Dissolving: The beast

Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910): Gorilla carrying off a woman, second version, 1887 (the first version, rejected by the Paris Salon: 1858). Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Cartoon by Homer Davenport against the “Crokerism” (Richard Croker’s influence) dominating New York, 1898

Poster of the American film Ravished Armenia (1919)

Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration (1894-1895) to Poe’s The murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

Journal des Voyages, 31 January 1909. (An earlier issue of 1885 here, and its model – one of the most important sources of 19th-century gorilla madness – here and here).

King Kong, 1933

“Destroy this mad brute! Enlist US Army” Anti-German Anglo-American war poster, 1917-1918 (Norman Lindsay’s Australian version of 1918 here)

“Destroy the German beast!” Nikolai Khaldogin’s photo, Leningrad, blocade, December 1941 – February 1942. The original poster has not survived, but its colored version was prepared for a film shooting in 2011.

Gino Boccasile: A Fascist propaganda stamp representing an American soldier dragging away the Venus of Milo, and the same stamp pasted on an envelope in Northern Italy occupied by the Germans, 1944, from here