Alastair (artist)

Illustration from Harry Crosby's book Red Skeletons published in 1927.

Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt) was an artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. Mysterious, flamboyant, enigmatic and attractive to many people he was born of German nobility in 1887 in Karlsruhe. In his youth he joined the circus and learned mime. Shortly after leaving school he studied philosophy at Marburg University where he would meet the writer Boris Pasternak.

Perhaps achieving more as an illustrator, Alastair’s drawings, which are often decadent in spirit and have the look of Art Deco and influenced somewhat by the drawings of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘serpentine line’ often depict characters whose outlines are lightly drawn with the main areas filled in with ‘broken dotted lines’. Alastair’s fame spread in 1920 with the publication of The Sphinx which had contained ten full-page illustrations by him ‘printed in black and turquoise’. Many of his drawings were inspired by the poems of Oscar Wilde and in 1924 Alastair would illustrate a book of Wilde’s Salome.

Other books containing Alastair's illustrations include the The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) by Carl Van Vechten, Red Skeletons by Harry Crosby (1928) and a 1928 edition of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, the last two published by the Black Sun Press. In The Blind Bow-Boy Alastair would depict the ‘androgynous male’. During the 1930s, he would stop drawing only to resume in 1964. He died in Munich in 1969.