{art nouveau} – Page 30 – { feuilleton }

Michael English, 1941–2009

left: The Soft Machine Turns On (1967); right: UFO Coming (1967).

This was a bitter blow coming at a time when I’ve been working on something inspired in part by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the 1960s design duo comprised of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. The two artists, together with associate Martin Sharp, are indelibly associated with the London psychedelic scene of the late Sixties. Whereas Sharp’s posters were often loose and dramatically bold explosions of shape and colour, the Hapshash posters were more carefully controlled in their curating of disparate elements borrowed from Art Nouveau—especially Mucha and Beardsely—comic strips, Op Art, Pop art and fantasy illustration. Their work perfectly complemented the very distinctive atmosphere of the capital’s psychedelic scene which, for a couple of hectic years, saw an explosion of new bands (or old bands in new guises) fervently engaged in a lysergic exploration of Victoriana, childhood memories and frequent silliness. UK psychedelia is generally more frivolous than its US equivalent which had the Vietnam War and civil disorder to deal with; English and Waymouth’s graphics captured the London mood.

top left: Coke (1970); top right: Toothpaste (1974).
bottom left: Leaf Falls (1972); bottom right: Red no. 3 (1978).

In the 1970s English refashioned himself as a hyper-realist painter of foodstuffs and other consumer goods, and his meticulous airbrush style led to work as an advertising artist. Those paintings are beautifully rendered but often leave me feeling slightly queasy. I much prefer his work from later in the decade which depicted equally meticulous close-up views of oil-smeared buses and trains. Paper Tiger published a book collection in 1979, 3D Eye, which gathers the best of his work from the poster art on.

• Obituaries: Guardian | Times
• Hapshash poster galleries here and here

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry

Further tales from the Obscure World

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.

L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, is an expanded version of a 1995 children’s story by Schuiten and Peeters, Mary la penchée. Mary is the young daughter of wealthy industrialists from Mylos struck down one day by some cosmic calamity which shifts her centre of gravity, causing her to permanently lean at an apparently impossible angle. When she’s bullied at school she runs away and joins a circus. A meeting with scientists and astronomers leads to a resolving of her affliction, and the repairing of her ruined life. This is a fascinating story for a number of reasons, not least the existence of a parallel narrative taking place in our world which is conveyed using photographs, and which unveils some of the metaphysical aspects of the Obscure World. The story of Mary is also flawlessly drawn. Schuiten uses a black-and-white style modelled on the work of old magazine illustrators like Franklin Booth, and there are further references to Winsor McCay and Jules Verne.

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Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters

The Obscure World.

Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in their French editions it wasn’t immediately apparent how much the Obscure World was supposed to be connected to our own; a number of the books contain references to people or places in our world, while the city of Brüsel, subject of the book of that name, is a kind of parallel Brussels. The counter-Earth explanation isn’t given in the early books but seems to have evolved later, as does Schuiten and Peeters’ introduction of portals between the worlds which imply a two-way leakage of influence. Writer and artist encourage readers of the series to suggest or “discover” new portals to the Obscure World.

A view over Xhystos.

The distant city of Samaris is the mysterious destination of Les Murailles de Samaris (The Walls of Samaris). The story begins in the city of Xhystos whose style is fully Art Nouveau in a manner reminiscent of the celebrated Belgian architect Victor Horta, if Horta had been allowed to design a city where every building is decorated with wrought-iron curves and glass-canopied roofs, and where trams go by on elevated roads several storeys high. The narrator, Franz, is informed by the city authorities that he’s been chosen to go on a perilous mission to discover whether rumours about the nature of Samaris are true or not. Previous explorers have failed to return so Franz’s friends and girlfriend regard his acceptance of the mission as suicidal. What follows is a journey by steam train out of the city into a surrounding zone of lawless ruins, then a journey by “altiplane” and “aerophele”, the latter being a kind of multi-winged sand yacht.

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Design as virus 10: Victor Moscoso

Continuing an occasional series.

A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull is a stylish series of Indian book jackets from 1964 to 1984. These impress partly for the way they rework western design approaches, and they consequently look very different from the florid visuals one might (lazily) expect of Indian cover design. Western culture borrowed more than enough from India in the 1960s, from clothes to music, so it only seems right that the sub-continent should be free to take something back.

Luna Toon by Victor Moscoso (1968).

Will at A Journey Round My Skull mentions the above cover design as reminding him of this Krautrock bible, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, a book which happens to be a favourite repository of musical obsession. The cover reminded me more of the weirdly abstract comic strips created by artist and graphic designer Victor Moscoso for the early run of Zap Comix in the late Sixties. Moscoso was one of the most graphically revolutionary of the West Coast poster artists, and his approach to comics looks surprisingly fresh today next to the work of fellow artists like Robert Crumb. Those limitless vistas go back to Giorgio de Chirico but it was Salvador Dalí who made deserts raked by evening shadows reflect interior landscapes of his own, and it was Dalí’s immense popularity that in turn popularised that endless plane as a stage for surreal events. Moscoso borrows from the Surrealists and comic artists like George Herriman as much as he borrows from Disney; in his posters he was one of many artists taking motifs or whole designs from Art Nouveau. Our Indian egg may well be an original work but the first example in Will’s post is a very Saul Bass-like hand, so I’m guessing that the designers of these books were looking around for inspiration. And that eye-in-a-hand? Moscoso had done that as well.

Blues Project Poster by Victor Moscoso (1967).

While we’re discussing Victor Moscoso, it’s convenient to draw attention to a slight mystery connecting his poster art and the great album cover designer, Barney Bubbles. The poster above was one of a number that Moscoso made incorporating Victorian or Edwardian photographs, and two at least of these use antique erotica as their central image.

Space Ritual interior, design by Barney Bubbles (1973).

This particular photo always stands out for me. The woman is familiar to anyone who’s seen the interior of the fold-out sleeve Barney Bubbles created for Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album in 1973. Barney spent some time in San Francisco in the late Sixties and was undoubtedly familiar with Moscoso’s work, as he was with all the great designs coming from the West Coast at that time. What surprises me is that he should have somehow found the same image to use as Moscoso did. Was there a popular book of Edwardian erotica which everyone was familiar with? Did he ask Moscoso where he’d found the photo? Did he find it by chance? Barney Bubbles experts don’t know the answer (I’ve asked) and the question is in any case a rather trivial one. But I’m still curious… As early porn photos go it’s a particularly fine one and I’d like to know whether there are more like it and where it came from. Needless to say, if anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus 9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus 8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus 6: Cassandre
• Design as virus 5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus 4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus 3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus 2: album covers
• Design as virus 1: Victorian borders

The Studio & Studio International

Back in February I posted some pictures from a 1971 collection of Art Nouveau illustration and design, some of which were competition entries from The Studio magazine. The Studio, which later became the long-running Studio International, can be seen from issue 11 onwards at the Internet Archive now that they’ve started uploading Google’s book scans. I’ve only looked at one of these so far, Volume 11–13 which runs over 850 pages and so takes some time to go through, as do all these rather unwieldy PDF books. The issues are missing their covers and so aren’t dated but would appear to be from around 1896 to 1898, one of the final entries being a memorial piece for Aubrey Beardsley who died that year; The Studio was the magazine which had introduced Beardsley to the public only five years earlier.

The Studio ran regular competitions among its readers and the examples shown here are from some of those. I especially like these type designs; dare we assume that the “Dorian” design below is named after Dorian Gray? As a whole the magazine is an odd mix of very dull Victorian art of the landscapes and artisans type, with occasional flares of interest when they devote a feature to the emerging Art Nouveau style or profile a Symbolist artist such as Giovanni Segantini.

A note for anyone wishing to download Google scans from the Internet Archive: some of the PDF links lead you to a Google page where they’re trying to sell you an e-text or get you to buy a book. To see the available files you need to click “All Files: HTTP”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine