“Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire

Most Coveted Covers #174
By D.G. Strong
[Part 2 of 3]

Lucky you! This week you get another Alvin Lustig masterpiece. There are worse things to have to look at week after week, let me tell you. Like “Two and a Half Men,” for instance! But as the kids say ... anyway. Lustig’s 1951 cover for Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil is, as far as I’m concerned, one of his half-dozen best covers. But I admit it seems silly to try to rank them; they're all fantastic. Flowers of Evil is one of his more literal approaches — he usually abstracted (or ignored) the title almost to the point of absurdity, but he approaches this one pretty directly. The little blobs pretty much look like, well, evil flowers. You get the classic oddball Lustig color scheme that only a crazy person or a genius would think of ... the kind of colors that you're seeing all over the place these days in catalogs, only instead of orange and blue, they call them “tanned hide” and “sea glass.” One reason I like this so much is that it reminds me of other artists who preceded Lustig, as well as some who followed him. It could be a twittery Miro doodle or even a detail of the anxious lines of a Roz Chast cartoon. It's vintage and modern. Vintage-Modern! Someone should start that movement. Oh wait, nevermind. I forgot about Domino magazine. Wait, what was I talking about?

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Comments

[lynn c]

That is pretty. When you click on the cover, you can see that Amazon has three different editions, with three *completely* different covers. This one isn't even shown there, but it really is the standout.

[Karen Templer]

The difference between this is and the brand-spanking-new one (the linked one) is almost hilarious. Though I like both.

The book title is amusing all by itself.

[dgstrong]

A lot of the Lustig covers are out of print. It's almost criminal.

[mara]

I like that the images bring to mind both deep sea creatures and bugs. This is making me think of that movie The Bad Seed. Kids with long blonde braids are creepy.

[Kat Warren]

Gorgeous. As are the contents.

[Joseph J. Finn]

Nope, going to be contrary here. It's a mess (on the other hand, it still makes more sense than Charlie Sheen having a job).