Louis Wain – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Steinlen’s cats

Chat Noir poster (1896).

We had Louis Wain yesterday so it only seems right to follow with the other notable cat artist of the period, and also the one whose work I prefer, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923).

Steinlen’s designs for the Montmartre cabaret, Le Chat Noir, of which there are many variations, are dismayingly ubiquitous in contemporary Paris, so much so that you quickly tire of his haloed feline when wandering the streets. Parisians regard Steinlen’s posters the way Londoners regard pictures of Beefeaters; they’re part of the background noise of the capital city, intended solely for tourists. A shame because it really is a splendid cat.

The Apotheosis of the Cats (c. 1890).

Steinlen’s cat pieces run the gamut of styles and variations, from delicate life studies and bronze sculptures to works such as the three-metres wide mural above depicting the advent of some ultimate feline deity. Among his many drawings he produced a number of marvellous cartoon sequences like the one below featuring cats fighting, playing and generally getting into trouble. Some of these can be found on Flickr here and here.

For more Steinlen, including his non-feline works, there’s Steinlen.net.

The End of a Goldfish.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Louis Wain at Nunnington Hall
• The Boy Who Drew Cats
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Monsieur Chat

Louis Wain at Nunnington Hall

The Mother of Triplets.

Anyone in the vicinity of Nunnington Hall in North Yorkshire over the next month has the opportunity to view and—if you’re wealthy enough—buy some pictures by Victorian cat artist Louis Wain (1860–1939). Wain is famously “The Cat Artist Who Went Mad” (as Chris Beetles’ gallery site puts it) and that piece of knowledge always comes to the fore when looking at his anthropomorphised felines with their huge eyes and often scowling expressions. The excellent Beetles gallery has an overview of the works on display at Nunnington. For the really eccentric stuff, however, you’ll have to go here.

Louis Wain at Nunnington Hall runs until September 13, 2009.

• Catland: The art of Louis Wain

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Marbled papers
• A Madmen’s Museum
• The art of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, 1736–1783

Marbled papers

left: Serpentine pattern; right: Bouquet pattern, both 19th c.

Regular readers here will have seen a number of posts recently concerning psychedelic culture, a perennial fascination/obsession of mine. One of the notable qualities of movements such as psychedelia or Surrealism is the way they highlight what seem to be previous manifestations of themselves which, until their emergence, lacked a specific label. Borges examined the literary version of this phenomenon in his 1951 essay, Kafka and His Precursors. In art and design, the vivid and chaotic appearance of psychedelic visuals cause us to class certain products of earlier centuries as psychedelic even though they were never intended as such. The Victorian era is especially rich in this regard with its proliferation of Paisley textile designs—which saw a resurgence in the 1960s—the fractal cats of artist Louis Wain, and incredible marbled papers such as these, the samples above being from a University of Washington collection. Of particular interest is the details of their creation; the look is familiar enough but one rarely sees any mention of how paper manufacturers went about designing or even making new works. I selected a red and black marbled paper for the endpapers of The Adventures of Little Lou which we produced at Savoy Books in 2007. The sheets used for that book were handmade, not printed copies, and had to be ordered from a specialist supplier in Scotland.

Via Design Observer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paisley patterns
• The Adventures of Little Lou