Jugend – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #2

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 2 covers the period April–September 1898 and, as before, this issue can be downloaded in a variety of formats at the Internet Archive. This edition opens with a feature on the Wertheim department store, Berlin, design by Alfred Messel. Like many examples of Art Nouveau architecture, the store suffered damage during the Second World War and was eventually demolished.

This number also has a lengthy feature devoted to artist Hans Christiansen whose work was appearing regularly in issues of Jugend magazine at this time. The colour panels below are Christiansen’s work.

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Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #1

Last year saw an exploration here of the fecund pages of Jugend magazine so in the same spirit I’m embarking on a serial delve into Jugend‘s more serious contemporary Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. I’ve made a couple of posts in this direction already but these were done before I’d had a chance to look properly through the editions at the Internet Archive, the first thirty of which form a collection which comprises some 7500 pages. Since few people would want to download and sort through that mountain these posts can serve as a select guide to the contents.

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration was published by Alexander Koch in Darmstadt and the first volume is dated October 1897–March 1898. Jugend was a humour magazine so the contents tend to be frivolous and lighthearted, Koch’s title by contrast was a guide to the best of German contemporary art and design and has the advantage of featuring furniture and architectural designs as well as graphic material. The content of this first edition is relatively sedate compared to some of the later numbers when the Art Nouveau style builds up a head of steam. There’s some astonishing design work in subsequent issues, as well as further illustration discoveries like Marcus Behmer. Watch this space.

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The art of Ephraim Moses Lilien, 1874–1925

Marvellous black-and-white work from a Galician artist whose drawings were predominately concerned with Jewish and Zionist themes. These are from a small monograph about the artist, The New Art of an Ancient People; The Work of Ephraim Mose Lilien (1906) which can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Elsewhere there’s a page here about the artist with further examples and links, a gallery site with a catalogue of his drawings of Palestine, and some of his illustrations can also be found in back issues of Jugend magazine.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jugend, 1900

Diaghilev’s World of Art

Cover by Evgeny Lanceray for Prospectus of the Magazine, 1901.

Previous posts here have concerned fin de siècle art magazines like The Savoy, Pan and Jugend; yesterday we had Sergei Diaghilev so it seems fitting to mention Diaghilev’s own magazine, Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), founded in 1899 with similar intentions to the European magazines which were highlighting developments in art beyond the academic sphere. Mir Iskusstva was also the name of the Russian art group who used the magazine as their forum, and a number of the artists involved in the movement, notably Léon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin and Nicholas Roerich, went on to work for Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes.

Cover by Léon Bakst for Mir iskusstva #8 (1902).

I find this later development especially fascinating since it positions the magazine as a precursor to the groundbreaking works which followed rather than being—as so many periodicals were and still are—a publication which had its moment of glory then faded from view. Of the works shown here, Vrubel’s Symbolist Demon, one of several painted by the artist, was featured in a 1903 edition of the magazine, whilst the Bakst painting, depicting the destruction of Atlantis, shows a Symbolist side to an artist who later became far better known for his Ballets Russes costume designs.

Demon (1902) by Mikhail Vrubel.

Unlike the other magazines mentioned above, I’ve yet to come across a cache of whole editions of Mir Iskusstva (and I’m still waiting for Ver Sacrum to turn up somewhere). This page has an overview of the Russian art movement and its journal, while this page has a selection of works by the artists involved. For more of Vrubel’s work, Wikimedia Commons has the best collection of the artist’s paintings and sculpture.

Terror Antiquus (1908) by Léon Bakst.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• The art of Ivan Bilibin, 1876–1942
• Magic carpet ride
• Le Sacre du Printemps
• Images of Nijinsky

Several Salomés

The Dance of Salomé (1885) by Robert Fowler.

There’s always more to find… Unfortunately, Robert Fowler’s academic tableaux is a prime example of bad Victorian art: carefully modelled but overlit, dull and lifeless. And worst of all for the subject at hand: deeply unerotic. We’re supposed to believe that this woman wrapped in a bedsheet would exude enough eros to drive her father to lustful recklessness. This was the bloodless “good taste” against which Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes set themselves.

Salomé Dancing before Herod (1876) by Gustave Moreau.

Wilde’s idea of Salomé can be seen here in one of Gustave Moreau‘s many paintings on the theme. Wilde would have preferred Moreau’s paintings, or something similar, to adorn his published play but he ended up with Aubrey Beardsley instead. You only have to compare Beardsley’s Stomach Dance with Fowler’s painting to see why Aubrey’s art made such a dramatic impression in the 1890s.

Salomé (1890) by Ella Ferris Pell.

Ella Ferris Pell’s painting isn’t the only portrait of Salomé by a female artist of this period but it’s the one which Bram Dijkstra chose as the cover image for his excellent study Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986). Of this work Dijkstra writes:

In Pell’s painting a number of the most characteristic turn-of-the-century attributes of the biblical temptress are absent. She does not glare at us with a look of crazed sexual hunger; she does not have the wan, vampire features of the serpentine dancer; nor does she show herself to be a tubercular adolescent … Pell’s Salomé, a real life-woman, independent, confident, and assertive, was far more threatening, far more a visual declaration of defiance against the canons of male dominance than any of the celebrated viragoes and vampires created by turn-of-the-century intellectuals could ever have been. Such a woman could not be disposed of in as cavalier a fashion as the evil women in man’s mind. Her indomitable reality was this feminist Salomé’s most formidable weapon, far more dangerous than any imaginary decapitating sword.

Salomé (1909), two paintings by Robert Henri.

Finally, there’s this pair of paintings by American artist Robert Henri whose work resembles John Singer Sargent’s in its shadowed backgrounds and light brushstrokes. Salomé was no longer a perennial theme by this point but Maud Allan’s improvised dance performance, Vision of Salomé, was proving enormously popular at the time Henri painted these pictures which may explain his choice of subject. There’s little in the rest of his oeuvre along similar lines.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive