{illustrators} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 746

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Robert Lawson’s House of Usher

Spook Month starts tomorrow so it no longer feels too early to post this marvellous (undated) etching of the opening scene from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Lawson (1892–1957) was an American author and illustrator whose early etchings were featured here some years ago after I turned up another wonderfully atmospheric piece depicting galleons rotting in the weed-tangled waste of the Sargasso Sea. I’m pleased that this gallery page which shows many more Lawson prints is still active over a decade later; they don’t have the Poe etching, however. A few copies may be found on the big auction sites but the best ones are blighted with a watermark.

Preparatory pencil drawing.

The title of Poe’s story refers to two separate falls, the dissolution of the Usher family line, and the physical collapse of the house in which Roderick and Madeline Usher pass their days, a calamity augured by the crack in the masonry which the narrator sees when he arrives at the shore of the black tarn. Lawson pays close attention to all the relevant details which Poe’s narrator is unable to regard as offering a sublime spectacle, something that film-makers and other illustrators (when they depict the house at all) don’t always honour:

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

Unless there’s more like this from Lawson the only other print of his that approaches horror is the Sargasso one; everything else is historical scenes or the light fantasy he continued to draw in his subsequent career as an illustrator of children’s books.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
• The Purloined Eidolon
• Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
• Mask of the Red Death, 1969
• Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
• Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
• Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• Poe at 200
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

New Worlds 224

Illustration by Mark Reeve.

New issues of New Worlds magazine have been rare things in recent years so the announcement last week of issue number 224 was a special moment:

New Worlds Vol. 66 No. 224, ed. Michael Moorcock (to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of his taking over editorship of the title), 09/’24, 978-0-9575764-6-9, a new full-colour A4 stapled outsized paperback/magazine, 72pp., illustrated by John Coulthart, Mal Dean, Herbert Sydney Foxwell, Allan Kausch, Mark Reeve, Julius Stafford-Baker; fiction/non-fiction anthology, contributors: John Clute, Coulthart, John Davey, Thomas M. Disch, Kausch, Roz Kaveney, Moorcock (a brand-new Cornelius story), Iain Sinclair, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline; first edition: £20.00 (for pre-ordered signed copies [while stocks last]).

N.B. This title is published on 30th September, 2024. Pre-ordered copies will be signed by Michael Moorcock and the magazine’s publisher.

See: https://jaydedesign.com/products_new.php

Copies in the U.S.A. will soon be available via www.ziesings.com @ $25 (for pre-ordered signed copies [while stocks last]).

If you’re in the mood for a spoilerish review you can see the entire issue leafed through and described here. In addition there’s also the New Worlds Annex which I’m hosting on these pages, a small repository of supplementary material.

There’s no need for me to recount the history of New Worlds, you can read about it in detail here. If you do know the history then you’ll know that the magazine under Michael Moorcock’s editorship acquired a considerable reputation in the late 1960s, upsetting politicians, the proprietors of WH Smiths, and the more conservative readers and writers of science fiction while publishing many important stories. In the 1970s New Worlds became a paperback series for a few years, managing ten numbers before resuming magazine format and increasingly sporadic publication.

Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius story is a Holiday on the Buses scenario set in the usual Cornelius landscape of geo-political chaos. Mark Reeve and Allan Kausch also illustrated this one. I think my piece may be the first time I’ve ever had reason to draw a bus despite being a regular user of public transport. In order to create a contrast with the other illustrations I opted for something in the isometric manner of George Hardie. Not as severely styled as Hardie’s drawings often are but it’s heading in that direction.

The last Moorcock-edited number prior to the present one was in 1996, an issue which included a drawing of mine from the Reverbstorm comic series. The new issue sees Moorcock returning to the editor’s chair for what he insists will be the final time so I feel fortunate to be able to contribute more substantially to this issue than I did in 1996. As well as designing the magazine I’ve illustrated four of the stories, and also wrote a page about the hundredth anniversary of Surrealism which provides a loose theme for the issue as a whole. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs the writing was commissioned first, the design having been offered to other parties earlier this year. This didn’t work out, however, so Mike asked if I could take over, something I was more than happy to do. Rather than follow any pre-existing layouts I started with a blank slate, something I prefer in these situations. The erratic nature of the magazine schedule has meant that many of the recent issues have been standalone items even though each one bears an issue and volume number. The issues that followed the paperback series in the 1970s differed widely from one another, a trend that continued up to 1996; consequently I didn’t have to worry about retaining any attributes of the previous issues.

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Rockwell Kent’s Wilderness

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920) was Rockwell Kent’s first book, an illustrated memoir written by Kent and his wife, Frances Lee, which recounts several months the couple spent with their son on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska. Most artists would illustrate something like this with drawings intended to evoke the remote location and its wildlife, and Kent does provide a number of documentary vignettes. Many of the full-page drawings are very different, however, being Blake-like renderings of nude figures representing a variety of moods and conditions. There’s a lot of this mysticism in Kent’s work, it’s what makes his art stand apart from the jobbing illustrators who were his contemporaries. You could also argue that Kent’s mystical nature and his love of voyaging to remote places, whether on land or sea, is why his Moby Dick from 1930 is the definitive illustrated edition. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

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French fables by Japanese hands

The fin-de-siècle interest in Japanese art is given a twist by four small books in which a group of Japanese artists illustrate well-known fables for a French readership. The books were commissioned circa 1890 by Pierre Barboutau, an art collector who specialised in Japanese arts and crafts. Barboutau’s volumes would have been intended to broaden the interest in Japanese art which had been fuelled a few years before by Le Japon Artistique, a magazine edited by a German art dealer with a business in Paris, Siegfried Bing. Le Japon Artistique was criticised for its inaccuracies by Japanese readers but it did feature colour reproductions of prints which otherwise might only be seen as monochrome reproductions. (Bing’s Paris shop, L’Art Nouveau, is also historically significant for giving a name to the predominant mode of fin-de-siècle design.)

Barboutau’s books take the French interest in Japonisme a stage further, allowing readers to experience familiar stories through Japanese eyes. Each book was printed in a limited run on Japanese paper. Of the four, I’m only familiar with the fables of La Fontaine where the emphasis on animal characters in rural settings means there are few explicitly Japanese details. Some of the landscapes are more Japanese than French, however, especially the drawing that includes a Fuji-like mountain in the background. There’s also a drawing of a group of foxes where the background details of a shrine and torii gate seem intended more for Japanese readers. Foxes in Japan are associated with the Shinto deity, Inari, to a degree that fox statues are a common site in Shinto shrines. None of this is mentioned in the book but if you’re aware of the significance it adds an additional layer to the cultural intersections.

All these books may be seen at Gallica, a valuable site whose interface is still woefully bad, especially on mobile devices. My advice, as always, is to download the PDFs.

Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1 (1894)

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