0.13 Bohemian by design: gelett burgess and le petit journal des  (Page 3/7)

More could be said about the details of the cover of Le Petit Journal , and a few remarks will follow below, but the interior pages show a remarkable range of inventions. Each turning shows a new form of border, drawing, design, and layout, while type and fonts shift according to the demands of each piece. The crazed diagonals and high-contrast shapes of one border are replaced on the next by nearly obscene cartoon characters. These baldy-headed figures interlink their tongues in a suggestive, sloppy way that seems more like R. Crumb and underground “comix” characterized by Zap! in the late 1960s than like any late Victorian motifs. Burgess’s in-your-face patterns are a long way from the elaborate organic borders of the Arts and Crafts movement invented by the masterly hands of William Morris, Burne-Jones, and the many followers they inspired. One looks in vain for precedents for Burgess’s rubber-limbed figures or Medusa-haired heads grinning toothy smiles, or screaming cats in sketchy ink, or plaid, polka-dotted, and checkered animals adrift in a wild night sky. Burgess has more of Little Nemo , Krazy Kat , Maurice Sendak, and Edward Gorey in him than Randolph Caldecott or Kate Greenaway. The sheer range and variety of Burgess’s graphic imagination shows a playful spirit at full tilt, enjoying the act of drawing and cartooning for its own mad pleasure.

Burgess’s writing skills were honed in the society journals and culture magazines in which he published regularly. The Wave, a Bay Area magazine for “those in the swim,” provided employment. His often droll and amusing commentaries on the vagaries of San Francisco architecture, or theatrical productions at the Orpheum and other vaudeville sites, appeared regularly in the 1890s. Joseph M. Backus, Behind the Scenes: Glimpses of fin de siècle San Francisco by Gelett Burgess (San Francisco: Grabhorn-Hoyem for Book Club of California, 1968). The illustrations, photographs, and decorative motifs that populated advertisements in the back pages of these publications were all fodder for Burgess’s eye and hand. Certainly the black cat motif noted above called forth associations of Le chat noir with its suggestions of a particularly delicious Parisian wickedness. The public life of aesthetic references never seems far from Burgess’s mind, however. The deliberately parodic style of the pieces in Le Petit Journal is derivative on purpose, to prove a metacritical point. They play with what postmodern theorists would (rather tediously) term the “always already” nature of imagery and ideas– the conviction that only methods of appropriation and détournement were jaded and self-conscious enough to escape the naïve belief in originality that had plagued the avant-garde. The term détournement comes from the Situationist International and the work of Guy de Bord and Asger Jorn. Elizabeth Sussman, On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time, 1957-72 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Such critical concepts belong to the century after Burgess engaged in his serious play. In keeping with his own era, for all his evident awareness of the social life of images and texts, Burgess is essentially an earnest and amusing fellow, eager to delight the reader at the expense of artists as well as the ladies who cultivated them. His contemporary audience, familiar with their local business directories, etiquette books, sophomoric yearbooks and other adolescent hijinks, would feel at home, at least, on the threshold of Burgess’s strange world, even if they might hesitate to pass through the doorway of rooms without floors, where his invented “goops” played slightly hallucinatory mind-games.