{illustrators} – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 683

She Did Not Turn (1974) by David Inshaw.

• “Pauline Kael compared Bruce Lee to Fred Astaire; I think the comparison works better with Rudolf Nureyev. Astaire had a besuited, playful grace, while Nureyev was shirtless, dramatic, and muscular. Astaire moved with athletic modesty, while Lee’s bravura dominated the screen.” Micah Nathan on 50 years of Enter the Dragon.

• New music: This Stolen Country Of Mine by Alva Noto, and Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Japanese Electronic Music) Vol.1 by Cosmocities Records.

• At Cartoon Brew: A profile of Sally Cruikshank. The spooky psychedelia of Face Like a Frog has long been a favourite round here.

• “My Life in a Hop, Skip and a Jump!” Clive Hicks-Jenkins answers a few questions about his art.

• At Public Domain Review: Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836).

• More martial arts: Tom Wilmot on Bruce Lee’s greatest fight scenes at Golden Harvest.

• Submissions to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lucrecia Martel Day.

• RIP Jane Birkin.

• Enter The Dragon (1974) by The Upsetters | Dragon Power (A Tribute To Bruce Lee) (1978) by JKD Band | Edit The Dragon (1985) by Colourbox

Franz von Bayros’s Inferno

Viennese artist Franz von Bayros (1866–1924) is unusual among illustrators in that his erotic art tends to be easier to see today than his less scandalous commissions. Such is the case with his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, some of which I’d seen before but never as many as in a book which arrived recently at the Internet Archive. This is a home-made presentation that uses the Longfellow translation of the Inferno for the text. Bayros can’t compete with the sombre spectacle of Gustave Doré’s illustrations but he depicts some of the less dramatic moments that Doré’s full-page engravings avoid, while also placing a number of his drawings in the same monumental frames he liked to use for his pornographic art.

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Fender guitar catalogue, 1976

Another post prompted by 70s Sci-Fi Art, and a publication that’s very typical of its decade. The Fender guitar catalogue for 1976 showcases its product range with a series of illustrations that carefully pastiche the kind of art you’d find in books of fairy tales. Selling rock’n’roll equipment in this manner wasn’t a trend-setting step by 1976, not with the punk hordes on the march, but corporations are seldom ahead of the general culture. The cover art by Ruby K. Lee is a copy of one of Kay Nielsen’s drawings for East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Lee also provides one of the interior drawings, with the rest of the art being the work of Bruce Wolfe. (There may be another artist involved since one of the illustrations lacks a credit.) This looks like a huge amount of effort for a small product catalogue but the illustrations were also part of an ad campaign with accompanying storybook copy. It’s good to see Busorama being used for all the headings. I’ve been using this font myself for its associations with the 1970s.

Since I keep borrowing tips from 70s Sci-Fi Art I’ll note again that Adam Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s will be published by Abrams next month.

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The art of Davis Meltzer, 1929–2017

Illustrators were often easy to miss in the pre-internet days, when paperbacks published overseas could be hard to find or even see. Such is the case with Davis Meltzer whose work I hadn’t really noticed before until this cover turned up at 70s Sci-Fi Art. Meltzer had a long career as a scientific illustrator for National Geographic but his work as a cover artist for SF novels only lasted a decade, from 1970 to 1981. Not everything is as dramatically eye-catching as his Simak cover but there’s a unique sensibility at work, with only occasional similarities to other artists of his generation like Kelly Freas.

The Temptation of St. Gerome.

The piece above is from an auction site which doesn’t reveal any information apart from the title. If this was a religious illustration it’s one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. Auction listings state that Meltzer’s paintings were mostly done in gouache, a common medium for illustrators and graphic designers owing to its flat bright colours. The following selection favours the more visually arresting examples over generic spaceship art.

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Covering Maldoror

This illustration by José Roy is a frontispiece created for a rare edition of Les Chants de Maldoror published by Genonceaux in 1890. Roy (1860–1924) was a French artist whose work receives little attention today but his Maldoror illustration happens to be the first of its kind, and a picture that serves the text better than some of those being produced a few years later. The detail of a flayed man stepping out of his skin prefigures Clive Barker by almost a century, a further example of the ways in which Lautréamont’s baleful masterpiece was ahead of his time.

Netherlands, 1917. Cover art by WF Gouwe.

Previous posts here have concerned illustrated editions of Maldoror but this one is all about the covers. Literary classics aren’t always very rewarding in this respect but Maldoror’s textual and imaginative wildness has prompted an assortment of illustrative choices that range from the appropriate to the bewilderingly arbitrary. The following covers are a selection of the more notable examples, avoiding those without pictures or ones that use photographs of the book’s enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse.

Italy, 1944. Cover art by Mario De Luigi.

France, 1947. Cover and interior illustrations by Jacques Houplain.

Salvador Dalí was the first well-known artist to illustrate Maldoror but his 1934 edition was published with plain black boards. Houplain’s illustrations follow the text more closely than do those by Dalí, Magritte or Bellmer, all of whom remain preoccupied with their own obsessions.

Belgium, 1948. Cover and interior illustrations by René Magritte.

France, 1963. Cover art by Paul Jamotte.

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