A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Dragon Skull Ring.
Jewellery by Swedish designer Maria Nilsdotter. Looking at her blog posts I’d guess that her snake bangle is inspired by the serpentine ring and bracelet set designed by Alphonse Mucha and Georges Fouquet for Sarah Bernhardt.
Snake bangle (blackened silver).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Divine Sarah
• Lalique’s dragonflies
left: Absinthe Robette (1896); right: Bitter Oriental (1897).
Henri Privat-Livemont, a Belgian artist and one of the best of the post-Mucha Art Nouveau stylists. I’ve featured his Absinthe Robette poster before but am including it again since it’s my favourite of the ones I’ve seen. All of these are from the Art of the Poster 1880–1918 collection at Lawrence University whose copies can be explored in extreme close-up.
Biscuits & Chocolat Delacre (1896).
Le Masque Anarchiste (1897).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Absinthe girls
Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).
Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.
My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.
Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.
Miller Blues Band/Mother Earth/Bukka White by Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse (1967).
I already had this piece roughed out before discovering that psychedelic artist Alton Kelley died last month, something that doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely. I posted the picture above last October then in January this year wrote something about San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. But it’s taken me until now to realise that these two things are connected.
The San Francsico poster artists of the Sixties, of which Mouse & Kelley were leading members, borrowed frequently from earlier sources, especially Art Nouveau stylists such as Alphonse Mucha and the Symbolist painters. A recent Thames & Hudson book, Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco traces some of the more obvious influences but this is one example which seems to have eluded them.
Descending Night and Rising Day by Adolph Alexander Weinman (1914).
The statue that Mouse & Kelley used was titled Descending Night and was, with Rising Day (aka The Rising Sun), one of a pair of symbolic works created by sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman (1870–1952) for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. The photos above are from one of the books I linked to earlier, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts by Juliet Helena Lumbard James. The identities of artists’ models are rarely preserved but in the case of Descending Night we know that one Audrey Munson was the model. And I know that thanks to a well-timed overview of Ms Munson’s career by Silent-Porn-Star.
Weinman later worked his statue designs into these rather fine figurines which became his best-selling small bronzes. These pictures make visible the stars at the feet of Night and the sun at the feet of Day.
left: Adolph Alexander Weinman in his studio with a study for Descending Night in the background; right: Alton Kelley in the Sixties.
Weinman didn’t live long enough to see his work exploited on a gaudy concert poster and given his adherence to a pre-Modern, Beaux-Arts style it’s perhaps just as well. He’s most remembered today for his Liberty design for the American Silver Eagle which also used Audrey Munson as the model. Ms Munson lived to 1996 so I can’t help wonder if she ever saw her youthful figure return on Mouse and Kelley’s poster. The same year as the San Francisco Exposition she played an artist’s model in Inspiration, a film by George Foster Platt which is only notable now for being the first American non-porn film to feature a nude woman. She stripped off again a year later for Rae Berger’s Purity. Audrey was 76 in 1967 but something tells me she that her free spirit would have identified with the Summer of Love more than many others of her generation.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Evanescent City
• Family Dog postcards
The classic absinthe poster from 1896 by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), one of the best exponents of the post-Mucha style. Don’t let anyone tell you that using unclad women’s bodies in advertising is a new thing.
And a couple more Mucha-esque examples circa 1900, both credited to “Nover”, from the wide selection of absinthe graphics at the Virtual Absinthe Museum.
The printer was L. Revon et Cie, situated in Paris at 93 Rue Oberkampf. The artist’s signature “Nover” is a mystery—no designer by that name is recorded. Since however the word is a palindrome of Revon, the assumption must be that the artist was Revon himself, or alternatively an anonymous employee of the firm. The same artist was responsible for the well-known Absinthe Vichet poster, also printed by Revon et Cie.
Interesting that so many of these posters show the women holding the glasses aloft as though receiving a libation from the gods. Privat-Livemont’s painting adds to the sacred effect by putting a halo behind the absinthe-bearer’s head.
Also at the Virtual Absinthe Museum is this warning against the dangers of the Green Fairy which would make a good addition to the Men with snakes post.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Smoke
• Flowers of Love