldn’t usually return to something like this but for years the only copy of Hello Dali! on YouTube was spoiled by having been recorded with a ghosted signal. The new copy isn’t perfect either, the sound is rather dull but this can be improved if you download the thing and watch it using VLC with the equalizer boosting the top end.

Instead of writing a new description I’ll repost the one I wrote 15 years ago. Something I didn’t mention in the original post is that this may be the last time that Gala Dalí was seen on camera, at least by foreign TV crews. She appears briefly and at a distance, hovering in the doorway of her Dalí-free castle before turning up later on the roof of Dalí’s home.

Brits who are old enough may remember Aquarius, an ITV arts programme whose weekly slot was taken over in the late 1970s by The South Bank Show, episodes of which used the same format of a short studio introduction followed by a self-contained film. In place of the SBS’s Melvyn Bragg we have Humphrey Burton introducing a film directed by Bruce Gowers. Russell Harty is the front man, seen here in the days before he achieved greater fame as a gossipy chat-show host. I’d been wanting to see this for a long time, having lost a video tape of it years ago. I never saw the original broadcast but it was screened again after Dalí’s death in 1989, and I remembered it as being particularly good for showing a slightly more human side to the eccentric and occasionally annoying artist. So it is, giving us a brief portrait of Dalí in his 69th year, preoccupied at that time with the construction of his museum in Figueres. The value of Harty and Gowers coup in getting the artist to allow a film crew into his home can be found in subsequent UK documentaries, many of which use uncredited extracts from these interviews. It’s the brief moments of interview which make this even though they reveal little. It’s refreshing seeing Dalí talking conversationally in front of a camera instead of putting on a performance.

The early 70s saw the last flare of real interest in Dalí from the world at large. Dalí and Surrealism in general had a resurgence of popularity in the late 60s as a consequence of psychedelic culture. A number of books by or about the artist were published or reprinted, among them Peter Owen’s 1973 revival of Hidden Faces, a novel which Dalí had written in 1944. Alejandro Jodorowsky was circling the Dalí camp around the same time, trying to inveigle the artist into portraying the Emperor in his planned film adaptation of Dune. One detail worth noting in the conversation with Russell Harty is mention of a golden toilet, something which Jodorowsky says Dalí wanted as his throne if he was going to appear in the feature film. We never got to see Jodorowsky’s Dune but it’s good to find this documentary available once again.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fame and shame of Salvador Dali
• Figures of Mortality: Lawrence versus Dalí
• Être Dieu: Dalí versus Wakhévitch
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• Salvador Dalí’s Maze
• Dalí in New York
• Dalí’s discography
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited

The art of Helmut Wenske

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar.

This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for example—hadn’t been translated into English at that time. Among the artists whose work appeared as illustration Helmut Wenske was one of several whose paintings were seldom seen in Anglophone publications, although a few album covers that featured Wenske art—those for Nektar in particular—were a common sight in British record shops in the 1970s.

Remember The Future (1973) by Nektar.

Wenske is a German artist with a penchant for Dalí-like Surrealism that might have been strained through a psychotropic filter. Most of his work in the 1970s was as an album cover designer for the Bellaphon label, and most of those covers are designs rather than paintings. There are a number of book covers, however, some of which are recycled from his album covers. From 1971 to 1975 Wenske painted the covers for a series from Insel Verlag, “Phantastische Wirklichkeit: Science Fiction der Welt”, a collection of reprints edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Wenske’s ISFDB credits list a few horror covers along with these, a small percentage of which are Lovecraft-related. In the past I’ve drawn attention to many different Lovecraft illustrators but Wenkse is one of a small number of these to have also written Lovecraftian fiction of his own (Die Krypta von Shaggay’h, 1974). He enjoys the work he’s being asked to illustrate, in other words, which isn’t something you can always expect from illustrators.

Electric Silence (1974) by Dzyan.

The covers below aren’t the best quality but better copies have proved hard to find. For those who’d like to see more Wenske art there’s at least one German catalogue that collects his work from the early 70s on.

Horizonte (1977) by PSI.

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