Endpaper design with an ex libris plate by the artist.
Another prolific illustrator with a clear-line style, Franz Stassen (1869–1949) here decorates the pages of Musikalische Schriften, a book devoted to the musical works of writer ETA Hoffmann. I haven’t checked but I’m fairly sure that Stassen was featured in Jugend magazine a few times, his florid style in this undated volume would certainly complement the work of the other artists there. Like some of those artists, Stassen was enthused by Teutonic nationalism during the First World War, a path that led eventually to work for, and plaudits, from the Nazis. We’re also told (via an unsourced Wikipedia detail) that he ended his days in a gay relationship, something the Third Reich would have either overlooked or conveniently ignored.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alastair’s Carmen
• Willy Pogány’s Lohengrin
• Willy Pogány’s Parsifal
Hoffman always makes me think of the Peter Sellers film because it’s on at the cinema in the background on one of the outside filmed sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s744sell.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffman_(film)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that Peter Sellers film. I always look out for the Home & Colonial store in the Hell’s Grannies sequence. H&C was a food retail chain where my mother used to shop regularly in the 1960s. The shop near us vanished in the 1970s when Safeway opened a store nearby.
Hoffmann’s name reminds me inevitably of Powell & Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann which I wrote about here before Xmas. Then there’s Paul Berry’s The Sandman…
I saw it once on late night TV all by myself between midnight and dawn after noticing the Python reference to it. A bit like The Collector but with a happy ending instead.
Thank you IMDB It’s in The Buzz Aldrin Show #2/4
and some quotes
Night thoughts, Saturday, October the 3rd. Every girl is a flower garden with a compost heap at the bottom. And many a noble man has had to drown his dwarf wife in a zinc bath or strangle an idiot girl on a muddy common in order to draw attention to himself. Reality betrays us all.
…
Please make yourself look as if you want to be fertilized.
…All over the world, simple pleasures of the flesh are being ruined by women screaming to be understood.
…Benjamin Hoffman: Girls all over the world are afraid of men with my expression.
Miss Janet Smith: What expression?
Benjamin Hoffman: Plain, sad-faced men.
… I remember the day my father introduced me to snails. “Hello, snails,” I said, “How are you?” “Tres bien, merci,” they said. “We who are about to be eaten salute you.”
…: Miss Smith. It’s not only homosexuals who don’t like women. Hardly anybody likes them.
…There are two people in all of us – the child in the snapshot and the monster the child grows into.
…Miss Janet Smith: Are you hungry?
Benjamin Hoffman: Women are always hungry for something. Fallopian tubes with teeth.
I’ll have to see if I can find a DVD of it http://www.allrovi.com/movies/movie/-v95394?r=allmovie