Herbert Crowley: The Temple of Silence: His Forgotten Works and Worlds - Rilegato

Duerr, Justin

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0997372990 ISBN 13: 9780997372991

Casa editrice: Beehive Books, 2019

Riassunto

Prior to his disappearance, Herbert Crowley was an innovator at the dawn of comics, and a defining figure of the early 20th century avant-garde.

His illustrations were featured alongside work by Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh in the 1913 Armory Show that gave birth to modern art in America. His newspaper strip THE WIGGLEMUCH was printed next to Winsor McCay's LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND in the New York Herald. He had a close relationship with Carl Jung, and was a noted mainstay of the burgeoning NYC experimental art scene.

And yet he's been completely erased from history. Aside from a very small selection of his comics, none of his artwork has been published or collected in any form.

Until now. Over the course of six years of deep research, we have unearthed a huge number of Crowley paintings, sculptures, illustrations, comics, prints, engravings and ephemera.

Contained in this tome you'll find hundreds of jaw-dropping images of otherworldly shrines, whimsical cartoons, grotesque creatures, nightmares and dreamscapes. You will encounter impossible symbolism, encrypted glyphs, and the yearning visual poetry of a brilliant, tormented spirit.

Enter THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE, and behold the strange, astonishing visions of a lost legend of modern art. Prior to his disappearance, Herbert Crowley was an innovator at the dawn of comics, and a defining figure of the early 20th century avant-garde.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Philadelphia artist, musician, and scholar Justin Duerr is best known for his research documented in the 2011 Sundance award-winning documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The term obsessive is very often employed in describing both his artwork and his unflagging commitment to research. His devotion to this project has been characteristically all-consuming. By following every possible lead and dissecting every available trace of Herbert Crowley around the world, he has managed to uncover a remarkable story, resurrect a lost piece of art history, and unearth the heart-stopping artworks of a true forgotten visionary. The rediscovery of Herbert E. Crowley is the second major research undertaking of Duerr’s life.

Josh O'Neill is the multiple Eisner and Harvey Award-winning co-founder of the small presses Locust Moon and Beehive Books. An editor, author, educator, curator, journalist and publisher, O'Neill has created books and articles for clients including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Atlantic, Dark Horse Comics, Toon Books, IDW and Amazon. He is also a former retailer who ran a comic shop and annual comics festival in West Philadelphia. The City Paper wrote that "you can't talk about Philadelphia comics without talking about Josh O'Neill."

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

On Sunday, June 19th, 1910, the newspaper reading public last sighted a rare creature called the Wigglemuch as it descended into a "dread underworld." Fortunately, "Wiggles" would emerge unscathed in this final adventure, as a creature known as the Snapper Snitch "bore [him] aloft from the dreadful pit." In the final panel of his comic strip adventures, Wiggles stands ready, muscles braced for a swim across a mountain lake toward a smiling wooden-toy fly-fisherman whose bucket of flies is partly shadowed, highlighting the word LIES. That last glimpse of artist Herbert Crowley's iconic, mysterious beast is where he remains, frozen in history. Over the next hundred years, precisely where the famed Wigglemuch and his enigmatic creator went next remained a mystery, as both vanished from the eyes of the world and faded into memory.

My first encounter with the work of Herbert Edmund Crowley was in 2008, by way of Art Out of Time, Dan Nadel’s anthology of forgotten comics that collected several of Crowley's Wigglemuch strips. I was drawn to the strange clockwork artificiality of this paper universe, the profoundly controlled cartooning and flat affect that hinted at endless hidden depths and symbols. These bizarre strips seemed to glow, to lift right off the page. I wanted to know about the hands that drew this story, and the mind that gave motion to those hands. I wanted to know who had dreamed up this backlit puppet-world and populated it with a totally unique bestiary, creating something like an ancient tome translated from some hidden, incurvated dimension. What forces gathered to bring this thing into existence? And why?

I've since spent many years unpacking musty boxes, peeking into forgotten attic corners in the hopes of answering those questions. My research took me from Switzerland to Texas, on crawls through moldy collapsed collapsed ruins, into the estate of Carl Gustav Jung, and back again. The remaining footprints of Herbert E. Crowley are few and far between, but they are too deep and distinct for a century to erase.

I hope the information I've found in some small way illuminates the man's singular work, which stands timelessly on its own.

Let's begin by opening a hundred-year-old newspaper, then, and from there trace the path of one of the great mysterious visionaries of 20th century art.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Beehive Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0997372990
• ISBN 13: 9780997372991
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 105
• Redattore: O'neill Josh
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile