{art nouveau} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Splendid Suns

I answered a few interview questions recently for Shunga Gallery, a site concerned with the erotic side of Japanese prints, and with contemporary practitioners who work in a similar areas. (All NSFW, needless to say.) I’m not really an erotic artist but Marijn has selected a few examples of my artwork that contain prominent erections, going back to the badly-proportioned drawing of the Great God Pan that I did in 1986 for my late friend, Ed, when he was part of a Dutch music & performance group, Abrahadabra. The drawing appeared in the zine of the same name, and later provoked mild disapproval from the organisers of a video festival in Den Haag where Ed and friends were using it as a flyer to promote their activities. Also at Shunga Gallery are a few pages from the rebarbative Reverbstorm, a book that’s the darkest and nastiest thing I’ll ever do. Some of that artwork provoked a rather more serious form of disapproval, as I explain in the interview.

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Clichés & Gravures

The clichés we have here aren’t the verbal variety but those which the OED defines as:

1. The French name for a stereotype block; a cast or ‘dab’; applied esp. to a metal stereotype of a wood-engraving used to print from. Originally, a cast obtained by letting a matrix fall face downward upon a surface of molten metal on the point of cooling, called in English type-foundries ‘dabbing’.

Clichés & Gravures is a two-volume collection (Volume 1 and Volume 2) of emblems, icons, small illustrations, initials, headings, frames and other print details published by the Deberny type foundry in 1912. Carol Belanger Grafton’s 3,800 Early Advertising Cuts is an edited selection of the same images which Dover Publications added to their Pictorial Archive series in 1991. I’ve been borrowing from Ms. Grafton’s book for many years, during which time I’ve wondered what might have been omitted from her selection. Once again the Internet Archive turns up the goods. The Dover reprint gives no indication that Deberny’s collection ran to two volumes and included colour printing in the second volume, plus a few pages of type designs; the Art Nouveau-styled design shown below is one that I can find immediate use for. If all of this somehow wasn’t enough, there are yet more clichés et gravures (and a lot more typefaces) in this type catalogue which Deberny published a few years later.

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Fantaisies Florales

Plants and flowers are a common feature of Art Nouveau sourcebooks; Alphonse Mucha, Eugène Grasset and Maurice Verneuil all produced books for designers filled with floral patterns and motifs which generally remain faithful to their models. The designs in Fantaisies Florales by Jean Pilters are less concerned with fidelity to nature, especially in the background decorations whose swirling elaborations look like precursors of the psychedelic art that would help revive popular interest in Art Nouveau decades later. Pilters’ designs were published as a series of loose-leafed portfolios which in these copies have lost their covers, hence the gummed labels which spoil two of the plates.

So who was Jean Pilters? Information is scarce, unfortunately, beyond descriptions of the artist as a French designer. The plates, which possibly date from 1910 (nobody is sure about the year of publication either), look like copies of colour originals but if an earlier colour edition exists I’ve yet to find any examples. Monochrome and tanned with age they may be but there’s enough here for me to work with. I may be borrowing some of these details in the near future.

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Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst

The development of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century led to the publication of many books and periodicals offering design suggestions to artists, craftspeople and decorators. The more popular examples, like the long-running Dekorative Vorbilder, comprised collections of plates by different artists, in styles that ran from imitations of rococo decoration to the latest Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil) graphics. Other books presented designs by single artists. Alphonse Mucha created two of these, Documents Decoratifs (1902) and Figures Décoratives (1905), while also collaborating with Maurice Verneuil and George Auriol on Combinaisons Ornementals (1901). Verneuil produced a book of his own designs, L’Animal dans la Decoration (1897), in which animals of all kinds were depicted in Verneuil’s precise and versatile Art Nouveau manner.

Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst (The Animal in Decorative Art) is an Austrian equivalent of L’Animal dans la Decoration, and one in which artist Anton Seder didn’t feel as constrained as Verneuil by biological accuracy. Three of the plates in Seder’s book are devoted to a variety of snarling dragons that were probably more useful for illustrators than interior designers. The rest of the book is a combination of reality and fantasy, with fish in various states of pop-eyed alarm, a collection of piscine grotesques that I’ll be looking at if I ever have to draw the inhabitants of Innsmouth again, and many beautiful renderings of birds, reptiles, crustaceans, feathers and shells. Seder’s book was reprinted by Dover Publications as Fantastic Beasts of the Nineteenth Century but you can browse or download the original for free here. (The date given at the Internet Archive is 1896 but several of the plates show dates later than this.)

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Typografia, 1903–04

The Internet Archive has a few bound volumes of this Czech print journal in its collection, although not a complete run, unfortunately. The most interesting one for me is Volume 15 which covers the years 1903 to 1904, a period in which the Art Nouveau style predominates. Prague is often listed as a centre of Art Nouveau but good examples of this aren’t always easy to find. Typografia does at least demonstrate that all the familiar elements—sinuous borders, floral motifs, stylised female figures—had found their way into Czech design even if many of the typefaces being showcased had their origins in Germany.

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