Afghan Protest Against Soviet Occupation Looks Familiar In Scarce Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

A set of nine dramatic anti-Soviet propaganda posters lithographed on thin paper and published in Pakistan c.1980-81 by the Internal Islamic Fronts/Afghanistan is being offered by Bonham's in its Fine Books and Manuscripts sale February 10, 2014.

Each poster (approximately 375 x 250 mm) is ink-stamped with the publisher's imprint in Arabic and English but without captions. They are somewhat crudely printed; on one poster the inky red fingerprints of the pressman are clearly visible. These were printed on the fly under difficult  circumstances and we should not be surprised that the result was less than perfect.

The initial Soviet deployment of its 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979, under then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989, under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets had been caught in what has been called "the bear trap" and the Soviet war in Afghanistan would become its Vietnam: an intractable morass, a political and military quicksand that sucked Soviet troops deep in over their heads, as it had in the past for every other power that tried to bend Afghanistan to its will. The United States poured billions into the country in military support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, the Moujahadin, playing out another Cold War conflict with the U.S.S.R.

In the poster above, Brezhnev is scolding his Afghan parrot, Babrak Karmal, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. Karmal's policy failures, iffy cooperation, and the stalemate against the Resistance led the Kremlin to become highly critical of its puppet's leadership. Brezhnev appears to be saying, "now, now, repeat after me, 'I will behave, I will behave, I will behave!'" Yet as every parrot caretaker understands but civilians don't, if you wag a finger close to a parrot's beak the bird will treat it as a chew toy on a serving tray and act accordingly. 

Substitute President G.W. Bush or President Obama for Brezhnev and insert current Afghan leader Hamid Karzai for Karmal and the situation has not changed.

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Image courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.

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1834 Prediction Of Transportation Utopia In The Year 2000

by Stephen J. Gertz

The marvelous and fascinating march of vehicular technology is satirized in this extremely rare, separately-issued lithograph printed on linen that highlights the early nineteenth-century British passion for improved transportation.

It depicts a wild fantasy overrun with improbable vehicles from the impracticable and obsolete to the quixotic: steam-powered carriages, giant hydrogen balloons, and men with wings. In handkerchief format printed in red, it was also offered in sepia (McCormick Collection of Aeronautica, Item 284, no. 60, Princeton University). The McCormick impression is the only other copy known to survive.

Locomotives and experimental steam engine carriages were both certainly in use by the 1830s. The caricaturist, in a design after C.J. Grant, was obviously unaware that the internal combustion engine and the automobile would be invented later in the nineteenth century. Here he lampoons the steam carriage rather than the increasingly reliable train: only buildings on wheels traverse his “Grand Northern Railway” bridge. One of these, the “Steamo Equestrian Travelling Company,” does not employ actual horses, nor does the stag hunt by steam-carriage above the bridge. A crier below advertises a “rare Exhibition” of outmoded transportation: “A Live Horse!!! Supposed to be the very last of the RACE.”

Even religion has been made convenient - or corrupted - by technology. As the “Zion Chappel” rolls by, a man advertises tomorrow’s sermon: “A CAST IRON PARSON WILL PREACH BY STEAM AT FUDGE CHAPEL.”

Though balloon travel was no longer considered viable when this handkerchief lithograph appeared, Londoners nonetheless waft over to Dublin and back before breakfast. A balloon race is also taking place (between the “Out o’Sight Club” and the “United Moonites”). The flying men hunting a flock of birds are oblivious to the fact that they will likely shoot down the balloons.

The image is an enlarged, reversed copy of a lithograph by caricaturist Charles Jameson Grant from the Every Body’s Album & Caricature Magazine no. 3, February 1, 1834.

Grant contributed regularly to that periodical, which appeared in thirty-nine sheets every two weeks from 1834-35. Grant also produced numerous separately-issued lithographs in paper formats, but not of the present image. The artist’s considerable body of work has been unjustly overlooked until recently; e.g. his Thieme Becker entry notes only that he cut a single wood engraving for the popular London periodical “Punch.”

“Everybody’s Album contains some of Grant's finest lithographic work, as well as displaying his imagination at its most fertile". (R.J. Pound, ed., C.J. Grant's Political Drama: A Radical Satirist Rediscovered, 1998, p. 10).

Ironically, the fleet of various ground vehicles predicted for the year 2000 runs on coal, the original fossil fuel. According to this lithograph, by the second millennium, "Why, by all accounts, the coal mines of the North are nearly exhausted," one lady at a window exclaims. "Yes," her companion says,  "I saw in the Steam Register last night that the coal mine under Blackheath is to be opened to supply the market."

Considering that London - which, until recently, excepting vehicles, ran on coal -  endured The Great Smog of 1952 when 12,000 people died from a toxic cloud of coal smoke pollutants that hung over the city for five days, one can only conclude that if cars were also fueled by coal the year 2000 would be the year of the Great London Black Sky, when a foggy day in London town would seem like a sunny day in Southern California by comparison, and Fred Astaire, unable to see his shoes through the thick haze, would fall and break his leg.

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[GRANT, Charles Jameson, after]. The Century of Invention. Anno Domini 2000. Or the March of Aerostation, Steam and Perpetual Motion. [London? c. 1834]. Lithograph printed in red on linen as handkerchief. Image 15 x 19 1/2 in., (380 x 495 mm.); sheet 15 1/8 x 21 1/2 (384 x 548 mm).

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Image courtesy of Martayan Lan Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Don't Wipe Your Nose With This Map.
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John Lennon's Bag One At $133,500

by Stephen J. Gertz

A complete copy of John Lennon's Bag One (1970) from its forty-five sets only hors commerce (not for sale) issue of the first edition has come into the marketplace. No complete copy of this iteration of the first edition has previously been offered for public sale; this is the first to come out of hiding. Numbered in pencil in Roman numerals "H.C.XXXIX" and signed by Lennon, it is being offered for £85,000 ($133,500) by Peter Harrington Rare Books of London..

Bag One is a series of fourteen signed original lithographs originally conceived and executed in 1969 to commemorate Lennon's wedding to  Yoko Ono and their subsequent honeymoon in Amsterdam.

It is the rarest, most desirable and difficult to find of all of Lennon's books, no matter the edition and issue. In addition to the 45 hors commerce copies the first edition was comprised of 300 signed copies.

Last year, an attractive complete copy of one of those 300 sets was offered by New England Book Auctions for $20,000-$30,000.

The hors commerce copies are held dearly by those privileged to have had one bestowed upon them by Lennon or Ono. This copy belonged to British advertising executive and fine arts publisher and author, Edward Booth-Clibborn, who won a rather spectacular claim to fame in 1991 while working for British agency D&D.

"Even by the ad industry's extravagant standards, Edward Booth-Clibborn's lunch bill for two at Mayfair's Le Gavroche in 1991 was a jaw-dropper… [a] £448 lunch for two - including a half bottle of wine costing £126 - that grabbed the headlines. Booth-Clibborn charged the lunch against "PR", causing The Independent to suggest later that the initials must have stood for 'profligate romp'" (Campaign, January 28, 2011). Adjusted for inflation that meal cost £750 ($1,185) in 2012.

Copies of the 45 hors commerce sets were reserved primarily for personal distribution by John and Yoko: 30 sets were given to their company, Bag One Productions, and presumably circulated by them amongst their friends. This set was given to Edward Booth-Clibborn as part of the negotiations in January 1970 over a marketing deal between his company, First Run Ltd, and the US licensee appointed by Lennon and Ono, Consolidated Fine Arts Ltd. Booth-Clibborn's British company proposed to produce mass-market posters of the images, and signed a contract to that effect on January 31, 1970.

On February 7, 1970, a jerk present at the New York opening night exhibition of the Bag One lithographs at Lee Nordness Galleries surreptitiously photographed them. Cheap reprints of the entire set were  publicly offered the very next day and Booth-Clibborn's contract was cancelled. He had invested $24,200 in the project; all he got was this copy of the suite. Forty-three years later he can now enjoy a few more profligate romps. Make sure he picks up the tab and leaves the tip.

Should another hors commerce copy enter the marketplace, one owned, perhaps, by Eric Clapton or any other super nova within Lennon's orbit, it will likely sell for at least $150,000-$175,000. Should Lennon or Yoko Ono's copy ever be offered for sale? I suspect an auction estimate beginning at $200,000-$250,000 and ending where the air is thin, leaving room for outer space before the hammer falls.

LENNON, John. Bag One. New York: Cinnamon Press, 1970. First edition, limited to 45 hors commerce sets, this copy being no. H.C.XXXIX. Folio. Title page, text leaf, and fourteen signed in pencil lithograph prints ( 58 x 76 cm) on BFK Rives paper, loose as issued. Lacking the leather bag, which was not included with hors commerce sets.

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Images courtesy of Peter Harrington Rare Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

The Rarest, Most Desirable Book By John Lennon Comes To Auction.

Extraordinary Letter From John Lennon To Eric Clapton: Join My New Band!

Yoko Ono Collects Rare Books: The Booktryst Interview.

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Women Who Read and Write Too Much

By Stephen J. Gertz

Look at that! Instead of milk she is pouring shoe polish
into my hot chocolate! Enough with that damned novel!

In 1844, French painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier published Les Bas Bleus, a series of forty lithographs satirizing bluestockings, i.e. intellectual women. They turn traditional gender roles topsy-turvy and cramp a man's style.

Instead of doing the laundry they hang men out to dry. Sacrebleu!

Oh Agony!.... To have spent my maidenhood dreaming of a
husband who, like me, adored hallowed poetry, and to wind up
with a husband who only likes to bait dudgeons...
the man was born to be a pike!...

Of Les Bas Bleus Gordon Ray wrote, "the bluestockings of this series are almost all literary ladies, and Daumier's satire is directed as much against the literary character in general as its feminine manifestations. At the same time, his attitude towards his subjects is consistently severe, and the fact that he made all forty plates in eight months, whereas most of his longer series extended over several years, suggests that they were inspired by deep-seated and well-developed convictions...

Goodbye Flora, my dear... don't forget to send two copies
of your frothy little pieces to the newspaper office...
and I shall whip them up in my article.

"Advocates of women's rights have as little reason to be grateful to Daumier for Les bas bleus as Jews have to be grateful to Forain for Psst...! [1898-99]... Nevertheless, the album contains some masterly designs" (The Art of the French Illustrated Book, pp 241-242).

- A woman like me... sew on a button?.... you must be out of your mind!
- So be it!... It's not enough that she is wearing my breeches...
she has to throw them on my head!!

In other words, despite its gentle humor and artful compositions Les Bas Bleus by Daumier is staunchly anti-feminist. Though they never signed it literary ladies upset the social contract. Womens rights is a zero-sum game; when women gain, men lose. Vive le difference, death to equality.

May I come in my dear, or are you still collaborating with Monsieur?

Daumier was not inclined to depict women as traditionally beautiful creatures to begin with; his eyes were jaundiced. Comparing Daumier with his contemporary, Gavarni, Ray continued:

Ever since Virginie obtained the seventh honorable mention
for poetry at the Académie Française, I, a captain of the
National Guard, am supposed to count the sheets for the laundry
every Saturday. If I don't do it , my wife will wash my head...

"If Daumier could not draw a pretty woman, as is sometimes alleged, Gavarni at this period could hardly draw an ugly one" (The Art of the French Illustrated Book, pp 220-221).

- The artist captured me as I was writing my melancholic book
entitled "Sorrows of my soul." The eyes came out quite well but
the nose is not sorrowful enough!...
- (Man, sotto voce) - No... it is just in a sorry state...

If Daumier can be blamed for this pointed visual social satire, his publisher, Charles Philipon, may be responsible for each plate's verbal sally. Daumier had collaborated with Philipon when creating political satire for Philipon's notorious La Caricature, Philipon often suggesting the subject/theme and writing the caption.

- Devilish brat! Why don't you let me compose in peace
my ode on the happiness of maternity!
- All right, all right...... he is going to be quiet.....
I am going to give him a good whipping in the other room.
(aside): from looking at what my wife is writing in her work,
it is she who makes the most noise of all.

When, after La Caricature shuttered, Philipon established Le Charivari, Daumier joined him in this journal of social satire, whence Les Bas Bleus originally appeared as a serial. Their previous collaborative formula may have continued: Philipon writing the jokes, Daumier visualizing them.

(Collaborations between caricaturists and publishers were not unusual at all. Twenty-five years before Les Bas Bleus was published British caricaturist George Cruikshank and publisher-bookseller William Hone often collaborated on political satires. Publishers had their eye on current social and political events, chose topical subjects that they thought would appeal to the public, and called upon an artist to realize the caricature).

Hell and damnation! hissed!... whistled!... booed!

It would be interesting to know what Marie-Françoise Aubert, wife of printing house Chez Aubert proprietor Gabriel Aubert, and sister of Charles Philipon (who set the couple up in business in order to handle the printing of his magazines and lithographs), thought of Daumier's (and her brother's) attitude about women. Hers was the brain that managed Chez Aubert to prosperity. Perhaps successful business women were accorded respect that bluestockings, with their heads in the air within books, were denied.

This is an extremely rare book. OCLC records on one copy of Les Bas Bleus in institutional holdings worldwide, not, incredibly, at the BNF, but, rather, at the Morgan Library, and it has never been at auction since ABPC began recording results in 1923. 

As for the ladies of France taking on literary airs blame it on Georges Sand, a baleful influence on contemporary womanhood and generations of women to come. Next thing you know, they'll be a female Secretary of State of the U.S.A. French fries? Non! Freedom fries? Non, non!! Fuggetaboutit fries? Oui!

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DAUMIER, Honoré.  Les Bas Bleus. Paris: Chez Aubert, 1844.

First edition. Tall quarto (13 1/2 x 10 3/8 in; 341 x 262 mm). Forty hand-colored lithographed plates.  Lith. by Imp. Aubert.

Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book 169. Daumier Register 1221 - 1260.
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Caption translations from the French by The Daumier Register.

The Daumier Register needs your help.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Scarce Daumier Childrens Books at Daumier Register.

Tonight On "The Bachelor": Daumier's Single Man.

A Rare Suite of Pre-Political Lithographs By Charles Philipon Surfaces.
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Bauer's The Holy One (Red Point): 1939 World's Fair Influence

By Stephen J. Gertz

This lithograph, currently being offered by William Reese Co., is by Rudolf Bauer (1889-1953) who was closely associated with Hilla Rebay, director, and Solomon Guggenhiem, founder, of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Guggenheim financed Bauer's gallery in Berlin.

This bold composition is an adaptation of Bauer's 1936 oil painting and was used for the cover of the Guggenheim's catalog for the Second Charleston Show in 1938.

It has been cited as the likely inspiration for the Trylon and Perisphere theme-structures for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

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Image courtesy of William Reese Co., with our thanks.
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The Rarest, Most Desirable Book By John Lennon Comes To Auction

By Stephen J. Gertz

"We're all in a bag, you know?...I was in a pop bag, going round and round, in my little clique. And she was in her little avant-garde clique, going round and round. So we just came up with a word. If you'd ask us what Bagism is, we'd say, 'We're all in a bag, baby'" - John Lennon, Avant-Garde, March 1970.

A scarce, complete, unnumbered and out-of-sequence first edition copy of John Lennon's Bag One, his 1970 collection of lithographs limited to 300 examples, is being offered by New England Book Auctions on Tuesday May 29, 2012. It is expected to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

The only other copy to ever sell at auction fell under the hammer at Sotheby's twenty-four years ago, in 1988, for $12,155.

Bag One is a series of fourteen signed original lithographs originally conceived and executed in 1969 to commemorate Lennon's wedding to  Yoko Ono and their subsequent honeymoon  in Amsterdam.

The lithographs were scheduled for a two-week exhibition at London Arts Gallery at 22 New Bond Street on January 15th 1970.  On the exhibit's second day, however, Scotland Yard raided the gallery and confiscated eight of the fourteen lithographs on the grounds that they were obscene and "exhibited to public view...to the annoyance of passengers, contrary to Section 54(12) of the Metropolitan Police Act, 1839, and the third schedule of the Criminal Justice Act 1967."  

Text leaf.

The case was later dismissed when the magistrate hearing the case determined that they were unlikely to deprave or corrupt.

The lithographs were soon afterward exhibited by Lee Nordness Galleries in New York City, February 7 through February 28, 1970.

"The American opening of Bag One was a lavish affair... I flew over on John's behalf to film the proceedings. The whole of the New York art scene and all the 'beautiful people' turned out. Dali came with his pet ocelot on a leash. The lithographs were on view in a specially created environment, where spectators were asked to remove their shoes. The next month's issue of the prestigious Avant Garde magazine featured the Erotic Lithographs on the cover and as the major inside spread" (Anthony Fawcett. One Day at a Time, pp. 164-173).

Cinnamon Press of New York issued the first edition in 1970 simultaneously with the exhibitions. Laurens A. Daane of Amsterdam published a subsequent edition afterward in the same year.

The whole, inside story of Bag One, from conception through exhibition and publication, was related by Lennon and Ono's personal assistant, Anthony Fawcett, in his 1976 biography, John Lennon: One Day at a Time. A Personal Biography of the Seventies. You can read that section here.

A copy of Bag One was offered in the Rock & Roll Pop Culture Auction held by Gotta Have Rick and Roll in December 2011. It was estimated to sell for between $75,000 and $100,000, with minimum bid $72,500. It did not sell, "irrational exuberance," evidently, not limited to the financial markets.

The auctioneer, high-as-a-Mr. Kite, it seems, was, apparently, under the influence of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, rather than Lovely Rita, down-to-earth meter-maid, when conjuring up that strictly from Alpha Centuri estimate.

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LENNON, John. Bag One. New York: Cinnamon Press, 1970. First edition, limited to 300 copies. Folio. Title page, text leaf, and fourteen SIGNED in pencil lithograph prints ( 58 x 76 cm) on BFK Rives paper, loose as issued in white vinyl portfolio with black lettering and three ribbon ties, here foxed and stained.

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Images courtesy of New England Book Auctions, with our thanks.
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Is This the Greatest Anti-Censorship Image Ever?

by Stephen J. Gertz

Anonymous. La Chasse aux Lettres, scène de l'Ancienne histoire de France.
A Paris chez Ostervald aîné, quai des Augustins, n°37 et Hautecoeur-Martinet,
rue du Coq St Honoré, n.d. Lith. by Georges Frey.

Three riders on horseback with enormous scissors preceded by scissor-wielding dogs chase two-legged letters (that spell  "literature") running for their lives, while vultures circle above, and a pig, at left,  rests on pages of books captioned, "trimmings."

In the foreground, toddlers in wheeled crib-chairs  pursue biped letters "J", "A," " B," and "C." Each crib-chair bears an individual inscription: "And if we become scientists, to be skinned by villains with scissors?;" "To be towed when we grow like wild beasts;" "Poor children we are, why torment us with these fine letters?"

The message: Why learn to read and write if censors will not allow us to read and write?

The lithograph, La Chasse aux Lettres (The Letter Hunt), is anonymously designed, and undated. Why is it uncredited and when was it done?

John Grand-Carteret, in Le Livre et l'Image, asserts that it was published in 1823. This cannot be so; Georges Frey, the image's lithographer, did not establish himself until 1827-29. Another source tentatively dates it to 1840. By 1840, however, censorship laws in France had grown draconian and even the great Charles Philipon, who dominated the market for caricature, whether political or social, had been forced to abandon political satire in his magazines; he'd already spent time in jail; no more, thank you. Between February 1831 and August 1832 he was was prosecuted sixteen times (Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture 1830-1848, p. 81).

Beyond that, however, La Chasse aux Lettres is part of the series Album pour Rire, many if not most of the plates in that series designed (and openly credited) by Philipon himself, who had, by 1830, ceased creating his own lithographs to publish those of the greater caricaturists, i.e. Monnier, Daumier,  Grandville, Traviés, Pigal, etc., in his stable of artists through the print shop, chez Aubert, that he established for his sister, Marie-Françoise, and her husband,  Gabriel Aubert, to operate on his behalf. Philipon prints issued by Ostervald, as in Album pour Rire, appear to cease by 1830; La Chasse aux Lettres cannot possibly have been published in 1840.

There is a major clue to the date of La Chasse aux Lettres, however, within the image. It is no accident that there are, not one, two, or four figures in the foreground, but three. Nor that they are infants. Symbols were extremely important in French caricature. The three figures represent the Trois Glorieuses, the three glorious days, July 27, 28, 29, 1830, of the July Revolution that followed Charles X's July Ordinances, one of which outlawed liberty of the press.

GRANDVILLE, J.J. Resurrection of Censorship.
"And it rose again the third day after its death" (Gospel of St. Luke).
Paris: chez Aubert. La Caricature, Feb. 29, 1831.

The Trois Glorieuses were later represented in Granville's Résurrection de la Censure, published by Philipon and printed by chez Aubert in the February 29, 1831 issue of La Caricature, Philipon's classic illustrated journal, after the government of the new king, Louis-Philippe I, began to attack the press once more. The three dated stones beneath the coffin are the Trois Glorieuses; hopes dashed, censorship rises from the dead to threaten once more.

The three days of protest  ended with Charles X's abdication and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The three infant figures represent the Trois Glorieuses and the birth of a new France. La Chasse aux Lettres, then, was published late in 1830, prior to Grandville's image for La Caricature in early 1831.

It's a grand theory, reasoned through after many hours of research, and I was quite satisfied with myself for about fifteen minutes until my compulsion to continue digging 'til I reached China led to what appears to be the reality.

Buried within the Bibliographie de la France, ou Journal Général De l'Imprimerie et de la Librairie, et des Cartes Géographiques, Gravures, Lithographies et Oeuvres Musique. XVII Année, No. 30 of the weekly periodical, July 26, 1828, at number 571, is La Chasse aux Lettres. I stumbled across this reference  work,  which lists every printed item published in France to the date of each issue, by accident. Case closed. But why 1828? What triggered this reaction in caricature?

"Later, in 1824, as old king Louis XVIII lay dying, a new prior censorship reign was instituted on the pretext that this was a dangerous moment for the country. The king's brother and successor, Charles X, hoping to gain popularity and perhaps to ally suspicions that he was even more reactionary and authoritarian than his predecessor, lifted censorship within six weeks of his accession (Collins 1959, 47). In 1825, censorship was imposed again.

"In 1828, a new press law was passed that pleased no one: It infuriated the liberals and the publishers of little magazines by demanding an enormous deposit against possible future fines from anyone who wanted to start a periodical, political or not…The press law of 1828 made it illegal to publish anything that would excite hatred and contempt of the king's government, provoke disobedience to the laws, or attack the rights of the king and parliament under the Charter of 1814. The courts ruled that "the king's government" included not only the king but his ministers as well…Prosecutions under this law were freequent, but usually counterproductive: The newspapers editors' defense lawyers could take advantage of the open forum of the courtroom to continue criticism of the ministry" (Thogmartin, Clyde. The National Daily Press of France, p. 49).

In La Chasse aux Lettres, the infants in the foreground are France's citizenry being treated such by their government. For all its cultural glory, France has a sorry history of censorship.

As for La Chasse aux Lettres being published without attribution to its artist, only a fool would have openly slapped the French authorities in 1828 so sharply with such ridicule; the price was too high.  France would have to wait for Philipon, who between 1830 and 1835 lost few opportunities to satirize the government, which, in turn, lost few opportunities to make life difficult for him. The identity of the designer, unfortunately, remains a mystery.

Why did the French authorities of the era get so bent out of shape about political satire in caricature?

Because, to the French monarchy, whether absolute or constitutional, "caricature was likened to pornography, whose corrupting influence it was held to share. Philipon's caricatures could not be considered legitimate political commentary because, like the licentious lithographs that were displayed next to them in Maison Aubert's  windows, they appealed to the passions rather than the intellect" (Op cit. Kerr, p. 117).

And so ends another episode of Censorship, Sex, and Politics: C'est la Vie. Ad nauseum.

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La Chasse aux Lettres: Grand-Carteret, Le Livre et l'Image I, 103. Bibliographie de la France, ou Journal Général De l'Imprimerie et de la Librairie, et des Cartes Géographiques, Gravures, Lithographies et Oeuvres Musique. XVII Année, at #571 (No. 30, July 26, 1828).

Résurrection de la Censure: Sello I, n.111. von Kritter p.105, n.30. Schrenk p.138, n.27. Farwell p.97, n.86. 

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Image of La Chasse aux Lettres courtesy of David Brass Rare Books. Image of Résurrection de la Censure courtesy of the British Museum. Our thanks to both.

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The Stammering Transports of an Ecstatic Man: Meidner's September Cry

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

"I cry in a loud voice. I listen to my mind but can not decipher the deep words. With flying arms I will go on from noon dream. ...” Ludwig Meidner, Septemberschrei.

A beautiful copy of Ludwig Meidner’s Septemberschrei  has come to market. With only 100 copies printed, it has become quite rare; the book is being offered for $7,500.

Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) is regarded as a key representative of  urban Expressionism. But in 1918 the German printmaker and writer produced fourteen lithographs that would, in 1920, be integrated into his post-World War I manifesto on the arts, Septemberschrei, September Cry, a passionate outpouring against the very movement that made his reputation and its subjective anti-realism, rejection of the temporal, and distain for nature. The enthusiastic acceptance of mechanization, abstraction, and the concomitant spurning of nature had led to the horrific, monstrous machine warfare that consumed Europe. One can imagine Septemberschrei pouring from the mouth of Munch’s screamer:

"The manner in which many of us lived and worked before the war was not right...What we need for the future, all of us, is a fanatic, fervent naturalism; oh, a passionate, virile, and unflinching veracity, like that of Masters Multscher, Grünewald, Bosch, and Breughel...our visions must be articulated as clearly and powerfully as those of Multscher and Grünewald...let us always think of these two! And let us not forget the noble, reliable, prudent craft of these heroes...Yes, craft - precious, laborious craft - which has its own severe beauty! All too frequently we have been remote from our world. Our desired goal was a geometric formulation, and the most advanced artists in particular obsessively strove for abstraction and concrete art. All you painters with your heads in the clouds, you want to forget the earth and to squeeze the spirit pure and immaterial directly out of your tubes of paint. But behold for just a moment the glorious reality of things...Let us hold fast to the earth, lest we end up in the boundlessness of the wild blue yonder. Let us return to a passionate realism, to a deep, loving faith in the physical reality of the world."

The figures in the lithographs of September Cry are seers of a new future yet “the fourteen lithographs of prophets that accompany his text, however, were still representative of his ecstatic style. Meidner's quest for for a 'fanatic naturalism' was undertaken in in the 415 intaglio prints that he produced between 1919 and 1922. While some painters studied Max Doerter's painting manual in order to develop beyond Expressionist formalism, Meidner undertook a study of the graphic techniques of artists like Dürer and Rembrandt" (Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, pp. 62-63).

The prophets of Septemberschrei are all in the image of Meidner, who was as obsessed with self-portrait as Rembrandt.

“After [Oskar] Kokoschka, it is to Meidner that we owe the most important portraits of the generation of Expressionist writers, to which he himself - by virtue in particular of his books Im Nacken des Sternemeer (Behind One the Sea of Stars,’ 1918) and Septemberschrei (September Cry, 1920) - very much belongs. These works are personal admissions, clothed in expressive vernal formulas, ‘ardent confessions, stammering transports of an ecstatic man...’ The drawings [in Septemberschrei] display the whole panorama of the features that characterize Meidner” (Lang).

Meidner’s reactionary stance against Expressionism was not welcome in all quarters. Expressionism was considered the only approach that could capture the essential truth of reality in the twentieth century, a hard, urban, cynical, mechanistic, inhuman world that no amount of wishful thinking could erase. Critic Wilhelm Hausenstein decried "the shamelessness of...the neo-naturalistic baroque-naturalistic vehemence of Meidner" (Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick, as cited by Crockett, p. 22).

Meidner’s highly emotional flood was an embarrassment and insult. The extreme intensity of experience that Meidner expressed was, for some, too much, as if, in his shock, the war had loosed an avenging, apocalyptic angel of the arts,  a Christ-figure in the wilderness struggling with the devil, shouting to God, seeking a true path out of the wasteland and to the Sermon of the Mount.

It is axiomatic that after a cataclysm a society will question everything that led up to it. The war had changed everything; to ignore the horror and return to business as antebellum usual was strictly for ostriches. These neo-naturalist artists and writers were birds of a different feather altogether, with eyes wide-open to keenly see that a world turned upside-down was not about to turn right-side up again, that, indeed, right-side up had been the wrong side up to begin with. The nineteenth century was now officially dead and buried, the millions who died during the war littering its corpse. But to throw the beauty of the natural world, however ugly, out with the bloody bathwater was immoral.

Meidner fled Germany in 1935. Though his rejection of abstraction in the arts would, theoretically, find sympathy with the Nazis, the idealized beauty that Hitler embraced and mythologized was not for Meidner, who sought and found the lyric bloom in the ugly truths of the real world. And, too,  Jews were, by 1935, persona non grata, a grim reality that was a bit too earthy, even for Meidner, whose ecstasy transported him out of Germany before the Nazi  Ministry of Transport transported him to Dachau et al and a most unnatural death.

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MEIDNER, Ludwig. Septemberschrei. Hymnen, Gebete, Lästerungen. Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920. Vorzugsausgabe (Special Edition), one of 100 hand-numbered copies on handmade Van Geldern-Bütten paper, with all fourteen lithographs signed in pencil by Meidner in the margin. Large quarto. (2), 75, (5) pp. fourteen original lithographs hors texte, lithographs hand-printed by Pan-Press.  In the publisher’s deluxe binding of quarter vellum over patterned brown paper over boards.

Lang 234, p. 54; Jentsch 88; Rifkind/Davis p. 528f.; Raabe/Hannich-Bode 203.2.

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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., with our thanks.
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Posters on Parade at Bloomsbury, 2

by Stephen J. Gertz

CAPPIELLO, Leonetto. Contratto.
Color lithograph, 1922.
Printed by Les Nouvelles Affiches Cappiello.

Last week's vintage poster sale at Bloomsbury Auctions - London brought some beautiful, striking, and unusual work into the spotlight.

CAPPIELLO, Leonetto. L'Oie d'Or.
Color lithograph, n.d.
Printed by Devambex.

We begin with examples by Leonetto Cappiello (1875-1942), the great Italian designer living in Paris whose innovative poster designs led to his being considered a father of modern advertising.

CAPPIELLO, Leonetto. Axa.
Color lithograph, 1931.
Printed by Devambex.

 

In contrast to earlier, painterly styles, Cappiello developed a startling approach with bold figures popping off  dark, often black backgrounds in stark contrast.

CAPPIELLO, Leonetto. Le Nil.
Color lithopgraph, n.d.
Printed by Vercasson.

Cappiello arrests attention, captures imagination, and holds the eyes hostage.

CAPPIELLO, Leonetto. La Tuberculose.
Color lithograph, c. 1930.
Printed by Devambex.

BONARD, J. Cafes Migora.
Color lithograph, n.d.
Printed by Azemard Cousins.

I don't drink it but I've love to wake up and smell the coffee if I woke up and saw this poster. Indeed, its electric, neon-like quality is so glowing I'd wake up, smell the whole world, and get a buzz from the colors, forget the caffeine. I've yet, alas, to find out anything about J. Bonard, its designer.

CASSANDRE (pseud. of Adolphe Mouron, (1901-1968).
Philips Television.
Color lithograph, 1951.

Adolphe Mouron aka Cassandre (1901-1968), the Ukranian-French artist, is, perhaps, best known for his 1935 poster design for the cruise ship Normandie, an iconic image. Establishing his own advertising agency, Alliance Graphique, he led the field with clever solutions to graphic challenges. And because typography is such an integral part of poster design, he also designed fonts. Above, an image from the emerging world of commercial television; the future is now.  But there's an unsettling, '50s sci-fi B-movie movie quality to the poster; cue the theremin, the future may not be as advertised. And, last time I checked, it wasn't.

LEVIN, M and TROYRVIKOV, V. Towards the Stars.
Color lithograph, 1968.

The space race provided opportunities for both the U.S. and Soviet Union to unify their respective citizens behind grand goals and inspire national pride. Until the U.S. eclipsed the U.S.S.R.. in 1969 with the first moon landing, the Soviets were ahead, proud, and prolific propagandists. I've yet to find out anything about Levin and Troyrvokov, the designers of Toward the Stars, but its image of a human space ship is simple, dramatic, and instantly memorable.

We switch gears into reverse, and travel further back in time...

ANQUETIN, Louis (1861-1932). Marguerite Dufay.
Lithograph in color, 1894.
Printed by Ancourt, Paris.

Who can forget Marguerite Dufay, the Parisian music hall trombonist, a comique excentrique entertainer known for her muscular performances? Work that 'bone slide, Maggie, 'great for the triceps!

ANONYMOUS. Veuve Amiot.
Color lithograph, n.d..
Printed by G. Bataille.

The above, anonymously designed poster for champagne Veuve Amiot, with its Art Nouveau and oriental influences, likely dates from around 1900-1910 before Cappiello altered the graphic design landscape. Cappiello later designed posters for Veuve Amiot.

GORDE, Gaston. Uriage les Bains.
Color lithograph, 1936.
Printed by Gorde & Boudry.

Forgive the whiplash but we snap back to the mid-1930s for Gaston Gorde's (1908-1995) unusual  Uriage les Bains, a hybrid of angular Art Deco and curvilinear Art Nouveau with a  hint of  Maxfield Parrish.

PAL (pseudo. of Jean de Paléologue 1855-1942).
La Peoria.
Color lithograph, n.d.
Printed by P. Lemenil.

During the 1880s, Peoria, IL was a major manufacturing center for bicycles, with the factories of Rouse Hazard Co. and Charles Duryea exporting bikes around the world. Just about anything stamped "Made in America" signaled quality. Little is known of lithographer and artist Jean de Paléologue, aka PAL, an American working in France. 

METLICOVITZ, Leopoldo (1868-1944). Fleur de Mousse.
Color lithograph, 1898.
Printed by Mouillot Fils Aine.

Leopoldo Metlicovitz began his career in 1891, joining the Ricordi lithograph workshop. He  became the firm's most prolific artist and, ultimately, art director, later offering his services to others. You can almost sense the aroma of the "foam flowers" that have captured and enraptured the woman in the image. It smells like ecstasy.

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Of related interest: Posters on Parade at Bloomsbury 1.

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Images courtesy of Bloomsbury, with our thanks.

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