{art nouveau} – Page 28 – { feuilleton }

Keim & Czeschka’s Nibelungen

It’s all Art Nouveau again round here while I go through back issues of Jugend preparing a series of posts about the artists and graphics featured in that magazine. Just now, however, I’m too busy to do anything substantial so this will have to suffice, some of the illustrations by Carl Otto Czeschka (1878–1960) for a 1909 adaptation of the Nibelungen Saga by Franz Keim (1840–1918), for which Czeschka utilised the rectilinear style of Art Nouveau popularised by the Wiener Werkstätte.

This small, almost square volume in the popular series of children’s books is rather unassuming in its external appearance, only sporting a small vignette with the title on the cover. Carl Otto Czeschka (1878–1960) was responsible for the complete design of the text to be found inside, and interspersed it with the illustrations characteristic of his work. These reveal his credentials as an outstanding artist of the Secessionist school and the Jugendstil. The eight double-page spreads coloured in clay block technique and rare gold prints, in particular, contributed to the volume’s fame. (More.)

The rest of the pages can be seen on this great Art Nouveau site which has a wealth of material from the period.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Jugend Magazine revisited

It was just over a year ago that I was wishing there was some way to see whole issues of Jugend magazine, the German periodical launched in 1896 whose Art Nouveau style gave its name to the movement in Germany, Jugendstil. Yesterday’s search for Heinrich Vogeler artwork turned up that very thing, scanned editions of Jugend at the University of Heidelberg’s digital archive. Whole numbers from 1896 to 1925! I am aghast. As well as the scanned pages being very high quality you can download the bound collections as PDFs, each one totalling over 400 pages. Leafing through pages of old magazines in a foreign language doesn’t sound very stimulating if you can’t read German but Jugend was a very visual publication. Each issue is crammed with a variety of drawings in styles which range from black-and-white Art Nouveau motifs and quasi-Symbolist illustration to humorous drawings and cartoons. Each issue also featured a large drawing or painting on a fold-out spread.

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Margaret Armstrong book designs

Millionaire Households and their Domestic Economy (1903).

More Art Nouveau cover designs, this time by celebrated American designer Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944) whose life and work is documented here. The University of Rochester has examples of her work, as does the Atheneum of Philadelphia and the University of Alabama’s Publisher’s Bindings pages, the latter being an incredible resource for 19th and 20th century cover designs.

The Golden Key (1926).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Bradley does Beardsley

Browsing various bookbinding sites this week turned up a gorgeous cover design I hadn’t seen before by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962). The Beardsley influence is unmistakable, of course, and more pronounced than one usually sees in Bradley’s work. Richard Le Gallienne is a familiar name to scholars of the London fin de siècle scene although I can’t testify to the quality of this novel which was published in 1898, the year of Beardsley’s death. If you want to give it a go, the Internet Archive has the entire thing in its Bradley livery.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks

Secession posters

Alfred Roller (1901 & 02).

A selection of posters for the Vienna Secession at Lawrence University’s Art of the Poster site. Alfred Roller’s stylised lettering on the poster below was famously adapted by Wes Wilson for his psychedelic designs in the 1960s.

left: Koloman Moser (1902); right: Alfred Roller (1903).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Henri Privat-Livemont, 1861–1936
• Wilhelm Kåge
• Art Nouveau illustration