Butt Johnson

Butt Johnson is the name assumed by (or, perhaps—he doesn’t say—given to) a Brooklyn-based artist whose published œuvre to date comprises twenty-five remarkably intricate drawings done in ballpoint pen, and a single limited-edition print. The minute attention to detail in these works reminds me, if only tangentially, of the similarly meticulous drawings of Laurie Lipton and Paul Noble. The details below link to images copied from the artist’s website: these are all Copyright © Butt Johnson, and have been reproduced here with permission. The text below is quoted from an article about Johnson by Conor Risch.

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Although he studied painting in college, post-graduation Johnson turned to ballpoint pen drawings. ‘Everything changed in ’01,’ he says, ‘I discovered these Victorian securities engravings that were done literally as railroad bonds in the turn of the century, and I started getting really interested in this tradition of engraving.’ […] The bond engravings, with their elaborate borders, backgrounds and ornamentation, were created not only to look impressive but also to prevent counterfeiting, which meant incredible levels of detail. […] According to Johnson, the intense patterns on the bond engravings were created using geometric lathe-work. Johnson managed to create his own patterns with spirographs and rulers, and then folded pop culture imagery into his borders and backgrounds.

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In addition to the Victorian engravings that first caught Johnson’s eye, he cites as influences Italian architect, archeologist and engraver Giovanni Piranesi, Venitian painter Giandomenico Tiepolo, and the work of German anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus […]. ‘I wish I could say that I studied [these master techniques] formally,’ says Johnson, but it’s just me crapping around the internet mostly, looking up stuff. And trolling around in the Strand looking at all the books.’ […] Johnson says his drawings take him roughly three months to complete, a schedule that makes it difficult to gather enough material for a gallery show.

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I suggest to him that our culture might appear unimpressive next to those we’ve grown up studying, but he disagrees. ‘I’m sure they’ll find our little plastic G.I. Joes in two hundred thousand years—and they’re going to last that long—and I’m sure they’re going to be in a lot better shape than the rocks we find from other cultures’ he says as he scrolls through images on his computer. ‘Considering the technology that we have, will they be able to access this stuff? Who knows. But if you’re just talking about remnants they can go to a landfill and find the most incredible things.’

Eva Bonnier

The artistic patrimony of the town where I live is, to be frank, none too inspiring. My first impression on visiting the municipal art gallery was that its permanent collection had an apologetic ‘sorry, but this is the best we could scrape together’ air about it, with portraits of local dignitaries jostling for wall-space with unimpressive maritime scenes, drab townscapes, and angst-filled, impastoed abstracts. One painting, however, caught my eye, and I spent the greater part of my visit staring at it. This was a small, informal portrait, of a blonde-haired girl with sad-looking eyes (see fig. 2 below). From the caption I learned that it was painted ca. 1906, that the girl’s name was Julia Hasselberg, and the painter’s, Eva Bonnier.

Eva Bonnier was born in Stockholm, 1857, into a wealthy, upper middle-class Jewish family. Her father, Albert, was a successful and influential publisher (the company he founded is still one of the largest Swedish publishing concerns today, and is still run by the Bonnier family). From 1875, Eva studied at a private art academy, later enrolling in the Women’s Department of the Kungliga Akademien för de fria konsterna, the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. In 1883 she moved to Paris, apparently one of more than fifty Nordic women artists studying and working there at that time. She attended classes at the Académie Colarossi and painted: these years in Paris were by far her most productive.

While in Paris, Bonnier met a sculptor named Per Hasselberg with whom she had a ‘complicated relationship:’ the couple were to be married, but their engagement was broken off in 1892, by which time she was back in Stockholm, trying, with only limited success, to establish herself as a portraitist. In 1894 Hasselberg died suddenly, leaving a new-born illegitimate daughter, Julia, who Bonnier adopted. The sad-eyed girl in the portrait must therefore have been about twelve years old when she posed for her adoptive mother. Shortly afterwards, Bonnier abandoned her attempts to make a career from painting. She is reputed to have been an intelligent, strong-willed and sharp-tongued woman who ‘could neither in private nor as an artist charm or flatter her contemporaries.’

Although no longer a working artist, Bonnier remained active for some time in public life, but, after the turn of the century, she gradually wihdrew into isolation. In 1909, she took her own life. Although she was never quite a virtuoso with the brush, her portraits nevertheless seem acute and ‘true,’ yet not unsympathetic. My source for all but one of these images and for most of the information above is a book by Margareta Gynning entitled Det Ambivalenta Perspektivet: Eva Bonnier och Hanna Hirsch-Pauli i 1880-talets konstliv. Fig. 2 I scanned from a postcard print I picked up at the Blekinge Museum, where the painting is currently on display. Some more of Bonnier’s paintings can be seen reproduced here and here. There is an exhibition devoted to her work running currently at the Thielska Gallery in Stockholm.

Veridicus Christianus

Veridicus Christianus was the first Jesuit emblem-book. It was published in 1601 by Jan Moretus at the famous Plantin workshop in Antwerp. It had evolved from a catechism consisting of a hundred questions and answers written by Father Jan David, rector of the Jesuit Colleges at Courtrai and Ghent. An unillustrated version of the text, in Dutch, had previously been printed in Brussels, in 1597. David had the idea of accompanying these with a hundred engravings, a commission assigned to the studio of Phillips Galle, and probably executed by Philips’ son Theodoor.

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The current images are courtesy of the Digital Image Archive, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. They have been reproduced from a Dutch-language edition of the Veridicus, entitled Christeliicken Waerseggher which Moretus published in 1603. (To see all of the emblems from the book, specify the Call Number “1603Davi” at the archive’s search page.) Looking at these engravings, it is easy to see why Theodoor Galle has also been credited with the authorship of the engravings in Barthélémy Del Bene’s Civitas Veri, given the two series’ similarities in style, and the deployment in both of ‘key letters’ at various points of the illustrations.

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One peculiar feature of the Veridicus was the inclusion of a ‘lottery plate’ near the end of the book ‘with a volvelle with four openings, which always revealed a number to one of the hundred proverbs or wise sayings from classical authors printed on the following pages,’ each of which ‘in its turn referred to one of the hundred emblems of the book.’ This gimmick merely formalised a common practice whereby emblem-books would be opened at random, with the selected emblem being interpreted for its relevance for the reader (source here).

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Taking the present images in turn, fig. 1 illustrates Sin ‘juxtaposing sinful indulgences, including a sumptuous feast, with the image of a demon riding a human being like a beast of burden;’ while in fig. 2 we are shown Heresy, More Pernicious than Plague, where a gorgon-like figure stands at the mouth of hell, presenting a book bearing the word “heresy” to a fleeing crowd. Father David, we read, was particularly zealous in his condemnation of heretics. Depicted in fig. 3, Demons, is an alarming female figure with wings and horns, whose clawed hand brandishes a three-pronged sceptre. She is surrounded with animals, and a serpent’s tail protrudes from her skirt.

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In Fig. 4, Devils and Heretics, ‘A demon and a heretic pull a sledge—on which sits a skeleton and a group of naked men transfixed by a mirror from which peacock feathers sprout—into the mouth of hell.’ Fig. 5 shows us The Insanity of the World wherein a masked female figure stands before a scale, with the symbols of earthly pleasures & power (a cup, a crown, and money) are shown seeming to outweigh the cross, rosary book, chalice and whip on its left-hand side. In the foreground of Fig. 6 we see an Indulgent Mother and her spoilt child in the foreground, juxtaposed with cautionary background scenes, including one where ‘a mother kisses her son as he goes to the gallows.’

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Fig. 7 represents the Incautious Gaze where the head of a man is shown in the form of a house—this picture intriguingly echoes a drawing attributed to Arcimboldo. Fig. 8, Nothing portrays the nullity of wordly vanity, while fig. 9 depicts Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. The final image, Painting Jesus, does not belong to the main sequence of emblems, but rather forms part of the title-page for the book’s closing section, comprising a sequence of a hundred prayers. Note in particular the unorthodox work-in-progress by the would-be artist at the bottom-left of the engraving.