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Ruins 3 by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith. “Dan wanted to do something on a really large scale and was looking at a lot of Piranesi and started talking to me about ruins. I then started looking at modern interpretations of this idea, I was obsessed with the post modern architecture of SITE, Disney [...]

At long last, the news that many people have been waiting for: the Reverbstorm book is now on sale at Savoy. From the hyperbolic press release: “Surfin’ bird Bbbbbbbbbbrbrbrbrbrb…awawawawawawawaaaaaah! A-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ooma-mow-mow Papa-oom-mow-mow!” The Trashmen, Surfin’ Bird Welcome to the nightmare metropolis of Torenbürgen, where New York’s Art Deco architecture has fused with the termination machinery of [...]

Salomé (c. 1919). Frantisek Drtikol (1883–1961) was a Czech artist and photographer whose nude studies frequently borrowed fin de siècle themes. Salomé was a subject he returned to on many occasions with different models. In other hands this might be a pretext for showing naked flesh but Drtikol’s work goes beyond mere soft porn with [...]

Reverbstorm: 1994–2012. Art, intellectual pursuits, the development of the natural sciences, many branches of scholarship flourished in close spacial, temporal proximity to massacre and the death camps. It is the structure and meaning of that proximity that must be looked at. […] But there is a [...] danger. Not only is the relevant material vast [...]

Secession poster (1899). Since I’ve been delving over the past year into the fin de siècle culture of Germany and Austria, the name of Koloman Moser (1868–1918) has kept recurring. This is partly because of Moser’s associations with the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, of course, but I’ve made a point of drawing attention [...]

Boys Kiss 2 (2007). The gay artists archive has for a long time been the most popular part of this site, that page proving twice as popular as the next post down. In which case I feel I ought to try and add to its contents a bit more frequently… Mel Odom is an American [...]

An exhibition of Wiener Werkstätte posters and graphics. Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 23 covers the period from October 1908 to March 1909, and aside from some dull paintings the Wiener Werkstätte continue to dominate proceedings with photographs and graphics from [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there’s another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it’s impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 11 covers the period from October 1902 to March 1903, and is almost solely devoted to the many design exhibits from the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna, a major exposition held in Turin in the [...]

Contes Oscar Wilde (c. 1928), design by Paul Bonet. Two selections from this gallery of bookbindings from the 1920s. Few books receive this kind of treatment today but it’s by no means a lost art, The Guild of Book Workers has examples of recent designs. La Canne de Jaspe (c. 1925), design by Pierre Legrain. [...]

The work of French architect and designer René Binet (1866–1911) has been featured here before with one of his most famous creations, the monumental gate he designed for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Philippe Jullian in his 1974 book about the exposition, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, calls the gate the “Porte Binet” and [...]

Another gem from the cornucopia of scanned books at the Internet Archive, Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs was a style guide and motif resource for artists and amateur craftspeople tasked with the creation of advertising show cards or shop display signs. The book was first published by the Detroit School of Lettering in 1910, [...]

It’s the poster for the 1924 film version we’re concerning ourselves with here, not the more popular 1940 adaptation directed by Michael Powell. Both films are great but I have a special affection for Raoul Walsh’s silent version and this poster design has long been a favourite for the way it manages to condense the [...]

“The Go-Go wonder of Paris — That’s space girl. Transistors never wear down, they just go on and on — Even her heart is made of vinyl — It’s a marvy life — With nothing else to do but dance — Why not? – Love? — Forget it, baby — Not for her —” From [...]

Yesterday’s post concerned skeleton clocks so I have to follow up with something about mystery clocks, those fascinating devices whose hands move without any apparent attachment to gears or clockwork. It’s the glass that moves, of course, and the trick is easily puzzled out in many of the pieces with circular faces. Rather more ingenious [...]

Yet another Salomé, this 1927 edition being a beautifully stylised Art Deco version by John Vassos (1898–1985), a Greek artist who moved to America in the 1920s. There aren’t many examples of these drawings online, unfortunately, I love to see a complete set of the illustrations. Salomé’s underarm hair is a detail one can’t imagine [...]

left: Jan Toorop (1898); right: no designer credited (1904). A search this week for work by Dutch designer Chris Lebeau (1878–1945) turned up another collection of fantastic decorated covers and prints from the Netherlands, running from the Art Nouveau period through Art Deco up to the 1940s. I found some Lebeau pieces but the big [...]

Belmont glass dial (1937). Something you’ll never get with your digital radio, fancy dials for the analogue spectrum. From Indiana Radios which has a lot more wireless ephemera. left: Sparton glass dial (1936); right: Fada glass dial (1937).

Shades of Toho: the city of San Francisco encounters its octopoid nemesis on this gig poster from DKNG. Via OMG Posters! • Related to the above: Godzilla Haiku. • View from Another Shore: a fantastic (so to speak) and overdue interview with Franz Rottensteiner, writer and editor of landmark studies of fantasy and science fiction. [...]

Myrna Loy, Charles Starrett and Boris Karloff. Los Alamos ranch school where they later made the atom bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the yellow peril. The boys are sittin’ on logs and rocks eating some sort of food there’s a stream at the end of a slope. The counsellor was a southerner [...]