Schulz

It’s probably fair to say that Bruno Schulz’s writings are much better known than are his drawings and prints. Yet Schulz had trained as an artist: he had studied architecture in Lwów, and the fine arts at Vienna; and his day-job was as the drawing-master at a boys’s school in his home town of Drohobycz. The first editions of his story-collections Sklepy cynamonowe (‘Cinnamon Shops,’ aka ‘The Street of Crocodiles’) and Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (‘The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’) were illustrated with Schulz’s own drawings.

Years before his first literary success, between 1920-22, Schulz had issued several variants of a portfolio of twenty or so prints entitled Xięga bałwochwalcza (‘The Booke of Idolatry’). These were executed in the seldom-used cliché-verre technique, which requires that a design be scratched into a glass plate covered with an opaque ground (such as black gelatin), the artist leaving the glass transparent where the lines were to print black. The glass plate was then used as a photographic negative, and a print produced by exposing light through it onto sensitised photographic paper.

These prints all revolve around a single subject: ‘the voluntary humiliation of a man before a woman’. Such scandalous, near-fetishistic subject matter meant that Schulz only ever showed them to a select audience of close friends and understanding connoisseurs. The first half-dozen images here are details of scans taken from a selection of the prints reproduced in Michael Gibson’s book Symbolism. Gibson, unsurprisingly, sees them as a late appearance of the stereotypical Symbolist femme fatale.

I was struck by the following reminiscences of Schulz related by a former pupil of his, one Alfred Schreyer:

“I used to regularly meet [him] when I was on my way to school. Though I had not been introduced to him, I felt obliged to take off my cap in greeting and nod my head politely. Physically, there was hardly anything in him that would attract immediate attention, there was something birdlike in the manner he walked, but one felt spiritual energy emanating from him… [He] was said to be slightly gaga, but at school, where all the teachers are usually given nicknames, he had none that would stick to him…

He could handle well the tools of a carpenter with a consummate skill. He taught us in class how to use planes, files and other tools. I learnt these skills so well that years later when I found myself in a concentration camp, [they] helped me survive.

We often asked him in class to tell us fairy tales. He would clear his workbench off wood shavings, sit down on it and begin telling his stories. They were actually fairy tales, all of them improvised as he went along, and we were so reluctant to leave the classroom if the bell announcing the end of the lesson would catch us in the middle of his stories.”

I had hoped to write something about Schulz’s stories, too, but have been unable to reduce my thoughts about them to a pithy paragraph or two, and will simply conclude instead with some extracts (in Celia Wieniewska’s translation) from The Street of Crocodiles:

If one entered for example a tailor’s shop to order a suit—a suit of cheap elegance characteristic of the district—one found that the premises were large and empty. […] Soon, a slender young man appeared, astonishingly servile, agile, and compliant, to satisfy one’s requirements and to drown one in the smooth flow of his cheap sales talk. But when, talking all the time, he unrolled an enormous piece of cloth, fitting, folding, and draping the stream of material, forming it into imaginary jackets and trousers, that whole manipulation seemed suddenly unreal, a sham comedy, a screen ironically placed to hide the true meaning of things.

The tall dark salesgirls, each with a flaw in her beauty (appropriately for that district of remaindered goods), came and went, stood in the doorways watching to see whether the business entrusted to the experienced care of the salesman had reached a suitable point. [...]

Slowly the selection of the suit gave place to the second stage of the plan. The effeminate and corrupted youth, receptive to the client’s most intimate stirrings, now put him before a selection of the most peculiar trademarks, a whole library of labels, a cabinet displaying the collection of a sophisticated connoisseur. It then appeared that the outfitter’s shop was only a facade behind which there was an antique shop with a collection of highly questionable books and private editions. The servile salesman opened further storerooms, filled to the ceiling with books, drawings, and photographs. These engravings and etchings were beyond our boldest expectations: not even in our dreams had we anticipated such depths of corruption, such varieties of licentiousness.

[…]

We shall always regret that, at a given moment, we had left the slightly dubious tailor’s shop. We shall never be able to find it again. We shall wander from shop sign to shop sign and make a thousand mistakes. We shall enter scores of shops, see many which are similar. We shall wander along shelves upon shelves of books, look through magazines and prints, confer initimately and at length with young women of imperfect beauty, with an excessive pigmentation who yet would not be able to understand our requirements.

[…]

Our hopes were a fallacy, the suspicious appearance of the premises and the staff were a sham, the clothes were real clothes, and the salesman had no ulterior motives…

Habert-Dys’s Alphabet

The following images show some of the letters from an alphabet designed by the decorative artist Jules-Auguste Habert-Dys. This alphabet comes from one of a series of booklets published in Paris in the late 1880s by Jules Rouam, under the Librairie de l’art imprint, as part of a Bibliothèque d’éducation artistique.

This Bibliothèque also included a series of inexpensive illustrated books about Les artistes célèbres. Other titles published by Roaum included a multi-part Bibliothèque populaire des écoles de dessin; as well as some larger-format works, including a volume of Fantaisies Décoratives by Habert-Dys, whose cover-price was a substantial 60 fr.

Habert-Dys was born in Fresnes in 1850. After studying with the ceramicist Ulysse Bernard at Blois, he came to Paris in 1873, where he spent four years in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, thereafter falling under the influence of the graphic artist Félix Bracquemond, who had been one of the first exponents of the new trend for japonisme in France.

I acquired this alphabet in a volume which comprises four decorative letter-series published by Rouam: the other three being Johann Theodor de Bry’s 1595 Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet; a mid-19th-Century alphabet by François-Émile Ehrmann, which is adorned with classical figures; and an ornately rococo 18th-century alphabet by Jean-Daniel Preisler.

Previous alphabet-themed entries: Basoli’s Alphabet; Paulini’s ABC; Steingruber’s Alphabet; De’ Grassi’s Alphabet; Hepburn’s Alphabets; Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (including some images from his Alfabeto in Sogno) and Figurative Alphabets. Also, see peacay’s post at Bibliodyssey about Habert-Dys’s Fantaisies Décoratives.

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