Arthur Symons – { feuilleton }

The Golden Hind: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Literature

Well, here we are at last… After years of waiting for scanned copies of The Golden Hind to turn up, now that they have done I’m still frustrated. The magazine was one of the many small arts periodicals being published in Britain during the 1920s. It had an erratic, eight-issue run from 1922 to 1924, and remains notable for being the second (and last) magazine to be co-edited by Austin Osman Spare. The artist’s first magazine venture, Form, had been edited by Spare and “Francis Marsden” (Frederick Carter), with the pair publishing two issues before the outbreak of the First World War, followed by a final issue in 1921. Spare co-edited The Golden Hind with writer Clifford Bax, creating a publication whose contents were less mystical than Form had been, while also providing more of a showcase for artists other than Spare himself.

Inevitably, it’s the artists that interest me the most in The Golden Hind, even though the magazine was running pieces by writers like Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell. Many of the artists have been featured here before, some of them on many occasions: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt), John Austen, Harry Clarke, Garth Jones, Henry Keen, and Allan Odle. Spare’s own drawings have since been recycled in various books but most of the other drawings, woodcuts, linocuts and prints remain exclusive to the magazine. The John Austen contributions are especially fine, further examples of his decorated style which borrows heavily from Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke, and which he used so well in his illustrated Hamlet. The spirit of Beardsley’s 1890s is very much in evidence in The Golden Hind, a demonstration, perhaps, that Spare was once again looking back to The Savoy magazine as an example to be followed; one of the essays concerns the poety of The Savoy‘s literary editor, Arthur Symons.

In addition to artists whose popular works are still reprinted today there are less well-known figures like Sidney Hunt whose drawings owed more to contemporary trends than many of the other contributors. Hunt later edited an avant-garde magazine of his own, Ray, while producing his own brand of homoerotic prints like the Ganymede with Zeus which may be seen in The Golden Hind’s final issue.

The frustration I referred to above is my usual complaint about image quality. All the copies of the magazine have been taken from microfilm archives which means the pages aren’t grey enough to be illegible but their general murkiness is enough to destroy a lot of the artwork, especially the lithographs and other prints. The samples you see here have been brightened a little which does improve some of the line art but can do nothing for the rest. But I’m not going to complain too much. It’s taken a long time to be able to browse a complete run of this magazine, and I feel fortunate to do so even in this compromised manner. Better copies may still surface eventually. Fingers crossed.

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Alastair’s Manon Lescaut

The illustrated works of Alastair aren’t always easy to find, not when Hans Henning Voigt (as the artist was known to his German parents) chose a nom de l’art shared by a large portion of Scottish manhood, past and present. This 1928 edition of Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost is a recent arrival at the Internet Archive. The publisher, John Lane, specialised in illustrated editions, and their Manon Lescaut gives an idea of what we might have seen from Aubrey Beardsley had he survived into the 20th century. John Lane had published collections of Beardsley’s drawings together with related works like Robert Ross’s memories of the artist. It was in their interest to continue the posthumous association, hence the pairing of Alastair with a novel that Beardsley himself might have illustrated. Alastair not only positioned himself as an inheritor of Beardsley’s filigreed drawing style but in photographs appears to be adopting the persona of one of Beardsley’s etiolated characters.

This edition of the novel is an English translation by DC Moylan, with an introduction by Arthur Symons, Beardsley’s friend and collaborator when the pair were teamed as editor and art editor of the short-lived Savoy magazine. Symons was an astute critic, his essays are always worth reading; he remembers his friend here while stepping lightly around Alastair’s imitation of Beardsley’s decorations. As for Alastair himself, he did a good job with the illustrations. The figure-drawing isn’t as uncertain as in some of his earlier works, and each piece is printed in two colours (“the colour of fire and night” as Symons describes it), a process he favoured elsewhere. The leading study of Alastair’s art, Alastair: Illustrator of Decadence (1979) by Victor Arwas, reproduces five of the fourteen drawings, only one of which is shown in colour.

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Covers for The Double-Dealer

The Double-Dealer was a literary magazine “published at New Orleans” from 1921 to 1926 whose covers for the first two years of its run wouldn’t have been out of place twenty years earlier. In its written content the magazine wasn’t a throwback to the fin de siècle but was flying the flag for Modernism, an editorial stance that might seem at odds with the Beardsley-like cover art, at least until you notice the names of some of the contributors. Essayist and poet Arthur Symons had been a friend of Aubrey Beardsley’s in the 1890s, and the pair worked together on their own magazine, The Savoy, as editor and art editor respectively. Another contributor, Djuna Barnes, was a thoroughgoing Modernist in her writing but she was also an occasional artist who produced a number of drawings in a Beardsley-like style.

The covers of The Double-Dealer up to June 1922 were the work of Olive Leonhardt who doesn’t seem to have produced anything else in this manner. The magazine is notable today for having published early writings by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway but the first few issues also include contributions from Lafcadio Hearn, Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell. A press ad declared that “rebels and reactionaries rub shoulders” in the pages of the magazine, so maybe Leonhardt’s covers were a further example of editorial equanimity. Or maybe this type of art was more suited to New Orleans than New York City. The cover for July 1922 by Gordon Ertz continues in the Leonhardt manner, after which the magazine adopted the sober presentation common to literary magazines of the period, with a simple design based on a Janus-headed Roman coin.

Update: Added a credit for Gordon Ertz.

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Weekend links 498

The Sentinel 280, a car design by Syd Mead from 1964.

• “Boris Dolgov did not exist. The man who bore that name may have existed, but there never was a man in the United States with that name until 1956, too late for Weird Tales.” Teller of Weird Tales on the mysterious identity of a magazine artist.

• Saying goodbye to 2019 also meant saying farewell to Vaughan Oliver, Neil Innes and Syd Mead. Related: Vaughan Oliver at Discogs; I’m The Urban Spaceman; a look back at Syd Mead’s vehicle designs.

• Lanre Bakare on how ambient music became cool. (Again. This begs the question of when it became uncool, especially when a ten-year-old Brian Eno piece about “the death of uncool” is being quoted.)

Westerners interpreted the peyote experience very differently from the practitioners of the peyote religion, where the focus was “ritual, song and prayer, and to dissect one’s private sensations was to miss the point”. Writers such as Havelock Ellis, who published an essay on his peyote experiences in the Lancet in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. Ellis described “the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours” and “their lovely and various textures”. Peyote reached Europe in tandem with the X-ray, cinema and electric lights, Jay notes, and “nothing delighted the eye of the mescal eater so much as the new electrical sublime”.

Emily Witt reviewing Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic by Mike Jay

• Peter Bradshaw takes on the thankless task of ranking Federico Fellini’s feature films.

• Geoff Manaugh on when Russia and America coöperated to avert a Y2K apocalypse.

• “Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication,” says Daniel Oberhaus.

• Keith Allison on Karel Zeman, a creator of remarkable cinematic fantasies.

• Japanese Designer New Year’s Cards of 2020.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Vera Chytilová Day.

• 2020 in public domain.

• Sentinel (1992) by Mike Oldfield | Sentinels (2001) by Cyclobe | Sentinel (2004) by Transglobal Underground

Form and Austin Osman Spare

The University of Heidelberg‘s scanning programme continues to be a source of delight for those of us without professional or financial access to rare book collections. Having recently made the entire run of Der Ochideengarten available, they’ve added scans of another journal that was on my list of magazines I’d been hoping would eventually turn up online. Form was the first of two short-lived publications edited by Austin Osman Spare from 1916 to 1924, the second being The Golden Hind. Spare and co-editor “Francis Marsden” (Frederick Carter) published two issues of Form before Spare was conscripted in 1917. After the war, publication resumed with two further issues. Spare aficionados have long been familiar with the drawings in these publications, many of which have been reprinted over and over in collections of Spare’s art but often with no indication of their original context.

Seeing the drawings in situ like this not only restores the context but also sets them beside the accompanying work by Spare’s fellow writers and artists. Some of the other contributors need no introduction—WB Yeats, Robert Graves—while others have been neglected or even forgotten. Most descriptions of Form mention its following in the lineage of The Yellow Book, publisher John Lane having been responsible for both publications. But looking through the first two issues I’d say the model is as much The Savoy, the magazine that Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons put together after The Yellow Book kicked out Beardsley in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial. Yeats was a contributor to The Savoy, and two other artists present in Form—Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon—were friends and publishers of Wilde.

The samples here are mostly Spare’s work, and only a small selection at that. Enthusiasts are encouraged to download the PDFs for themselves. I had seen one of these issues before (Alan Moore has an enviable collection of Spare publications) but the rest were magazines I’d been waiting decades to see in full. I’m hoping now that the excellent staff at Heidelberg may have copies of The Golden Hind waiting for similar treatment.

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