Marius van Boordt
Last August, someone reached out to me looking for information about a long-lost bedroom poster from their 1980s childhood in NSW, Australia. All they had to go on was one muddy picture of it:
I didn't recognize it, and none of my guesses panned out – it reminded me of the type of concept or poster art that you'd see for animated films like The Black Cauldron or The Secret of NIMH, but I didn't have any luck sniffing up the Don Bluth-related tree.
I shared it on my blog, and the original poster had a little more to share:
"The only other clue I have is that in the bottom left hand corner, which has been cropped out of this photo, is the initials “Jf” with the bar of the F aligning to the top of the J. I’ve been trying to find the origin of it, and to get another copy, for 3 decades now."
I think the same person might have actually reached out to me years earlier as well, although I can't recall exact details. They've been looking for a while!
Flashforward to this week, when I was randomly looking through vintage poster art online, and stumbled onto an Etsy listing. It took me a second to realize why it looked so familiar.
It's called "The Fourth Dimension," and it's by Marius van Boordt. The poster was printed in the Netherlands by John Faber Production, which is what the "JF" initials were for.
Mystery solved! I've messaged the person who was looking for it – hopefully they check their Tumblr sometime soon.
Looks like one other Marius van Boordt poster, also from John Faber Production, can be found on Ebay. It depicts Jupiter:
Here's his 1978 album cover artwork for Gustav Holst's The Planets:
He's also behind this 1977 album cover for Kayak's Starlight Dancer. But that's the extent of van Boordt's sci-fi-tangental album art, according to Discogs, which only has a total of four albums cited to van Boordt.
The Fourth Dimension poster is definitely my favorite out of these options, but when I switched to the Dutch-language marketplace Marktplaats.nl, things got a little more interesting.
First, I found an expired listing for the Fourth Dimension poster that clarified a little more about van Boordt: "Beautiful spiritual poster after the well-known oil painting by Marius van Boordt from the early 1970s. Beautiful colors, not discolored. Almost 50 years old."
So, it really is from the 1970s, and it's "spiritual" and an oil painting that's "well-known" in the Netherlands, according to that seller.
I then found another very cool looking Marius van Boordt poster, "The Consecration." I wasn't able to pull the images from that listing, but with a little Googling, I found a PDF that had an even better version of the painting:
Not sure what's going on here, but this one certainly strikes me as "spiritual." My best guess is that it's about the second coming of Christ, with the empty grave on the right indicating where Jesus came from, with the Earth ahead as his destination? It reminds me of Gilbert Williams' body of work.
That was all the Marius van Boordt art I could find today, but that last poster listing only went up last February, so I imagine more posters might turn up in the future if I keep searching for them.
Here's one last non-Boordt poster from Marktplaats.nl: A '70s reproduction of a 1959 artwork by Diana vanden Bergh:
In other news, Worlds Beyond Time was just announced as a finalist for the 2024 Locus Awards!
It's in the "Illustrated and Art Book" category alongside nine others. I'm really happy about it! My book didn't get any noms for the Hugos or the Nebulas, but it's really nice to slip something in right at the end of awards season.