The Fiancée de Frankenstein

French actress Audrey Tautou, perhaps best know as the shy and gently eccentric heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (2001) posed for the May 2006 issue of Elle magazine as a goth Bride of Frankenstein in a red satin cocktail dress.

The same month, a New York Times article entitled “Sans Makeup, S’il Vous Plaît” discussed the French “Le No Makeup Look”, directly referencing the Elle issue as the cover featured Tautou, “the anti-star”, sporting what they called the “Le Bare Face Look” in direct contrast with her powdered face and dark-eyed, frizzy-haired appearance within, suggesting, perhaps, that overdone makeup is only suitable for Frankenstein’s Fiancée.

 If you ask me, both versions of Ms Tatou look great.

The Art of Frankenstein : Barry Sachs

A mixed media Bride bursts with electric colors, her signature white curls sizzling with lightning.

Pennsylvania-based artist Barry Sachs is a painter, graphic designer and illustrator whose portfolio reveals a love for the classic monsters. With paint and pixels, experimenting with bold color and design, Sachs has depicted, among others, The Bride’s famous mate, Lugosi’s Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Vincent Price, the pulps’ The Shadow and the comic books’ Rocketeer.

There’s lots to see on Barry Sachs’ blog. 

The Bride Alive

She’s only onscreen a brisk, fleeting twelve minutes yet, 77 years on, The Bride of Frankenstein is instantly and universally recognized, an indelible icon. Artists and photographers have paid homage, often improvising and reinventing the character, sometimes to excess.

I love the direct reference, the simple straightforward photograph here, by Ben Albares of Malaga in Andalusia, Spain. The model, Jera Strucc, looks like a young Elsa Lanchester. This is The Bride captured as she was.

And speaking of The Bride, last October, cartoonist Thomas Boatwright celebrated Halloween with a sketch-a-day project sampling James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein in 31 rough and robust digital drawings, which I blogged about here.

Now, Boatwright has collected his Bride series as a very limited edition and inexpensive art book, shipping in September. Hurry up if you want one, there are only 31 copies!

Related:
The Bride Unwrapped
Bare Essentials
The Halloween Bride
The Bride Strikes a Pose
The Bride Does Vegas

The Bride's Spring Wedding

The Bride stands for a wedding shroud fitting while her bewildered beau thumbs through a bridal fashion magazine in this whimsical cartoon by Tim Foley for Blown Covers, a friendly competition where artists come up with images in the very demanding style and spirit of those used on the cover of The New Yorker magazine.   

Run by The New Yorker’s art director extraordinaire, Françoise Mouly, Blown Covers was inspired by her book of the same name collecting outstanding but ultimately rejected covers for the magazine. Now, on a weekly blog, Mouly suggests themes and runs the best images submitted by artists from all over the world. The BRIDE image here was artist Foley’s submission on a recent “spring wedding” theme. A nice touch: Note the stitching in the color bar running up the side.

Tim Foley works in a startling variety of styles, equally at ease with painted portraits, caricature, scratchboard illustrations and elegant cartooning, as evident by the present image. There’s much to admire on the artist’s website and blog.

Blown Covers

Related:
The New Yorker Frankenstein Cover by Edward Sorel
The Art of Frankenstein: Charles Burns

The Art of the Bride : Ray Caesar

This disquieting Bride in a pressure-cooker bonnet is the work of Ray Caesar, a leading light of the Pop Surrealist movement.

Using sophisticated modeling and texture-mapping software, the artist poses and positions his characters and props in a 3D environment, creating weirdly appealing images of mutated, porcelain–skin figures in Regency-era gowns inhabiting an opulent, waking dreamworld. Think Alice in Wonderland on drugs.

Ray Caesar’s superb website.

Fascinating interviews with Ray Caesar on The World’s Best Ever and Coates and Scarry.

A variant image of The Bride on Richard Goodall Gallery.

The Art of the Bride : Bob Lizarraga

An atmospheric portrait of a baleful Bride, by California cartoonist Bob Lizarraga.

Lizarraga boasts impressive credits as a character and prop designer for animation and CGI studios. His personal work as an illustrator and a sure-handed caricaturist reveal a Monster Kid’s enduring love for classic horror.

Bob Lizarraga portfolios here and here, and more art on Bob’s blog.

The Art of the Bride : Aly Fell

The Bride of Frankenstein as pin-up girl is a favorite subject for cartoonists and tattoo artists, but few illustrators are as accomplished as Aly Fell of Manchester, UK, whose sumptuous art is of a tradition that tracks back directly to the classic glamour artists like Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas.

Fell’s smart and sexy subjects are beautifully composed and awash in rich colors and witty details, as evidenced in his Bride portrait, entitled Charge! (2007). This Bride wears purple lipstick, green silk stockings and keeps a wrench on her dressing table. Hairspray by the crateful explains the hairstyle. Note the autographed snapshot of her beau and the stashed Abby Normal brain.

Aly (Alastair) Fell work is displayed for your guaranteed appreciation on his website and blog.

The Art of the Bride : Alfonso Azpiri

La Novia — the fiancée — as femme fatale, by Spanish artist Alfonso Azpiri.

One of the masters of European erotic fantasy comics, Azpiri favors classic horror, sword and sorcery and space opera served up adult-style, with bold nudity and sexual situations. In a vastly different register, his kids-oriented character Mot, a time traveling monster, was adapted to television as an animated series.

Alfonso Azpiri’s website.

With thanks to Emilio Lobato.

The Art of the Bride : Tom Bagshaw

British artist Tom Bagshaw describes the beautiful women he paints as “strong, intriguing characters, with an air of mystery to them.” This certainly applies to his starlit Bride who wears her stitches like delicate jewelry.

Bagshaw’s digital art serves a who’s who of editorial, advertising and fashion clients. His work can be appreciated on his website and blog. The ethereal Bride, titled Frankie, was created for Halloween. It is available as a limited edition giclee print.

The Art of the Bride : Mike Bell

New Jersey’s Mike Bell offers up an outlandish pop surrealist rendition, The Birth of the Bride. In another piece, The Bride is at once tough and sophisticated, wearing Old School tats, sipping a cocktail.

Bell’s lowbrow art celebrates monsters, pinup queens, robots and Jersey shore memorabilia, with the Karloffian Monster and Lanchester Bride as favorite subjects.

Check out his website and you’ll see Frankie decked out in fez and monocle, leopard-print smoking jackets, channeling Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash, or clinking martinis with his inamorata.

You’ll also see Lugosi’s Dracula flicking a Zippo with continental flair, and other indelible pop culture icons, from Marilyn Monroe to Astro Boy, decorating skateboards and matchbooks.

We'll revisit Mike Bell's universe in the near future, 'cause it's loaded with Frankenstein goodness.

The Art of the Bride : Sarah Joncas

A blue Bride, by Canadian painter Sarah Joncas, whose sensuous, romantic art focuses on female characters who seem to share a resemblance with the artist herself.

Ms Joncas keeps a generously illustrated website and a blog.

The Art of the Bride Continues!

The reaction to The Art of The Bride series has been terrific. Visitor traffic is way up over the Holidays, usually a very quiet time, and comments have been extremely positive here, on Facebook and even through email. So let’s keep going, all the way to New Year’s Day, shall we?

I’ll be posting my Year’s End recap first thing in January, and there’s lots of new stuff I’m eager share with you, but this week, again, we’ll feature artwork inspired by the fabulous Bride of Frankenstein. Here are seven more artists and seven more visions of The Bride, as we wrap up her 75th Anniversary Year in style.

Enjoy, and here’s to a great New Year!

Art cropped from the Bride of Frankenstein poster by Martin Hansin.

The Art of the Bride : Isabel Samaras

Here’s a holiday-appropriate nativity scene, monster magi in attendance. A second piece shows The Bride with a cherubic child. Two fabulous illustrations by Isabel Samaras.

In Isabel Samaras’ beautiful and witty art, pop culture characters meet the Old Masters. Goldilocks and the Gilligan gang channel Ingres. Batman, Robin and Catwoman evoke Rubens. Zira of the Planet of the Apes appears as a modern Madonna with chimpanzee child. Elvis, a pill-popping martyr, is borne away by angels. Universal Monsters — and Universal’s Munsters — are rendered as biblical iconography.

Samaras shows a distinct favoritism for Frankenstein’s Monster and his fabulous Bride. Among numerous interpretations, The Monster appears Saint-like, and The Bride rises from the sea on a Botticelli half-shell. Together, they are seen clinching in erotic fervor.

I could easily have filled this last week’s worth of daily posts just with Samaras’ Frankenstein paintings, every single one of them a perfect little masterpiece in its own right. I’ll be revisiting Samaras, here, in the coming weeks and months. There’s so much to admire.

Simply said: Among Frankenstein artists, Isabel Samaras is the Queen of them all.

An art book, On Tender Hooks, and a Postcard book.
Isabel Samaras’ website and blog.
An interview with Samaras via Fangoria.

The Art of the Bride : Don Ivan Punchatz

A bold Bride faces forward in this gorgeous illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz. A closeup shows Punchatz’ beautiful rendering, with a curious but very effective purple outline to the character. The blowup also reveals that the Bride was manually cut out and pasted onto the background.

The Bride, along with her famous beau, and fellow Universal Monsters The Mummy, Dracula and The Wolf Man, was part of a 1991 “Monster Match” promotion for Pepsi.

I must admit my unbounded admiration for Don Ivan Punchatz (1936-2009), truly one of the great American illustrators of the later half of the Twentieth century. His elegant and powerful art appeared in a surprisingly wide variety of venues. He created beautifully enigmatic covers for science fiction paperbacks, notably Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. He appeared in Playboy and Time, equally at ease with formal portraits or delightfully eerie metaphorical illustrations. His work would pop up in National Geographic with meticulous renderings of animals, as well as National Lampoon, showing stumblebum president Gerald Ford hitting himself in the forehead with an ice cream cone.

For all the amazing artwork he produced, Punchatz is perhaps most remembered as the creator of the iconic logo and box art for id Software’s Doom.

Punchatz was celebrated by his peers as the first artist to break away from New York where illustrators had traditionally settled so as to stay close to the publishing industry. Punchatz moved to Dallas where his career continued to flourish, going on to create a successful regional studio. Having studied under artist and teacher Burne Hogarth, Punchatz, in turn, mentored young artists, Gary Panter among them.

Now, question... When do we get a comprehensive book of Don Ivan Punchatz’ art?

Punchatz bio on Spectrum, and his New York Times obituary.

The Art of the Bride : Asunción Macián Ruiz

Here’s a supremely elegant Bride sporting delicate scrollwork tattoos. She’s a doll-maker, brought to life to create life in turn, making button-eyed monsters.

This sumptuous digital painting was created by Asunción Macián Ruiz, aka Medusa the Dollmaker, of Valencia, Spain. The artist dedicated the painting to “the divine Elsa Lanchester” and meant it as “a brief and tender tribute to all these movies that scared us and we grew up with, fathers and mothers of all actual terror films.”

The art was used to great effect as the poster for the first Festival Gótico y de Terror de Málaga held in March 2010.

Asunción Macián keeps a website, a blog, and a deviantART page.
Read an interview with the artist on Something We Like.

The Art of the Bride : Sarah Young

This striking, big-eyed Bride is a one-of-a-kind art doll by Texas-based artist Sarah Young.

The 20-inch tall Bride is sculpted in paper clay over an armature. Her beehive is mohair, her wedding gown is vintage fabric and she carries a bouquet of dried flowers.

Sarah Young’s website and Etsy page.
Photos of the Bride doll in progress.

The Art of The Bride : Damian Fulton

A beach off an industrial wasteland. Night falls, lightning strikes at sea, and it’s surf’s up for a tattooed Frankie while his teenage Bride (note the ring), catching moonbeams, reads a cheap mag by the light of firebugs in a jar.

California-based artist Damian Fulton’s credits include stints in advertising, serving as Head of Creative Development for Marvel Comics, and directing TV commercials for high-end clients. As a painter, Fulton explores the imaginary Pacific Coast zone where sun and surf, pop culture and the cars and sprawl of Los Angeles meet.

The Frankenstein Monster pops up here and there in Fulton’s work adorning skateboards or riding his Frankenstein Flivver, but this oil painting, called The Bathers, is uniquely and spectacularly original.

Damian Fulton’s website and deviantART page.

The Art of The Bride : Alex Gross

In his introduction to The Art of Alex Gross (2007), writer Bruce Sterling described the artist’s Pop Surrealist paintings as “… a powerful body of contemporary artwork whose themes include globalization, commerce, great beauty, dark mayhem, and the remorseless passage of time.”

With his curious Bride of Frankenstein portrait, artist Alex Gross breaks with his usually intricate, large-scale paintings steeped in irony and typically loaded with unsettling images and deep, often obscure cultural references.

Gross’ Bride is part of a delightful series that repurposes vintage photographs, painting directly over the cards and transforming the subjects into pop culture characters. Gross turns forgotten Victorians into colorful comic book heroes such as Batman and Wonder Woman, and famous movie monsters the likes of Godzilla and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. See the collection here.

Alex Gross’s website

The Art of The Bride : Marie Meier

Marie Meier’s Bride sips pink champagne and wields a cigarette holder with decadent aplomb. She keeps a brain in a bell jar and poses against intricately spooky wallpaper. The image is scratched and weathered like an old postcard, yet as vivid as a stained glass window.

In another painting, The Bride appears as mysterious and formal as a Byzantine icon.

Marie Meier’s subjects include musicians like Lux Interior; pinup queens, strippers and burlesque artistes; Bettie Page and Amanda Palmer, all wrapped in flowers and tentacles, flaming hearts, and candy colored Dia de los Muertos skeletons. Meier calls her outside art style “goth’n roll”.

Meier keeps an eye-popping website and several art blogs, all accessible through this one.

The Art of The Bride : Daniel Horne

The classic Bride, as played by Elsa Lanchester, comes to electric life in a luminous painting by Daniel Horne.

Horne is a multi-talented artist. As a painter, he has created some 400 book covers, he has illustrated children’s books, role-playing and card games, and his art graced the cover of the annual anthology of fantasy art, Spectrum. As a sculptor, Horne creates astonishing, one of a kind art dolls and unique monster masks.

Horne is a fan of classic movie monsters and, along the way, he has illustrated or sculpted all the great characters in the field, not the least of which is Frankenstein’s Monster in all its film versions, and related movie characters such as Colin Clive’s Frankenstein, Ernest Thesiger’s Pretorius and the Bride herself in glorious three dimensions.

Horne’s Bride painting is currently serving as the cover for the ever-excellent Monsters from the Vault magazine. It is also available as a very affordable print directly from the artist.

Daniel Horne’s website.