Anton Seder – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 751

The Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Là-Bas, the celebrated account of Satanism in fin-de-siècle France by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

• New music: Chronicle by ARC, and The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz (linked here before but that was for the pre-release).

• Fabulous Animals (1975), a six-part British TV series about cryptozoology presented by David Attenborough (!).

• At Colossal: “Colour and repetition form optical rhythms in Daniel Mullen’s geometric paintings“.

• At Public Domain Review: Anton Seder’s The Animal in Decorative Art (1896) turns up again.

• Unseen scenes from Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Roadhouse.

• Fanzine covers selected by DJ Food.

• Mark Webber’s favourite records.

• Satan Side (1972) by Keith Hudson | Satan Is Boring (1986) by Sonic Youth | Sataan Is Real (1991) by Terminal Cheesecake

Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine

Ballantine Books published a number of Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related titles in paperback in 1976, all with uniform cover designs featuring a bold Art Nouveau-style border. I’ve seen these covers on many occasions but hadn’t paid the artwork much attention until I was browsing Fontinuse last week and realised that artist Murray Tinkelman had borrowed his dragons and scowling fish from a book by Anton Seder, Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst, a collection of animal designs for artists and craftspeople. (See below.) Writing about Seder’s book a couple of years ago I referred to “piscine grotesques that I’ll be looking at if I ever have to draw the inhabitants of Innsmouth again”, unaware that another artist had already plundered the book for just this reason.

Murray Tinkelman (1933–2016) was a versatile illustrator but he was better suited to science fiction and other genres, horror doesn’t seem to have been his forte. This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject. The writhing convolvulus-like shapes favoured by Victor Horta come to mind, while one or more of the typefaces of the occult revival might be useful for the title designs.

Seder’s book of animal illustrations may be browsed at the Internet Archive although at the time of writing the site is offline for maintenance following a series of hacking incidents and DOS attacks. Here’s hoping it returns soon.

Continue reading “Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine”

Moderne Malereien, 1903

A few months ago I turned up a collection of decorative animal designs by Anton Seder, a German artist, designer and art teacher. Moderne Malereien is a sequel to this in which Seder applies his somewhat overwrought Art Nouveau style to the world of interior design, with suggestions for a variety of elaborate murals. Animals are also present in some of these plates, especially fish; Seder had a fondness for aquatic organisms. Similar designs may be found in the pages of Kunstgewerbe in Elsass-Lothringen, a short-lived journal which Seder co-edited from 1900 to 1906.

Continue reading “Moderne Malereien, 1903”

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.)

Continue reading “Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst”