Harry Clarke – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke

A Delightful Page in the Record of My Existence.

This picture popped up at Chateau Thombeau a few days ago and it’s also been circulating in Tumblr’s recursive labyrinth. The very obvious debt to Harry Clarke’s black-and-white style caught my attention, especially to the artist’s Poe illustrations with the reclining woman being a blatant swipe from one of the Pit and the Pendulum drawings.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1919) by Harry Clarke.

Searching around revealed that the artist responsible, Cardwell Higgins, produced a small series of similar pieces in the late 1920s. He then settled into a career as an illustrator for American magazines and advertising, working in a far more commercial style which isn’t really the kind of thing I get very excited over. Six drawings from the black-and-white series were published as a lthograph set in 1979. Some of the originals came up for sale recently which accounts for the surfacing of these copies.

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Modern book illustrators, 1914

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Harry Clarke.

Some samples from a collection of mostly black-and-white drawing at the Internet Archive, Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work (1914), edited by C. Geoffrey Holme & Ernest G. Halton. This was an illustration review produced by The Studio magazine and in this edition happens to feature two pieces of work from Harry Clarke’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1913). Also at the Internet Archive is an earlier Studio publication, Modern Pen Drawings: European and American from 1901 from which I’ve selected Patten Wilson’s hyper-detailed rendering of Rustum and the Simoorg, a fantastic piece of work in every sense.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Harry Clarke.

From The Poems of Coleridge by Gerald Metcalfe.

La Belle Dame sans Merci by Dorothy M. Payne.

Rustum and the Simoorg by Patten Wilson.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Weekend links: the Halloween edition

Goddem with Attendants (1924) by Harry Clarke.

• Some of Harry Clarke’s extraordinary illustrations from Goethe’s Faust can be seen at A Journey Round My Skull. And a reminder for anyone who missed them, Clarke’s Poe illustrations at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• HP Lovecraft – Audio Books, Radio Plays, & Audio Documentaries. Out-of-print recordings and (no doubt) pirate copies of more recent things. I found this page by accident so it was a surprise to see my 1999 Lovecraft portrait used there. I used to own the David McCallum Dunwich Horror, an album with a singularly appalling sleeve illustration.

• Better album sleeves can be found here: Prospective 21e Siècle, a collection of foil designs from 1967. Some of the very challenging music within can be downloaded at the Avant Garde Project archive. Related: Have an electroacoustic Halloween with Ilhan Mimaroglu’s Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe (1964) and Wings of the Delirious Demon (1969).

Star Trails and the Captain’s Ghost, a photo by Chris Kotsiopoulos at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

• “The horror industry is totally male dominated from its directors to its slashers, and even its bloggers…and I think that needs to change.” Day of the Woman, a blog for the feminine side of fear.

• 6 of the Scariest Queer Horror Books Ever. I think I’d agree with the commenter in picking The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook (pictured in a graveyard by the looks of things) is interviewed at MyFonts.

• A Weird and Scratching Beauty: The Art of John Coulthart and Call of Cthulhu.

• Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain?

• 50-million-year-old insect trove found in Indian amber.

• The Café Kaput Samhain 2010 mixtape.

• The Groovy Age of Horror.

• Monster Mash (1962) by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers.

Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others

The Conqueror Worm (c. 1900) by František Kupka.

Poe’s illustrators are legion, you could easily devote an entire blog to nothing but depictions of his stories and poems. By way of rounding off this week of posts I thought I’d point to some of the works which have caught my attention over the years, several of them being obscure enough to warrant further investigation.

František Kupka’s drawing is, as far as I can gather, one of a series based on Poe’s poem; this seems to be a related piece. As with many Symbolists artists, you can spend a great deal of time scouring the available resources to find more of their work. We’re told that one of Kupka’s more well-known paintings, The Way of Silence (1903), was inspired by the poem Dream-land.

Berenice (1905) by Alberto Martini.

Alberto Martini (1876–1954) is a fascinating artist whose work bridges the decline of Symbolism and the rise of Surrealism. He’s also another talent whose work is woefully underrepresented on the web so let’s hope that changes soon. Wikipedia describes him as having produced 135 Poe illustrations of which only a small handful are visible online, and most of the ones that are go unlabelled. I know this one is for Berenice since I have it in a book but any Poe reader should guess the title from those blazing teeth. A few more of Martini’s drawings can be seen here.

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Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty

satty_poe01

Here it is, the book that began my fascination with the collage art of Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982), a German artist and psychedelic poster designer resident in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s. Warner Books published his Poe collection in 1976 and for some reason omit the umlaut from his name even though it’s present in Thomas Albright’s introductory note. I bought my copy in 1979 at a time when I was writing a lot of unsuccessful “experimental” fiction, and the sight of these tremendous collages inspired a surge of writing activity which disregarded Poe’s stories altogether. I’d seen enough of Max Ernst’s engraving collages to know that Sätty was following Ernst’s example but something about Sätty’s work struck me in a manner I couldn’t articulate other than by trying to set down the thoughts they inspired. Personal obsessions aside, I’ve since come to regard this book as the only illustrated Poe which can approach Harry Clarke’s inimitable volume.

I’m fortunate to own two copies of this edition otherwise I wouldn’t have attempted to scan any pages when doing so involves bending the spine rather badly. The book is profusely illustrated, with many full-page or double-spread illustrations most of which I haven’t tried to reproduce. What you have here are the title pages from nearly all the pieces and a couple of additional illustrations. Sätty’s Poe is still the easiest of his books to find secondhand if you browse the dealer pages at AbeBooks. For more of his incredible work there’s this page at Ephemera Assemblyman, and for details of the artist’s life and career there’s my 2005 essay in Strange Attractor Journal Two.

• Sätty’s illustrations for The Annotated Dracula (1975) at Flickr.

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