February 2009 – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

Art Nouveau illustration

The cover picture of yesterday’s book purchase complements the month, being a woodcut by Leopold Stolba entitled February from a Ver Sacrum calendar for 1903. The book is Art Nouveau: Posters and Designs (1971), a collection edited by Andrew Melvin for the Academy Art Editions series and the book includes some covers for Jugend magazine which coincidentally was the subject of Monday’s post.

Ornamental letters from The Studio magazine, 1894; no artists credited.

I wrote about another of the books in the Academy series, The Illustrators of Alice, a couple of years ago and while I don’t really need yet another Art Nouveau book, the presence of a few illustrations I hadn’t seen before made the purchase worthwhile. Further examples follow.

Continue reading “Art Nouveau illustration”

Colin Corbett’s decorated jockstraps

I missed posting something about Strapped: The Art of the Decorated Jockstrap while the exhibition was running last month at the London College of Communications but better late than never with this. Designer Colin Corbett’s playful additions to the humble jockstrap hit so many spots of obsession it’s like he read my mind: black clothes, swords, peacocks, jockstraps… You can see more of them here and he talks about some of the designs here.

Dennis Covey, meanwhile, turns jockstraps into art by making unique torso casts of their wearers. He also has a fine collection of other homoerotic work, most of which is for sale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Game boy

Jugend Magazine

Two of several cover illustrations by Hans Christiansen (1866–1945) for 1898 issues of Jugend magazine. I waited a long time for someone to put together a site devoted to Jugend and good as this one is I can’t help but wish it was as thorough as the Simplicissimus site. Jugend is a regular fixture in histories of Art Nouveau since it was the magazine’s promotion of the new graphic style which gave the movement a name in Germany, Jugendstil. The covers look strikingly advanced today in the way they vary their style and the presentation of the magazine title from one week to the next. The monotonous branding of contemporary magazines seems staid in comparison. Christiansen’s swirling title design shows why these covers had such an influence on the psychedelic poster art of the 1960s. You can see a larger copy of that cover here and a further 299 drawings and paintings by the artist here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Meggendorfer’s Blatter
• Simplicissimus

The art of Ryan Martin

To Live and Die in LA.

I really like Ryan Martin’s beautiful paintings of fey youths in vibrant, vaguely surreal scenarios. Those familiar with the work of Leonardo da Vinci may recognise Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want as being based on The Lady with an Ermine (1490). There isn’t a great deal of Martin’s work around since he’s only just starting out but you can see more of it at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art.

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.

Cupid de Locke.