Alastair was a German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. Mysterious, flamboyant, enigmatic and attractive to many people, he was born of German nobility in Karlsruhe. In his youth he joined the circus and learned mime. Shortly after leaving school he studied philosophy at Marburg University where he met the writer Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...

.

He is best known as an illustrator. His drawings, which are often decadent in spirit and have the look of Art Deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

, are influenced somewhat by the drawings of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....

. Their ‘serpentine line’ often depicts 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 contained ten full-page illustrations by him ‘printed in black and turquoise’. Many of his drawings were inspired by the poems of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 and in 1922 Alastair would illustrate a book of Wilde’s Salome.

Other books containing Alastair's illustrations include The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) by Carl Van Vechten

Carl van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...

, Red Skeletons by Harry Crosby

Harry Crosby

Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....

 (1928) and a 1928 edition of "The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...

" by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, the last two published by the Black Sun Press

Black Sun Press

The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...

. In The Blind Bow-Boy Alastair depicted the ‘androgynous male’. During the 1930s, he would stop drawing only to resume in 1964. He died in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

in 1969.