Jugend – Page 11 – { feuilleton }

Der Orchideengarten

Will at A Journey Round My Skull turned up some gold this week in the form of several covers from a German periodical, Der Orchideengarten, which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921. This is generally credited as being the world’s first fantasy magazine which makes its unaccountable obscurity all the more surprising. Both Will and I first encountered the magazine in Franz Rottensteiner’s essential history of fantasy, The Fantasy Book, published by Thames & Hudson in 1978, with a US edition produced by Collier Books. As well as being a wide-ranging history, Rottensteiner’s book is profusely illustrated throughout and includes two tantalising and distinctly weird covers from Der Orchideengarten, a magazine which Rottensteiner describes as “one of the most beautiful fantasy magazines ever published.” Over the years I’ve found myself becoming thoroughly acquainted with most of the book’s contents as authors were discovered and various gaps filled. One of the few points of obscurity left was that column which describes Der Orchideengarten and those two covers. So you can perhaps appreciate the excitement at seeing more of these rare specimens brought to light.

There’s no need to repeat the history when you can read it for yourself on Will’s page and see the covers. One of the magazine editors was author Karl Hans Strobl whose collection of weird tales, Lemuria, had been published two years earlier. This monochrome copy of the cover design is by Richard Teschner, taken from one of my Art Nouveau design books where it stands out like a rather grotesque sore thumb. I don’t know if Teschner was a contributor to Der Orchideengarten but on the strength of this he should have been.

Update: Will posts some interior illustrations.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Jugend Magazine
• Meggendorfer’s Blatter
• Simplicissimus

The Great God Pan

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

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Art Nouveau illustration

The cover picture of yesterday’s book purchase complements the month, being a woodcut by Leopold Stolba entitled February from a Ver Sacrum calendar for 1903. The book is Art Nouveau: Posters and Designs (1971), a collection edited by Andrew Melvin for the Academy Art Editions series and the book includes some covers for Jugend magazine which coincidentally was the subject of Monday’s post.

Ornamental letters from The Studio magazine, 1894; no artists credited.

I wrote about another of the books in the Academy series, The Illustrators of Alice, a couple of years ago and while I don’t really need yet another Art Nouveau book, the presence of a few illustrations I hadn’t seen before made the purchase worthwhile. Further examples follow.

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Jugend Magazine

Two of several cover illustrations by Hans Christiansen (1866–1945) for 1898 issues of Jugend magazine. I waited a long time for someone to put together a site devoted to Jugend and good as this one is I can’t help but wish it was as thorough as the Simplicissimus site. Jugend is a regular fixture in histories of Art Nouveau since it was the magazine’s promotion of the new graphic style which gave the movement a name in Germany, Jugendstil. The covers look strikingly advanced today in the way they vary their style and the presentation of the magazine title from one week to the next. The monotonous branding of contemporary magazines seems staid in comparison. Christiansen’s swirling title design shows why these covers had such an influence on the psychedelic poster art of the 1960s. You can see a larger copy of that cover here and a further 299 drawings and paintings by the artist here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Meggendorfer’s Blatter
• Simplicissimus

Atelier Elvira

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

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