Peter Behrens – { feuilleton }

In Carcosa

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2

It’s been a while since I posted anything here which has been created solely for myself rather than a commission. This new piece is a portrait of the King in Yellow, the sinister regent whose supernatural presence pervades the four weird tales that open Robert W. Chambers story collection of the same name. The drawing is a big one, big enough to fill an A2 sheet which I was intending to make available in print form at Etsy. Not having looked at my Etsy shops for a while I didn’t know that they’d changed the shipping section to such an extent that I’d be having to guess what the shipping rates were for different regions. The printer I use has rough guidelines for setting shipping costs on external sales sites but not in the detail that Etsy requires. Prints of this picture may still be ordered direct from me, however. A2 or A3 giclée on Hahnemühle Pearl paper; send me an email if you’re interested.

To return to the artwork… Prior to this my sole drawing of Chambers’ King was for one of the illustrations in Lovecraft’s Monsters, but that depiction is only a reflection in a pub mirror. The new piece was the result of a number of impulses which coalesced after I’d finished work on the forthcoming Bumper Book of Magic. I’d been doing a lot of drawing for the book—there’s a 20-page section, for example, which is all full-page, colour illustrations—and I wanted to keep my hand in while working on the current round of design-related projects. I’d also been wanting to try a proper depiction of the King in Yellow for some time, the previous attempt being unsatisfying even when detached from its pub scene. I’d reworked the earlier drawing a while ago after a Chinese publisher asked for a couple of illustrations for a Chinese edition of Chambers’ book. They paid me for the drawing, and for an old painting which I’d titled The King in Yellow but I still don’t know if the pictures were used anywhere.

A promotional poster by Robert W. Chambers, circa 1895.

A more general impulse has been the urge to get back to doing things for myself when I have the time. Time is always the problem when you’re engaged in commercial work. This new piece has been worked on over a series of months, chipping away at weekends and the ends of the working day. I had the idea at first of following Chambers’ own drawing of the King fairly closely, wings and all, but I’ve never been sure whether the wings are meant to be real appendages or symbolic shapes like the halo that Chambers also draws. The same goes for the guttering torch which the figure holds upside down, and which was used as a decoration on the spine of the third printing of the book.

Among the other details, the Art Nouveau border is intended to connect the drawing to the 1890s, the decade in which the stories were written, but for the architecture I wanted something more severe and less earthbound. Most of the architectural design is my own but the arches are a variation on the vestibule that Peter Behrens designed for the German pavilion at the 1902 Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin. Behrens started out working in the Jugendstil mode but soon evolved a style of his own which prefigures the stylings of Art Deco. The inscription on the steps is Cassilda’s Song, a page of verse which opens the first story in Chambers’ book, The Repairer of Reputations. The words have been set in the Lingua ignota alphabet devised by Hildegard von Bingen. In the past I might have used the alphabet from The Voynich Manuscript but I like the appearance of Hildegard’s lettering even though I doubt she’d approve of this usage.

• The King in Yellow at Standard Ebooks

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eldritch idols
• In the Key of Yellow
• Lovecraft’s Monsters
• The Court of the Dragon
• The King in Yellow

Darmstadt documents

More from the University of Heidelberg’s treasure trove of digitised books, Die Ausstellung der Darmstädter Künstler-Kolonie (1901) is also related to Deustche Kunst und Dekoration by being a product of that journal’s publisher, Alexander Koch. The book showcases the work and philosophy of the Darmstadt art and design colony, many of whose artworks and architecture designs were featured in DK&D. Since having gone through the back issues of Koch’s journal I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the Darmstadt group and their contemporaries in the Wiener Werkstätte so finding a handful of new documents is very welcome, even if much of the work is now familiar. The continual use of the square at this period of German and Austrian design is particularly notable (Ver Sacrum, lest we forget, was a square-format magazine) and square motifs have been feeding into my own work in various ways recently, some of which will be revealed here soon.

Also in the Heidelberg archive are some related publications, Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst: die Ausstellung der Künstler-Kolonie in Darmstadt (1901) by Peter Behrens, and Die Ausstellung der Künstler-Kolonie Darmstadt (1902) by Joseph Maria Olbrich, several pages of German text but it does include a plan of the colony grounds.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ver Sacrum, 1898

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #11

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 11 covers the period from October 1902 to March 1903, and is almost solely devoted to the many design exhibits from the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna, a major exposition held in Turin in the summer of 1902. As with the Secession work in the previous edition, many of the featured pieces here are familiar from books about the art and design of the period but DK&D shows them in greater detail. Peter Behrens’ vestibule (above) is one of these, a very advanced design which looks ahead to the stylisations of Art Deco. 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.

The vestibule ceiling panel.

Another Behrens design which would have still looked modern twenty years later.

Continue reading “Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #11”

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #9

The Ludwig Habich building, Darmstadt.

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 9 covers the period from October 1901–March 1902. This edition continues the examination of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony begun in the previous number. Despite the colony being very much an Art Nouveau venture the pictorial content is largely photographic, with many views of the show-homes built by the colony artists. Much of the other content is a disappointment compared to what’s gone before, the featured painters being the conservative types who were crowding Jugend magazine at this period with generic depictions of stolid German farmers. Unlike Jugend, however, this isn’t the end of the line. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail, or the rest of the edition, is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

Continue reading “Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #9”

The Art Nouveau dance goes on forever

Catalogue for Art Nouveau Revival 1900 . 1933 . 1966 . 1974. Peacock feather not included.

Regular readers may recall my mention of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition Art Nouveau Revival which was launched late last year. I didn’t get to see the exhibition, unfortunately, but this week I finally ordered a copy of the catalogue, an expensive cloth-bound volume with essays (in French) by Philippe Thiébaut, Stephen Calloway, Irene de Guttry, Thierry Taittinger and Philippe Thieryre. Despite the ruinous postal charges incurred by the book’s weight this was worth every euro, it being the kind of polymorphous production which in solipsistic moments one can choose to believe was created solely for your own benefit.

Aubrey again, album covers from 1974.

Much of the subject matter has been explored here in various small ways, with the curators following the influence of Art Nouveau through Surrealism (mainly Dalí) to the psychedelic art of the 1960s and on into the Pop Nouveau (for want of a better term) which flourished in the first half of the 1970s. Among the familiar Aubrey Beardsley graphics and psychedelic posters there are also some pleasantly surprising inclusions, including illustrations by Philippe Jullian (yes, I’m still intending on writing about him at some point), yet more Beardsley album covers, film posters, and even some of the sillier films of the late-60s such as Casino Royale. Being a French exhibition there’s a section devoted to comic strips which includes work by Moebius, Philippe Druillet and Guido Crepax.

Sex and LSD, a spread from Playboy, 1967.

It’s common to see parallels drawn between the 1890s and the 1960s but the strange blooms of vulgarised fin de siècle style which burgeoned in the wake of psychedelia are seldom given much attention. One of the great things about this catalogue is the amount of ephemera the curators chose to include such as magazine ads and trend-chasing album sleeves. It was precisely this blend of 1890s + 1960s + 1970s I sought to capture in my recent cover for Dodgem Logic. As I said, it’s an expensive book but for anyone drawn to this aesthetic hothouse it’s also an essential purchase. Art Nouveau Revival can be ordered direct from the museum shop. Further samples follow.

Continue reading “The Art Nouveau dance goes on forever”