Book Art: designing end papers

In contemporary books, end papers tend to be a bit boring. They are most often either white or made out of paper in only one colour. - In 18th century, books were decorated with a variety of beautiful endpapers: combed marbled papers, brocade papers (for bindings mostly) or papers with flowery designs... All of them designed to add to the beauty of a carefully leather-bound book.




































In 19th century end papers were no longer hand made, but they show a distinct interest in creating something equally beautiful: marbled papers, papers with decorative patterns, embroidered papers, etc. are to be found in all kinds of differnt books.



























And just as a suggestion at the end: modern Japanese (Origami) papers.

Collector Cards: the saga of Gudrun and Ackermanns Schlüsselgarn

In Germany, collector cards were quite popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. Liebig, Stollwerck, Reemtsma and many other companies issued their goods together with collectible cards hoping to generate a collector's passion and thusly increase their sales.
Later on they even started to sell albums in order to help the enthusiastic collectors to store the precious cards for later pleasure. Although Liebig never attempted to issue cards of great artistic value, companies like Stollwerck actually strifed for a modern and qualitative art that represented their future oriented company policy. Same goes for the collector cards of "Ackermanns Schlüsselgarn", a company specialised on sewing cotton .

In the first decade of the 20th century they issued a series of cards telling the German saga of Gudrun, depicted in twelve Art-Nouveau-images by Fritz Schoen, a Berlin illustrater born in 1871.
Gudrun, a Middle High German epic, tells the tragic romance of Herwig, king of Seeland, and Gudrun, the daughter of Hettel and Hilde. Gudrun is carried off by Hartmuth, king of Normandy, and her kinsfolk are defeated in a great battle on the island of Wulpensand off the Dutch coast. Gudrun, now prisoner in the Norman castle, refuses to become the wife of her captor, and is condemned to do the most menial work of the household. Thirteen years later, Herwig and her brother Ortwin find her washing clothes by the sea; on the following day they attack and besiege the Norman castle with their army and, finally, Herwig marries Gudrun.

Mourners in Stone - Graveyard Sculpture

When wandering through cemeteries in Germany or Austria that date back to the 19th and early 20th century, one cannot fail to observe that most of the figurative sculptures are anonymous mourning women or equally sad looking (guardian) angels who look decidedly female as well.

These mourning women, human or angelic, are of course personifications of Sorrow or Grief and in consequence to the iconographic tradition of personifications or allegories such as Spes (Hope), Fortitudo (Courage) etc., they are also portrayed as women.

But then, I think, there might be another and much older tradition to which the gender of the sculpted mourners also alludes: it is the tradition of the mourning women who bewailed the deceased in the ceremonial rites. While in Germany these rites are no longer practiced, and haven't for quite a few centuries, the concept of the lamenting women is still very much present in our cultural memory.

The mourning women bemoan the dead in place of the remaining family and - at the same time, and cast in iron and sculptued in stone - remember the dead throughout all time. The sculptures are thusly memory binding monuments and, simultaneously, ritual devices that support the remaining family members in their grief.

There is, sadly, no proof for this thesis, I just think that it is a tempting and fascinating aspect of 19th century grave-sculpture. Just a few (of my) photos, taken from sculptures at the Munich Old Southern Cemetery, and the Vienna Central Cemetery shall illustrate this idea:

Disney's European Influences

In 2006, Bruno Girveau curated an exhibition about Disney's European influences, that is now shown in the Hypo-Kunsthalle in Munich.
The idea to trace the European influences which helped Disney to craft his special "world" and imagery is certainly a thrilling endeavour, and to see so many Disney originals, cel-sets, storyboards, sketches, figurines, etc. , even short movie clips, is equally interesting and insightful in the making of-process.
With his adaptations of fairy tales and children's stories that had been illustrated numerous times before, Disney's films had to inevitably position themselves in the corresponding visual traditions such as every other artist who wants to illustrate - for example - Cinderella. For witches and fairies, dragons and knights, etc., there is an established iconography in art history to be found that every illustrator has to consider: even if he decides to break with every tradition.
That's true for Disney as well, even more so, considering, that Disney brought from his travels to Europe numerous books (mostly of the 19th and early 20th century) illustrated by Gustave Doré, Grandville, Rabier, Wilhelm Busch, Hermann Vogel, Arthur Rackham, Ludwig Richter and many others, and added them to the library of his studios: as means of inspiration for his artists. In the early years he had also some illustrators on his payroll that had already been acclaimed illustrators in their home-countries: Kay Nielsen and Gustaf Tenggren, for example. And then, of course, there is the whole "visual context" aspect: paintings and schulptures, even early films, that inspired Disney's visual and narrative.
But, and there are many buts to follow, there is not only the European influence! To single the American influence out, to ignore the Golden Age of American illustration with Wyeth, Parrish etc., and the American film history (!) results in a completely one-sided and lastly false picture. At least the French/English exhibition catalogue (published by Prestel) mentions the equally important American influences. The German exhibition shows only European examples, only Murnau and Lang films, and then paintings and sculptures from European artists mostly of the 19th and early 20th century that are supposed to illustrate the art historian context for different aspects of the Disney films. For example Stuck's and Böcklin's pans and fauns as inspiration for Fantasia, or Anster Fitzgeralds A Midsummer Night's Dream for Tinkerbell... And, sorry, but these paintings and sculptures seem so randomly selected that one can only understand the visitor who asks: what's with all the old paintings? - They are just not well enough selected to work as examples for something as complex as the Victorian fairy painting, or the German Romantic movement with C. D. Friedrich and Carus.
Even more problematic is that some of the exhibited illustrated books of Doré, Richter, etc., were from the Disney library, but others were not. Sorry, but you cannot show a random Ludwig Richter book and say it was an inspiration without giving the exact proof: in this case at least the proof that Disney had purchased this book, and not another, and (the book being property of the Studios library) was actually accessible for the Disney artists. That's the minimum of a scientific approach I would have expected: a library catalogue would have been even better.
So, even though I am quite convinced that the curators were working hard to accomplish this exhibition, the main goal of the exhibition - to show Disney's European influences - was only partially achieved: there were the Disney works and then there were the European artifacts that seemed more like a random associative conglomerate of European art than a true "search for traces" of influences.

Clarkson Stanfield - "Staging" Landscape

In 19th century Europe landscape painting was highly en vogue, and travelling through Europe - especially to Italy - was seen as substantial to the education of every artist who strived for a successful career. Soon, other European countries and landscapes were added to the "must see"-list of every educated traveller, and with each of these countries and landscapes there were certain view points connected: The touristic "discovery" of the Rhine coincided with the "discovery" of the medieval castles and ruins, and so ruins of medieval castles are often part of paintings that depict scenes near the river Rhine.
































Most of the travelling artists did not paint every motif they saw, but selected motifs that corresponded to the contemporary landscape concepts of the picturesque and the sublime. They thusly helped to cement certain stereotypes that are still present in our modern-day perception of these landscapes. And even back then, the eye of the travelling observer was thusly schooled, was trained to see nature as a landscape composed after certain standards. The rich bourgeoisie saw Italy as modelled after Lorrain's and Poussin's landscape paintings.
The tourist who wanted to be reminded of the "highlights" of his travels when he was back home became the new customer for the travelling artist. To him the arist sold his pictures on site or back home. This market was exploited rather quickly by publishers who provided the interested buyer with albums and illustrated books.

In this context, Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (Dec 3, 1793 – May 18, 1867), an acclaimed English marine painter, was sent by his publisher to continental Europe to draw landscape motifs of the Moselle, the Rhine and other popular regions, that were later to be published in different albums. His "Sketches on the Moselle, the Rhine and the Meuse" were published in 1838 by Hodgson & Graves in London. They show a landscape that is highly "inszeniert": the landscape is orchestrated to a picturesque vision of an idyllic country. Influenced by the Dutch landscape paintings and stage scenery the artist, Stanfield, who worked for different theatres throughout his career, created a vision of the Rhine regions that is hardly realistic but all the more poetic. He "dramatized" the landscape and made it to a fairy tale.

Consequently, the landscapes Victor Paul Mohn (1842-1911), a German landscape painter, drew for his fairy tale illustrations are not too different from Stanfield's landscapes:















The 19th century perception of landscape tended to idealize in a way that let fiction and reality blur together. No wonder that the late 20th century started to discuss the complexities of landscape perception.

Karl Mühlmeister

Karl Mühlmeister was certainly one of the most productive and talented illustrators of children's literature in Germany in the early 20th century. There are designs and watercolours to fairy tales, sagas, and adventure stories such as The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, or other children's literature like Johanna Spyri's Heidi.
About the artist himself is unfortunately very little known. He was born in Hamburg in 1876, lived and worked in Munich until around 1942 and was a member of the "Süddeutsche Illustratorenbund". Where he studied and who his teachers were, is as unknown as the date of his death. What remains is his work, and especially his watercolours are of an intriguing delicate beauty. I am rather convinced that there might have been an influence by the work of Willy Pogány (1882-1955) whose watercolours show a similar concept of landscape and understanding for colours.
Mühlmeister's luminously coloured landscapes conjure up the atmosphere of the whole picture, they are "Stimmungslandschaften" in which the protagonists act, the stories take place. Even though, the depicted persons are often rather small in contrast to their surroundings, they are not for accessory purpose only (as known from the landscape painting tradition) but are as important as the landscape itself: they form a unified whole that gives insight into the magical-fictive world of the illustrated story.

Fairy Tales: Mohr, Herbert and Lotte: Von Prinzessinnen und Königsöhnen. Leipzig: Feuer, ca. 1920.





Arabian Nights: Die schönsten Märchen aus 1001 Nacht. Stuttgart: Thienemann, ca. 1925.





The Leatherstocking Tales: Cooper, James Fenimore: Der Lederstrumpf. Reutlingen: Enßlin & Laiblin, ca. 1920.



Grimms' Fairy Tales: Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Reutlingen: Enßlin & Laiblin, 1927.