Max Klinger – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Bookplates from The Studio

Cyril Goldie.

Selections from Modern Book-plates and their Designers, an overview of British, American and European designs published by The Studio magazine in 1898. These small Studio books are always good to see, not least for the period ads in the opening and closing pages. A couple of the designs are familiar from later reprints, notably Cyril Goldie’s remarkable accumulation of thorns and skulls. Many others are in the swirling and tendrilled style of Art Nouveau which The Studio did much to promote in Britain. Also of interest are a few entries from well-known fine artists who are seldom associated with this kind of design. Among these is Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff who contributes a design of his own and an article about Flemish bookplate design.

Charles Robinson.

PJ Billinghurst.

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Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Turin and Vienna

Turin exposition poster by Leonardo Bistolfi.

Part two of a two-part skate through the contents of volume 10 of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. In addition to the Heinrich Vogeler feature which was the subject of yesterday’s post, this edition includes articles on the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin—another international showcase for the Art Nouveau style—and a feature on the Viennese Secession exhibition of the same year. This latter piece was especially fascinating when seeing such a notable event reported for the first time. There’s more about that below. This volume also includes a piece on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement but the photos for that piece are poor quality. As before, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

A feature on dress design shows some rare examples of Art Nouveau style being applied to clothing.

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Jugend, 1900

Continuing the rake through back issues of Jugend magazine, the German fin de siècle periodical of “art and life”, this post covers the year 1900 and will be the final Jugend image trawl. I mentioned in the post for 1899 that the magazine loses its Art Nouveau dynamism as the years pass. 1900 represents the point where all the graphics which make Jugend valued today—and which gave the name to the German manifestation of Art Nouveau: Jugendstil—are being pushed aside by the burgeoning nationalist and militarist fervour which led eventually to the First World War. At this point a couple of the notable Art Nouveau stylists such as Otto Eckman and Julius Diez are still present, and the work of Hugo Höppener, aka “Fidus” is increasingly prominent. In subsequent years the eccentric Fidus is mostly on his own, pursuing his obsession with naked figures, and his work seems even more curious in such staid surrounds. As before, anyone wanting to see more of these graphics is advised to explore the bound volumes at the Heidelberg University archive. The two books for 1900 can be found here and here.

A picture by the Symbolist and Secession artist, Max Klinger.

Nymphs and satyrs by English artist and illustrator Robert Anning Bell.

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Jugend, 1897

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Continuing the series of posts about Jugend magazine, all these samples are from the issues for 1897. This is where things start getting really interesting graphically so I’m only posting a very small selection from 900 pages of content. As before, anyone interested is advised to examine the complete volumes which can be viewed and downloaded here and here.

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Cupid drawings abound in early issues of Jugend, with men and women falling prey to love’s vicissitudes. This is one of the more unusual examples.

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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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