A blue robot ominously transports a limp, chorus girl, in a red-satin bodice. She’s needed for her flesh, of course …
It's just one of the 3,500 covers the prolific Michel Gourdon executed for “Fleuve Noir” Editions between 1950 and 1978. He said in an interview, that sometimes he would produce as many as 20 covers in a month.
Over the weekend, I got to wander through New York’s Antiquarian Book Fair where I saw the original gouache painting, which is quite luminous. Bookseller, Michael R. Weintraub had the illustration displayed along side the book it was painted for, La Nuit des Trépassées (Night of the Dead).
There is lots of Gourdon’s work to be seen online
here,
here and for some of his pin-up art and more explicit covers go to
Deadlicious.
Some shots off the TV of a restored version of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. The 1922 German film, featuring stage actor Max Schreck, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. When Stoker’s widow won a copyright infringement suit in 1925, it was ordered that all prints of the Expressionist film be destroyed. But as vampire-movie expert Tim Kane notes, “the undead film continued to rise from the grave throughout the years.”
Happy Halloween!
