Tag: Art Nouveau

Posted on

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

 

 

It’s October 31st, the day of the spooky festival known in Ireland as Samhain and elsewhere as Halloween.  As is my custom each Halloween, I’ll celebrate the spirit of the occasion by posting on this blog ten of the creepiest or most unsettling pieces of artwork I’ve come across during the year.  By the way, the above photos are of a house in my immediate neighbourhood in Singapore.  Its inhabitants must really love Halloween.

 

Let’s begin with a great, old-school horror illustration where an unwary boatman has an encounter with a marsh-monster.  This was painted by the late Angus McBride, an artist who was born in London to Scottish parents but spent much of his professional career based in South Africa.  McBride’s resume included work for the educational magazines Look and Learn (1962-82) and Worlds of Wonder (1970-75), the Men-at-Arms series from Osprey Publishing and the tabletop game Middle-earth Role Playing inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  In fact, it’s from a collection of those last illustrations – Angus McBride’s Characters of Middle-earth (1990) – that this ghoulish picture comes.  The hideous beastie is actually a Mewlip, which The One Wiki to Rule Them All describes as ‘a fictional race, made up by Hobbits of the Shire, mentioned only in one poem.’

 

© Iron Crown Enterprises

 

Onto something more elegant.  I love old posters and illustrations advertising that most decadent of alcoholic drinks, absinthe.  These were often the work of Art Nouveau artists, most famously, Alphonse Mucha.  But away from the gentle curves and nymph-like belles dames of Art Nouveau, there’s a darker school of absinthe artwork, which suggests the drink’s more sinisterly seductive and ruinous side.  These feature green devils, black cats and, depicted in this painting from la Belle Epoque, a splendidly vaporous green lady-ghost.  It’s entitled Absinthe Drinker and is the work of the Czech artist Viktor Oliva, who reputedly quaffed much of the stuff in Paris in the late 19th century.  Absinthe Drinker now hangs in the Zlata Husa Gallery in Prague.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

You get the impression la Belle Epoque passed by the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose paintings – most famously The Scream (1893) – often suggest he lived in a state of perpetual, nerve-jangling anxiety.  During his childhood, he suffered the trauma of losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis and getting a bout of it himself when he was 13: “One Christmas Eve, when 13 years old, I lie in my bed,” he recalled. “The blood trickles from my mouth – the fever rages in my veins – fear cries out deep within me. Now, now, in just a moment, you will meet your Maker and be sentenced for eternity.”  In 1893, drawing on those experiences, he painted By the Death Bed (Fever) with pastels.  He would do further versions of it, with oils in 1895 and 1915 and as a lithograph in 1896.  It’s the 1915 By the Death Bed (Fever) that I find most disturbing. The white-skinned, almost skull-faced woman on the right could pass for the Angel of Death, while the appropriately diseased-looking wallpaper resembles a close-up of a yellow handkerchief, into which a TB victim has just coughed globs of blood.  Actually, the décor puts me in mind of one of the best horror short stories of all time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

 

From archive.com/artwork

 

Another all-time classic horror short story is M.R. James’ Casting the Runes (1911), which taps into the fear there’s something monstrous and nasty following you, and following you, and all the time getting closer…  The story was filmed as Night of the Demon in 1957, 21 years after James’ death.  I think James would have approved of the creepy atmosphere and build-up created by director Jacques Tourneur, but not of big, shonky-looking demon that’s doing the following and appears at the movie’s climax.  Apparently, it was shoehorned into the film by its producers, against Tourneur’s wishes.  Still, I really like this colourful poster for the movie, painted by Spanish artist Enrique Mataix.  Mataix produced movie posters for almost a half-century, from 1939 to 1988, including ones for Bringing Up Baby (1938), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Lust for Life (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).  Yes, his Night of the Demon poster gives prominence to that silly demon, but it’s slightly blurred, which hides its shonkiness.  And the surrounding, infernally psychedelic colours are striking.

 

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Columbia Pictures

 

This next work, Can You Show Me the Way Home by Californian artist Brandi Milne, feels like it could be an illustration from a movie poster.  Maybe one for a warped 1960s psychological thriller where children are imperiled, like Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Nanny (1965) or The Mad Room (1969).  Of course, it also echoes that hoary old 1958 sci-fi / horror movie The Fly, whose finale has a human / fly hybrid – David Hedison’s tiny head grafted onto a fly’s body – trapped in a spider’s web, while the humungous spider crawls hungrily towards it.  Rather than an attached-to-a-bug David-Hedison-head, Can You Show Me the Way Home artfully features a detached doll-head.  Also, it’s disarmingly presented in a child-like palette of black, white, grey, pink and straw-yellow.  Though going by the size of the doll-head, its spider must be pretty humungous too.

 

From dorothycircusgallery.com / © Brandi Milne

 

And there’s an obvious cinematic vibe – J-Horror this time – from this picture by Ohio-based concept artist David Sladek, aptly titled Waiting at the Wrong Bus Stop.  It strikes a particular chord with me.  During my misspent youth, I occasionally spent too long in a pub on a Friday or Saturday night and then found myself waiting for a late-night bus, in a decrepit and remote bus shelter, in the company of various unsavoury-looking characters.  Though none of them ever looked as unsavoury as the characters here.

 

From artstation.com / © David Sladek

 

And now for something completely different.  For depictions of the surreally ghoulish, you can’t beat Hieronymus Bosch.  Here’s a detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the legendary triptych the Dutchman painted between 1490 and 1510.  Its panels depict the paradise that’d been the Garden of Eden, the titular garden with its cavorting, amorous nudes and… hell.  Obviously, the hell-panel contains the images that everyone remembers.  This part of it shows a knight being devoured by what Wikipedia describes as ‘a pack of wolves’, though to me they look more that horror-story staple, rats – giant ones.  No doubt the thoughts flashing through the unfortunate knight’s brain are similar to the thoughts of the first victim in James Herbert’s 1974 paperback epic, The Rats: “Rats! His mind screamed the words.  Rats eating me alive!  God, God help me…”

 

From smarthistory.org

 

And keeping with rats, this gleeful-looking half-human, half-rat creature never fails to give me the creeps.  It’s the work of the American artist Brom, originally from Albany, Georgia.  His career has included illustrating the roleplaying worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and, more recently, providing pictures for as well as writing his own horror novels.  This illustration comes from his 2021 novel Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery.

 

From bromart.com / © Gerald Brom

 

Meanwhile, proper wolves – though perhaps they’re werewolves – feature in this beautifully evocative watercolour, ink and pencil work done by the Swiss artist Eugene Grasset in 1892, Three Women and Three Wolves.  I love everything about it: the trio of eerily floating women, who must be witches, or nymphs, or spirits, and the half-shocked, half-indignant way the nearest woman looks out of the picture at us; the three black wolves also looking, and laughing, out of the picture; the subtly-patterned russet trunks of the forest trees; the carpet of ferns.  And what’s that lying in the bottom left-hand corner?  A horn?  A hunting horn?  Have the wolves just been chomping on a huntsman?  No wonder they look so jolly.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

There aren’t any wolves, giant rats, giant spiders, J-Horror apparitions or any other monstrosities in this illustration by another Californian, Michael Whelan, described as ‘one of the world’s premier artists of imaginative realism’ and the most lauded artist in the history of science fiction.  (He has 15 Hugo Awards under his belt for a start.)  Done in acrylic, it’s an interior illustration for a Centipede Press edition of the famous H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931) which, as far as I can ascertain, hasn’t been published yet.  It’s the pictorial equivalent of a cinematic reaction shot.  But what a reaction.  The screaming explorer conveys all the cosmic horror that makes this particular story, set in the wastes of Antarctica, so claustrophobic.  Particularly clever are the margins of grey fur along the edges of the explorer’s garments.  They’re arranged so that they resemble that most Lovecraftian of motifs – a coiling tentacle.

 

From dmrbooks.com / © Michael Whelan / Centipede Press

 

And on the subject of H.P. Lovecraft…  I traditionally feature ten scary pictures in these annual Halloween posts.  But this year, here’s an extra one, an eleventh, in honour of the legendary New Jersey artist Stephen Fabian, who sadly died in May this year (admittedly at a grand old age of 95).  I admire the black-and-white interior designs he did for a 1998 volume entitled In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which is a collection of short stories not by Lovecraft but by his pen-friend and posthumous publisher August Derleth.  Unfortunately, reproducing an entire illustration on this page would mean reducing it and shedding some of its intricate detail.  So here’s part of an illustration for the 1948 Derleth short story Something in Wood.  It shows a statue of Lovecraft’s ghastliest and most famous deity, Cthulhu, looking tentacle-y and baleful, as ever.

 

© Mycroft & Moran / Stephen E. Fabian Sr

 

Happy Halloween!

Posted on

Est-ce qu’on vous sert?

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Anyone born at a similar time to me, and in a similar part of the world, and who therefore grew up watching 1970s British television, will have difficulty reading a novel about a department store without being reminded of the saucy British TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, created and written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, broadcast from 1972 to 1985 and, yes, set in a department store in contemporary London.

 

Even though the novel in question is the classic French one The Ladies’ Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames) written by Émile Zola, published in 1883 and set in Paris, I’m afraid that while I read it I kept hearing in my head Ronnie Hazelhurst’s theme song from Are You Being Served?  This was a simple but maddeningly relentless number wherein a lift-girl talks over the non-stop chiming and chattering of a cash register: “Ground floor, perfumery / Stationery and leather goods / Wigs and haberdashery / Kitchenware and food / Going uu-uup…!”  I’ve heard people claim that the Are You Being Served? theme invented rap music, but maybe that’s pushing it a bit.

 

Anyway, on a more serious note…  I admire Émile Zola because of his variety.  He didn’t confine himself to writing about one particular section of society but gave each of his novels a different and distinctive focus.  For example, Nana (1880) is set in Paris’s theatrical world while Germinal (1885) is set in a mining community in northern France.  The Beast in Man (1890) deals with workers on the French railways while The Debacle deals with soldiers fighting and civilians caught up in the Franco-Prussian War.  Thus, his body of work becomes a massive, fictionalised document of French life in the mid-to-late 19th century.

 

With The Ladies’ Delight, Zola turns his attention to retailing industry and the changes it was undergoing at that time.  He tells the story largely through the eyes of young woman, Denise Baudu, who arrives in Paris from the provinces in the 1860s and finds work as a saleswoman at a booming department store, the titular Au Bonheur des Dames.

 

Denise’s job at the store is troubled from the start.  By working there, she incurs the displeasure of her only Parisian relatives, her uncle Baudu and his family, whose little draper’s shop has the misfortune of being across the street from Au Bonheur des Dames and is quickly being put out of business by it.  She comes to the capital with her two younger brothers, teenaged Jean and little Pépé, and Jean – with an irresponsibility typical of many of Zola’s male characters – is soon sponging off her while she barely earns enough to keep Pépé fed, clothed and in school and keep herself alive.  In fact, she almost doesn’t get employed at Au Bonheur des Dames at all.  On the day she applies for a job, the general overseer Bourdoncle rejects her for being ‘too ugly’.  But he’s overruled by the store’s owner, Octave Mouret, who hires the rustic-looking and waif-like Denise on a whim.

 

Nor does Denise – gentle, principled and clean-living – prosper in the licentious and back-biting environment of Au Bonheur des Dames.  The intensity of her workmates’ carnal obsessions is matched only by their determination to shin their way up the promotional ladder, usually by plotting against and undermining whoever’s immediately above them.  She’s eventually dismissed and finds a new job with Robineau, a one-time buyer at the store who was himself elbowed out and has now taken over a shop selling silk garments.  But Robineau’s business is unable to compete against the remorselessly growing, evermore popular establishment he once worked for, and he’s soon forced to let Denise go.  However, she manages to get back onto Au Bonheur des Dames’ payroll and this time she gains the ear of her boss, Mouret.  Though she’s naïve, Denise has excellent common sense and an unerring instinct for knowing what the public wants.  The advice she gives Mouret about how best to treat his customers, and his employees, leads to her rapid promotion.  Meanwhile, the cynical, worldly-wise Mouret starts to find himself unaccountably attracted to her…

 

From wikipedia.org

 

As well as relating the ups and downs of Denise’s career in and outside Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola describes Mouret’s efforts to expand his business and reel in more customers.  His activities include becoming the beau of society widow Madame Desforges, in order to get access to the super-powerful Baron Hartmann, who’s another of Madame Desforges’ lovers.  (Well, these folks are French.)  If he can secure Hartmann’s financial and political backing, Mouret believes he can grow Au Bonheur des Dames until it encompasses an entire city block.  Mouret’s romancing of Madame Desforges, and the flirting and flattering he does with the wealthy ladies who make up her social circle, become a metaphor for the seduction of Paris’s female shoppers that his store is performing on a commercial level.

 

However, it’s the novel’s third strand that’s the most powerful.  This describes the impact that Au Bonheur des Dames has upon the traditional shopkeepers who specialise in one particular type of good and are unlucky enough to share a neighbourhood with it.  The store begins by ruining the drapers but, as it gets bigger and Mouret creates more departments and sells a wider range of products, it also threatens the local furriers, glovers, hatters and so on.  Mouret even encroaches on the business of an old man called Bourras who looks ‘like an Old Testament prophet’ and makes and sells umbrellas and walking sticks.  Bourras’s decrepit shop occupies a sliver of one of the street-fronts that Mouret is expanding his premises along.  The old man refuses to sell and move out, so that his shop ends up with Au Bonheur des Dames on either side of it and resembles a ‘wart’ in its grand façade.

 

Denise’s Uncle Baudu not only loses his draper’s business but also his daughter Geneviève to the store.  Geneviève’s fiancé abandons her after becoming infatuated with a coquettish salesgirl working across the street, and the broken-hearted Geneviève wastes away and dies.  Her funeral provides the novel with its most effective scene.  The mourners include all the shopkeepers who’ve had their trade pulverised by Au Bonheur des Dames and they’re obliged to follow the coffin past the building that’s the source of their misery.  Old Bourras laments, “Oh, we’re a pretty sight; a fine cortege of carcasses we make for the dear child!  It must be odd, for people watching this line of bankrupts going past.  And it seems that the clean-out is continuing.  The scoundrels are opening departments for flowers, for fashions, for perfumes, for shoes, and who knows what else?”

 

While Zola doesn’t hold back in depicting Au Bonheur des Dames as a rapacious monster, his imagination is clearly besotted with the place as well.  He devotes many pages to describing it.  It’s variously likened to ‘an awakening beehive’, ‘an enormous fairground display’, ‘a sumptuous pasha’s tent’, ‘a cathedral of modern trade, light yet solid, designed for a congregation of lady customers’, ‘a monumental gallery’, ‘an enormous carnival’, ‘a vast, many-coloured architectural pile with gold highlights’, ‘a boreal vista’, ‘a great love nest’, ‘a white chapel’ and ‘a dream heaven, a window into the dazzling whiteness of a paradise.’  Whenever you think Zola has finished writing about its appearance, he has Mouret give the premises another upgrade and off he goes on another flurry of description.

 

In my mind’s eye, I found myself embellishing the store’s architecture and décor with flourishes of Art Nouveau.  I visualised the building as resembling some grand project designed by an Art Nouveau artist like Alphonso Mucha, Koloman Moser or Eugène Grasset.  But that would be wrong, since the novel’s 1860s setting precedes the Art Nouveau movement by at least 20 years and those artists would have been youngsters at the time.

 

From alphonsemucha.org

 

The Ladies’ Delight isn’t one of Zola’s best books.  His lengthy descriptions become tiresome.  This is especially true towards the end, when the reader is impatient to see how the various plot strands will be resolved and when those descriptions just seem to get in the way.  Also an issue is the characterisation.  Denise seems too innocent to be true, especially when there’s such a rogue’s gallery of schemers, chancers and letches inhabiting the store around her.  Correspondingly, it seems unlikely that somebody like Mouret could fall for her, even briefly – let alone become obsessed with her, to the point where he loses interest in everything else, including his business, as he does later.  (Predictably, the virtuous Denise rebuffs all his advances, which only leaves him more smitten with her.)

 

Enterprises launched by characters in Zola’s books tend to overreach themselves and come crashing down, both small-scale ones like Gervaise’s laundry business in L’Assommoir (1877) and grand ones like the title character’s theatrical career in Nana.  But that doesn’t happen to Mouret’s store in The Ladies’ Delight.  It simply continues to grow – the cash-register from Ronnie Hazelhurst’s Are You Being Served? theme was clinking particularly loudly in my head during those scenes where Zola describes the cashiers struggling to count and gather up and lock away Mouret’s ever-swelling profits.  In the absence of Mouret getting his financial come-uppance, I suppose Zola felt obliged to give him a romantic come-uppance instead, which is where he deploys Denise.  But as a plot device it doesn’t feel plausible.

 

The Ladies’ Delight is effective, though, when it chronicles how the new store tramples all over the businesses of the old-style traders and leaves a trail of bankruptcies in its wake.  It’s ironic to reflect that in 2020 the same department store would probably be a much-loved historical landmark.  It’d be regarded as an important, if vulnerable, part of its city’s commercial heritage.  Fearful that modern online traders like Amazon might trample all over its business, citizens would be calling on the government to subsidise it and keep it propped up.

 

Yes, this youthful monster of 19th century capitalism would now be regarded as, potentially, an elderly victim of 21st century capitalism.  The French saying ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose‘ isn’t quite true.