Arnold Böcklin – { feuilleton }

Covering Maldoror

This illustration by José Roy is a frontispiece created for a rare edition of Les Chants de Maldoror published by Genonceaux in 1890. Roy (1860–1924) was a French artist whose work receives little attention today but his Maldoror illustration happens to be the first of its kind, and a picture that serves the text better than some of those being produced a few years later. The detail of a flayed man stepping out of his skin prefigures Clive Barker by almost a century, a further example of the ways in which Lautréamont’s baleful masterpiece was ahead of his time.

Netherlands, 1917. Cover art by WF Gouwe.

Previous posts here have concerned illustrated editions of Maldoror but this one is all about the covers. Literary classics aren’t always very rewarding in this respect but Maldoror’s textual and imaginative wildness has prompted an assortment of illustrative choices that range from the appropriate to the bewilderingly arbitrary. The following covers are a selection of the more notable examples, avoiding those without pictures or ones that use photographs of the book’s enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse.

Italy, 1944. Cover art by Mario De Luigi.

France, 1947. Cover and interior illustrations by Jacques Houplain.

Salvador Dalí was the first well-known artist to illustrate Maldoror but his 1934 edition was published with plain black boards. Houplain’s illustrations follow the text more closely than do those by Dalí, Magritte or Bellmer, all of whom remain preoccupied with their own obsessions.

Belgium, 1948. Cover and interior illustrations by René Magritte.

France, 1963. Cover art by Paul Jamotte.

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A Little Phantasy on a Nineteenth-Century Painting

The painting in question is the same one used as the source for the pictures in the previous post, The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, which is here transformed in a very short animated film by Norman McLaren. Watching this again I thought it might have been created with the pinscreen (previously) since the NFB posting doesn’t offer any information about the technique used. The close shots, however, reveal the kinds of texture and smudges common to pastel drawing. McLaren followed this a few years later with a pastel animation in colour which he titled A Phantasy.

This isn’t the only cinematic rendering of Böcklin’s painting—Toteninsel.net lists a few more—but it may be the only one that ends by withdrawing the sea that surrounds the island. This spoils the setting a little but it adds a finishing touch. That’s the trouble with animating paintings, you’re always compelled to account for the passage of time in a scene that exists in a timeless space.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’île des Morts
• More Isles of the Dead
• Isles of the Dead
• A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead
• The Isle of the Dead in detail
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

L’île des Morts

In Philippe’s studio there was always against a wall this large canvas sketched in the 80s on the theme of the Isle of the Dead. During a work session on the print, I asked him if he intended to finish it one day. He answered me: “NO”, then “we will finish it together.”

Thus François Avril writing about his collaboration with Philippe Druillet on yet another version of The Isle of the Dead, the endlessly malleable Symbolist emblem created in the 1880s by Arnold Böcklin. Druillet had already drawn an impressive version of the cemetery island for Gail, one of the later Lone Sloane stories, in 1976. These new versions are from an exhibition of prints staged last year at Galerie Barbier in Paris.

Copies of the prints are still for sale, as is a pricey (€ 100) signed and limited exhibition catalogue. More tempting, although even more expensive, is a forthcoming catalogue from another Druillet exhibition, Les 6 Voyages de Philippe Druillet which explored the artist’s “oeuvre colossale”.

All of this reminds me that when I was writing about René Laloux’s films for the previous post I was thinking once again that it was a shame Laloux never produced anything based on Druillet’s art. There is an animated series, Bleu, L’enfant de la Terre, which Druillet designed for French TV in the 1980s, but this was aimed at children so there’s none of the cosmic doom that dominates Druillet’s early books. My ideal today would be a Lone Sloane feature animated by one of those Japanese studios with a fanatic attention to detail. I can dream, can’t I?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Isles of the Dead
• Isles of the Dead
• Du Tac au Tac: Druillet, Hogarth and Buscema
• Sorcerer: Druillet and Friedkin
• Ô Sidarta: a film about Philippe Druillet
• Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles
• Philippe Druillet album covers
• A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead
• The Isle of the Dead in detail
• Druillet’s vampires
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

Esoterica 49

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” —Giorgio de Chirico

A few weeks ago I made a list of feature films that might be regarded as having the characteristics of a Thomas Pynchon novel without being based on any of Pynchon’s books. The post prompted several suggestions for other candidates, including recommendations to watch Jim Gavin’s TV series, Lodge 49, an American production that ran for two seasons from 2018 to 2019 before being cancelled due to low ratings. Having now watched the series I can say that I enjoyed it very much, and it is very Pynchonian, unsurprisingly when it not only gestures to the title of Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, but also borrows from its storyline.

Ernie (Brent Jennings) has just been contemplating a print from the Ars Magna Lucis (1665) by Athanasius Kircher. Near the end of the second series he leaps through an image from the same book.

Lodge 49 presents a unique mélange of alchemy, surfing, secret societies, aerospace engineering, pool cleaning and cryptocurrency, with the added bonus of songs by the much-missed Broadcast being woven into the narrative. The series is consistently funny, humour being another essential Pynchonian ingredient, while the episodes are littered with references to (or correspondences with) Pynchon’s oeuvre: two of the main characters are an ex-surfer and an ex-sailor; the defunct aerospace company, Orbis, is modelled on Pynchon’s Yoyodyne from V. and Lot 49; there’s a trip to Mexico, a visit to an auction, and mention of a Remedios Varo exhibition (Lot 49 again); there are even references to Antarctic mysteries (V.), the Hollow Earth (Mason and Dixon) and the V-2 rocket (Gravity’s Rainbow). And those are only a few of the things I happened to catch as a first-time viewer. This is unusual territory for a small-scale television series, even if American TV has loosened up in recent years to allow a more eclectic range of material.

Larry (Kenneth Welsh) in the Sanctum Sanctorum with a plate from the Splendor Solis on the wall.

The Lodge 49 of the title is part of a global network of lodges that form the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx, a cross between a Masonic order and an occult cabal, founded by one Harwood Fritz Merrill, a Scottish alchemist, writer and explorer. (Merrill’s biography and the history of the Order of the Lynx is detailed here [PDF].) Alchemy is a persistent theme in the series but remains in the background for the most part, literally so inside Lodge 49 (Long Beach, California) and Lodge 1 (London) where the walls are decorated with prints of alchemical engravings. It would have been tempting to identify all of these pictures but most of them can be found in Taschen’s excellent Alchemy and Mysticism picture book so it’s easier to direct the curious to the Taschen volume. The prints also seemed to be there more to provide suitable set decoration rather than be significant in themselves, with one notable exception (see below).

Connie (Linda Edmond) going deeper into the mysteries of Lodge 1. The print is from Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur: in Alchymia (1615) by Stephan Michelspacher.

More intriguing was the appearance of several paintings which did seem significant although they might equally have been there to generate audience speculation. Film and TV drama is made today in the full awareness that every detail is liable to be screen-grabbed and scrutinised by obsessive viewers, a situation that offers the potential for directors and designers to incorporate details that may have no special significance but are simply there to fuel online chatter. It’s difficult to tell if this is what Gavin and co. were doing, especially when the prematurely truncated series contains so many loose ends and unexplained moments. But paranoia is in part the search for a significance that may not exist outside the mind of the paranoiac so a small degree of concern about being gamed by the creators of Lodge 49 seems warranted here, as well as adding to the general Pynchon factor. Despite all the Pynchoniana mentioned above the series is light on the paranoia that’s a constant in Pynchon’s novels so why not cultivate a little paranoia in the audience itself?

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Raphael Kirchner’s Salomés

This drawing by Austrian artist Raphael Kirchner (1876–1917) caught my attention for its apparent combination of the Salomé theme with an arrangement of stones and cypresses that bring to mind Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. All supposition on my part since I can’t find any definite confirmation that the picture is meant to depict Salomé, while a stand of cypresses is often just a stand of cypresses. But the Salomé theme and Böcklin’s island were popular enough fin de siècle subjects to be gestured towards in this manner, even on a piece of postcard art. In one of Kirchner’s other alleged Salomé cards he has a building that resembles the Temple of Cybele in Rome so the cypresses may simply be there to signify Ancient-World-plus-Mediterranean-setting (which in itself contradicts the Judean setting of the Salomé story). Kirchner’s speciality as an artist was attractive young women, often in states of undress, so the Ancient World here and elsewhere is providing the same excuse for a straight audience as “Greek” themes provided for homoerotica in the 19th and 20th century. There’s a lot more of Kirchner’s tasteful cheesecake at Wikiart.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive