Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis
In December 2008 I featured Jean-Michel Folon's illustrations for Kafka's "Metamorphosis" (Olivetti, 1973). [Link to that post.] I hope you enjoy this follow-up post.
I also include here some of Folon's non-Kafka work from the 70s, and one image from 1983 ("The Feast") from the out-of-print retrospective Folon's Folons.
As I said last time: In his introduction to Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin, 2007; buy the deluxe version with the Sammy Harkham cover before it disappears), Michael Hofmann writes of:
I also include here some of Folon's non-Kafka work from the 70s, and one image from 1983 ("The Feast") from the out-of-print retrospective Folon's Folons.
As I said last time: In his introduction to Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin, 2007; buy the deluxe version with the Sammy Harkham cover before it disappears), Michael Hofmann writes of:
...Kafka's suggestion as to how his story might be illustrated, if it had to be illustrated -- not, pace Nabokov, with an entomologically or coleopterically correct beetle... but with a picture of a man lying in bed.
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis (detail)
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis (detail, left side of a spread)
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis (detail, right side of a spread)
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis (detail from a spread)
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973, illus. for Kafka's Metamorphosis (detail from a spread)
***
Jean-Michel Folon, 1974, 'Alice Editions'
Jean-Michel Folon, The View, 1970
Jean-Michel Folon, 1972, 'I write you from a distant country'
(This won't make sense unless you click through to the larger version)
Jean-Michel Folon, 1972, 'The Art of Conversation'
Jean-Michel Folon, The Feast, 1983
7 comments:
In-cred-i-ble.
Thanks for these
amazing stuff as usual
keep up the good work
I second the above comments, as always. You probably know this, and maybe Hofmann mentions it, I don’t know:
When 'The Metamorphosis' was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka, fearful that the cover illustrator 'might want to draw the insect itself', wrote the publisher, 'Not that, please not that! ... The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.' He suggested instead a scene of the family in the apartment with a locked door, or a door open and giving on darkness. Any theatrical or cinematic version of the story must founder on this point of external representation: a concrete image of the insect would be too distracting and shut off sympathy; such a version would lack the very heart of comedy and pathos which beats in the unsteady area between objective and subjective, where Gregor’s insect and human selves swayingly struggle.
(From John Updike’s introduction to the Schocken Books edition of The Complete Stories.)
this blog is a real find! Thanks for collecting so much excellent yet somehow over-looked art! It's a feast for my brain!
Hofmann's comment about Met. in the intro to that collection blew my mind when I first read it.
thank you all.
notesfromaroom, a special thank you for the quote.
It doesn't sound like Kafka was thinking of a coleopterically correct beetle.
you can definitely tell this was done in the 70's
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