leading from
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| self portrait of Jean Delville |
a) My discovery
I found out about about Jean Delville's amazing painting "Treasures of
Satan" in the early 1990s from an article about Andrzej Żuławski's movie Possession and then I suddenly realised
that this painting where H R Giger got the idea for the general shape of the
creature in the painting Alien Monster IV which I had known about from the book Giger's Alien several years earlier from the Giger's Alien book.
It might seem as if he took the outline of the
form of this Satan for his creature Alien Monster IV transforming the
back tentacles into the creatures wings and the sheet of material
wrapped around the upper arm (the sheet I suspect extends along the mass
of bodies below him and it's by this he is dragging them along), into
the shoulder of the alien, so the whole torso and the leg extending
across the painting of this male ballet dancer like figure transforms
into a single arm and part of the ribcage of the alien.
See: Alien Monster IV (1978) by HR Giger references Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville?
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| Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville and Alien Monster IV (1978) (work 408) by HR Giger |
b) Noticing the Delville influence
At the end of the Alien production, H R Giger can be found to have painted Alien Monster IV, (dated 1978 at www.littlegiger.com), which offers us in the form of another alien with an elongated head, similar to the movie creature and with hands that look as if it has fingers similar to those of the facehugger. However it is a homage to Jean Delville although nowhere has H R Giger told us about this in any of his published interviews. The biomechanoid creature is part Jean Delville's Satan and part bird of prey perhaps an eagle. And after Alien, Andrzej Zulawski tried to get H R Giger to work on his film Possession which would be found to take ideas from Delville's work, but since it was so soon after Alien, H R Giger passed them onto Carlo Rambaldi who created for them a very memorable monster inspired in its different stages of transformation by Treasures of Satan and the poster for the film had been inspired by Idol of Perversity itself. The sudden interest in Delville's work may well connect with the fact that in 1978, the Italian book Il simbolismo di Jean Delville written by Maria Luisa Frongia. was published in Bologna, Italy. ( See: Possession: The Beast in Andrzej Zulawski's Berlin movie)
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| Delville's "Idol of Perversity" |
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| Poster for Andrzej Zulawski's Possession |
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