Untitled drawing by Tom of Finland. Tom of Finland’s beefy clones arrive within cruising distance of Buckingham Palace this week as part of an exhibition of drawings at the ICA. Keep Your Timber Limber is subtitled Works on Paper, and features contributions from eight artists old and new: Judith Bernstein, Tom of Finland, George Grosz, [...]
The 1922 edition of Hamlet “decorated” by British artist John Austen (1886–1948) is a lot more visible today than it was a few years ago, thanks to a reprint by Dover Publications in their Calla Editions series. The scans here are from an original printing at VTS. Austen’s Hamlet is often rated as his chef [...]
Ekaterina Panikanova paints on books. Back in 2009 I bought a book of Art Nouveau illustration and design which contained an intriguing drawing by an Austrian artist, Franz Wacik (1883–1938). At the time there was little of Wacik’s other work online so I was delighted by the latest post at 50 Watts which showcases a selection [...]
It’s a shame that artist Edmund Lewandowski (1914–1998) didn’t do more covers for Fortune magazine as I enjoy this combination of painting and design a great deal. The cover above shows how well you can illustrate a farming theme without resort to a view of rolling fields and busy tractors; the cover for March 1948 [...]
Yet more from the Fortune magazine scans at Chris Mullen’s VTS site. The covers here are all by American artist Antonio Petruccelli (1907–1994), a very versatile illustrator whose work is well-represented at VTS. In addition to his work for other magazines there’s a small selection of unused Fortune designs.
Chemicals by Ronald Searle, November 1963. More from the pages of Fortune magazine via the labour of love which is the VTS archive. A good reminder of the degree to which some magazines used to support many different kinds of illustrators and designers. The serious piece by Ronald Searle was a surprise since I thought [...]
Maren writes: “When I saw your recurrent gallery I couldn’t help but think of this photo my partner took of me one weekend here in San Francisco.” Many are the contemporary imitations of the Flandrin pose but this is one of the most accurate I’ve seen for its recapitulation of the details, from the ocean [...]
Le Cadavre Exquis by Yukio Michishita. As featured in The Purple Book: Sensuality & Symbolism in Contemporary Art & Illustration by Angus Hyland & Angharad Lewis. • ” Like Polo’s magic cities, which in the end all turn out to be Venice, fantasy finally refers us back to reality and the challenge of everyday social [...]
Paolo Garretto (1933). I always enjoy the month of June if the weather is decent. This week happens to be very sunny and relatively warm, the first time in years that the month’s weather hasn’t been wet, windy, and even cold. In celebration, here’s some June magazine covers which avoid the usual seasonal imagery. All [...]
Salomé: portrait of Tamara Karsavina (1914) by George Barbier. A slight return to the Russian ballet, and another Barbier portrait. Tamara Karsavina danced lead roles for the Ballets Russes, most notably with Nijinsky in the original performances of The Firebird. The pictures here are from La Tragedie de Salome, a ballet with music by Florent [...]
The Transformation of Actaeon (no date) by Jean Mignon. More gleanings from one of the better provinces of the Google Empire (unless and until they abandon it…), these being recent additions to the Google Art Project from the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. Jean Mignon’s etching shows Diana’s transformation of Actaeon into a stag as punishment [...]
Untitled drawing by Sophie Penrose. • “…many arts producers – much more so than the artists themselves – were over-fearful of the prospect of prosecution, when in nearly all incidents there were no reasonable grounds for bringing charges.” Julia Farrington of Index on Censorship on self-censorship by artists and art institutions in the UK. • [...]
For the past two months I’ve been busy drawing a new set of Tarot designs. More about these later, but sporadic research has naturally led to me to look at a few earlier sets, although my Trumps have mostly been following Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations for the Waite deck. Tarot designs have really proliferated in [...]
An inevitable one this, given the amount of times that George Barbier’s work has been featured here. Designs on the Dances of Vaslav Nijinsky was a series of prints published in 1913 when the dancer was at the height of his celebrity. All of Nijinsky’s major roles are represented although this isn’t quite the complete [...]
My friend James Marriott died last year. He was 39. His final book, The Descent, a study of Neil Marshall’s acclaimed horror film, is launched on Friday at the Cube Microplex in Bristol. The book is published by Auteur, a UK imprint, in their Devil’s Advocates series. James was finishing the book a year ago [...]
Catching up with more recent work, this was a quick collage for Fatality, a single by US musician OCTiV. This has been out for about a month. The main track—a kind of dubstep/metal hybrid—can be heard here. The request was for something on the cosmic horror spectrum which would also incorporate geometric elements, hence the [...]
A welcome arrival in the post recently was two issues of Abraxas, the book-format journal of esoteric studies from Fulgur Esoterica. I’ve always observed the contemporary occult scene from a distance, being more interested in cultural spin-offs whether those happen to be music-oriented—as was the late, lamented Coil—or art-oriented. Something I always enjoyed about Kenneth [...]
This poster for Massimo Dallamano’s 1970 updating of The Picture of Dorian Gray was featured here several years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to finally discover the name of the artist responsible, Ted Coconis. Better late than never. It could be argued that the illustrations below for Nabokov and Goldman tend more [...]
Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]
Cover of Salome by Oscar Wilde (1903) by Modest Alexandrovich Durnov. Gathering a few more Salomé renderings which have caught my attention recently. The biggest surprise is the one from Picabia since he’s an artist who these days is almost always associated with the Cubists and Dadaists. In the 1920s he returned to figurative painting [...]
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