{illustrators} – Page 21

Weekend links 599

Taarna by Chris Achilleos for Heavy Metal, September 1981. A typical piece by Achilleos, whose death was announced this week, and very typical for a Heavy Metal cover. Achilleos was a prolific illustrator.

• New music: The Truth, the Glow, the Fall (Live At Montreux) by Anna von Hausswolff, from her forthcoming album, Live At Montreux Jazz Festival. The last gig I went to was in October 2019, to see Sunn O))) supported by Anna von Hausswolff. Easily one of the best things I’ve ever experienced. Meanwhile, Anna von Hausswolff has had to cancel a Paris church concert following protests by a rabble of outraged Catholics. Bravo les crétins!

• “…it is easy to forget that Montesquiou—regardless of his own work—was not merely emblematic of Decadence, he was essentially patient zero in its viral spread.” Strange Flowers explores the exquisite life of the bat-obsessed, hydrangea-cultivating Robert de Montesquiou.

• “Kotatsu have been around longer than we imagine. And art history has the proof.” Spoon & Tamago on an old Japanese method for warming a room during winter. Also further evidence that cats always find the warmest place in any house.

• Dennis Cooper‘s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2021. Thanks again for the link here!

• The Wire magazine has opened its collection of articles by the late Greg Tate so they may be read by non-subscribers.

• “Neil Bartlett is a gay writer’s gay writer,” says Jeremy Atherton Lin reviewing Bartlett’s latest, Address Book.

• James Balmont on the psychedelic cinema of Nobuhiko Obayashi.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Erotique.

• Northern lights photographer of the year.

• The Strange World of…Takuroku.

• RIP Robbie Shakespeare.

• Robbie Shakespeare’s bass x 3: King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1974) by Augustus Pablo | Nightclubbing (1981) by Grace Jones | Bass And Trouble (1985) by Sly & Robbie

Willy Pogány’s Treasury of Verse

In the previous post I referred to Willy Pogány’s versatility, and this book of poetry for children shows the degree to which he could adapt his illustrative style to suit the written material. When compared to his minimal drawings for Padraic Colum’s Grecian tales, his Dulac-like Rubáiyát and the elaborate designs for the Tale of Lohengrin these illustrations could be the work of a different artist.

A Treasury of Verse for Little Children was compiled by Madalen Edgar, and published by Harrap in 1908. The illustrations and page layouts are close enough to the children’s books being produced at this time by Charles Robinson that I wonder whether the similarity was deliberate on Pogány’s part. The drawings stray too much into the twee zone for my taste but the book is worth looking through if only to see the ways in which he varied the hand-drawn title designs for each entry. Pogány’s next commission took another change of direction with an edition of Goethe’s Faust.

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Willy Pogány’s Children of Odin

I ought to have waited until Wotan’s Day to post this one. The title may suggest a black metal album but these are illustrations by the versatile Willy Pogány for a retelling of Norse myths by Padraic Colum. Pogány illustrated several of Colum’s books, including retellings of Greek myths for which the illustrations resemble the figures found on Grecian ceramics. Children of Odin was published in 1920 with illustrations and page designs closer to Pogány’s drawings and paintings for Colum’s novel, The King of Ireland’s Son. The four colour plates shown here aren’t always present in the editions available online.

Iduna picking the Apples of Life for the Gods.

Jason and the Argonauts was one of my favourite films when I was 10 years old (and the story of the Golden Fleece happens to be the subject of a later Colum/Pogány volume) but I was never very interested in the written accounts of Greek mythology. The world of the Norse gods was darker and more mysterious, and I read Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen many times. I’m sure I would have done the same with Colum’s book, especially in this edition which contains over 40 illustrations. These days, any mention of Odin and Thor is blighted by association with the steroidal junk of “The Marvel Universe” and neopagan numbskullery. Feed them all to Fenrir and the Midgard Serpent, say I, and let the old gods rest in peace.

Odin at Mimir’s Well.

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The Dreaming City by Michael Moorcock

Cover art by James Cawthorn. Chaos pin not included.

More sword and sorcery. Last month I was asked to design a reprinting of the very first Elric story by Michael Moorcock, a standalone publication from Jayde Design intended to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Moorcock’s most popular character. The Dreaming City was published in issue 47 of Science Fantasy magazine in June 1961, following a request from the editor, John Carnell, for Moorcock to write a new series of fantasy stories. Over the next three years Science Fantasy published all ten of the novellas that established Elric’s character and his world, ending with Doomed Lord’s Passing in April 1964, the entry which saw Moorcock destroy his creation in a Boschian apocalyptic finale.

The Dreaming City: A Sixtieth Anniversary Edition is a compound facsimile of these publications. The interior design follows the template of the magazine interiors while the front cover is based on one of the later numbers which ran the fifth Elric story, The Flame Bringers, with a cover illustration by James Cawthorn. That illustration may have been attached to a different story but it actually depicts a scene from the end of The Dreaming City when Elric is leaving Imrryr in burning ruins after the place has been sacked by the raiding party he led there. It’s also a much better illustration than the one by Brian Lewis that appeared on the cover of the June 1961 issue. In addition to recreating the cover we’ve also restored the drawing, which in its printed form was slightly cropped at one side, with the complete version taken from Cawthorn’s original. Jim Cawthorn was closely involved with the creation of Elric, and even co-wrote Kings in Darkness, another of the stories in the Science Fantasy sequence. Inside the new edition there are four further illustrations which Cawthorn produced for a German collection of Elric stories published by Heyne in 1979.

One of James Cawthorn’s interior illustrations.

This small publication will only be of interest to collectors but it was a good thing to be involved with. In the past I’ve designed an Elric-themed album cover for Hawkwind, and last year designed The Stormbringer Sessions, a very limited publication of Jim Cawthorn’s sketched outline for his unfinished Elric graphic novel. The Dreaming City is the first Elric design of mine that features Moorcock’s own text. For an opening shot in what would become a saga spanning several decades and a variety of media The Dreaming City is a remarkably confident piece of work, even more so when you consider that the author was only 21 at the time. Elric begins and ends the story as an outsider, exiled and alone, and with his existence bound to his cursed sword, Stormbringer. Subsequent novels and stories would fill in the history before pitching Elric into the multiverse along with many of Moorcock’s other characters. But this is where it all begins, with six Sea Lords waiting in a tavern wondering whether the albino prince will turn up at all.

The Dreaming City: A Sixtieth Anniversary Edition is available here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Stormbringer Sessions by James Cawthorn
• James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art
• The Chronicle of the Cursed Sleeve
• Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety
• Elric 1: Le trône de rubis
• The Sonic Assassins
• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

Edmund Dulac’s Sinbad the Sailor

I mentioned Edmund Dulac’s Sinbad book in an earlier post but didn’t show many his illustrations on that occasion so here they are. Most of these pictures are a long way from Ray Harryhausen’s Sturm und Drang but they’re not without their complement of monsters and afreets.

Sinbad the Sailor & Other Stories from the Arabian Nights was published in 1914. No author is credited, which suggests the text might have been by Dulac himself but it’s more likely to be another retelling of the tales by Laurence Housman with whom Dulac collaborated on similar titles. Sinbad the Sailor is one of Dulac’s best books, a prime example of the ease with which he could combine influences from Persian miniatures, Chinese painting and Japanese prints all done in the watercolour technique employed by contemporaries such as Arthur Rackham.

The plate at the top of this post showing a princess battling an afreet made a striking cover image for the American edition of Fantasy: The Golden Age of Fantastic Illustration (1975) by Brigid Peppin, a study of book illustration from the 1860s to the 1920s. The British edition used a Dulac illustration from The Snow Queen which seems dull in comparison, and an odd choice for a volume filled with so much exceptional art. The book itself is an excellent collection, however, and one I’d recommend to anyone interested in this period of illustration.

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