One day I really will have exhausted this subject but for the moment here’s another look at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. I’d downloaded this photo album months ago from the excellent resources at the University of Heidelberg then promptly forgot all about it. The book is of interest for the variety of views [...]
Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian. • The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show. [...]
Autochrome by Léon Gimpel. The Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris is one of the few sites remaining from the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (see yesterday’s post), and is still in use today as a venue for art exhibits, fashion shows and the like. The huge and graceful canopy ceiling makes it a far better venue [...]
Grand entrance. Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 but these photochom prints at the Library of Congress are so sharp, detailed and subtly hued they make all other views seem crude [...]
Dorian Gray (1924) by Otto Verhagen (1885–1951). If you need an idea of the colossal impact Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing had on the art world of the 1890s consider that the entirety of his career—from his first public exposure in The Studio in 1893 to his very untimely death in 1898—lasted a mere five years. Decades [...]
After several posts about Albert Robida it seems more-or-less mandatory to write something about his spectacular creation for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. “Vieux Paris” was an elaborate theme park-style attraction which sought to recreate some of the lost buildings of medieval Paris on the right bank of the Seine, a short distance from [...]
I’m sure I’ll run out of things to say on this subject eventually but it’s showing no sign of happening yet. In an exposition with its fair share of unusual buildings, the Grand Globe Céleste in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 was one of the more notable constructions. An enormous globe built on the [...]
The Exposition gateway. In a blizzard of work this month I finished another project with a Victorian theme (not more Steampunk!) which I won’t reveal just yet as I dislike spoiling the surprise for publishers. Part of the preparation involved yet more trawling through scanned volumes at the Internet Archive, looking this time at British [...]
Despite being one of the most striking and beautiful national pavilions in the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the Cambodian building seldom features isn’t featured in any of the exposition guides I’ve seen. These photos are from the excellent set of William Henry Goodyear views presented by the Brooklyn Museum at Flickr. If it wasn’t for [...]
Another Art Nouveau journal partially emerged from the world’s libraries, Art et Décoration was a French equivalent of The Studio, launched a few years after its British counterpart in 1897. The examples here are from a cover design competition in the first issue which yielded the usual complement of decorous muses and florid borders; The [...]
Ancient Egyptian capitals from The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones at Egyptian Revival. • Golden Age Comic Book Stories has been pulling out all the stops recently with entries for Will Bradley, Alphonse Mucha’s Documents Decoratifs (a companion volume to Combinaisons Ornementales), and pages from My Name is Paris (1987) illustrated by Michael [...]
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 [...]
Turin exposition poster by Leonardo Bistolfi. Part two of a two-part skate through the contents of volume 10 of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. In addition to the Heinrich Vogeler feature which was the subject of yesterday’s post, this edition includes articles on the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna [...]
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 7 covers the period from October 1900 to March 1901 and features a set of ornamental capitals throughout this edition designed by Karl Lürtzing, part of a presentation of typefaces in the Art Nouveau style. The [...]
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 6 covers the period from April to September 1900, and the content is still Art Nouveau all the way, with a dash of Symbolism. Among the contributors in this edition there’s Otto Eckmann and more work [...]
The only place of amusement which was an unqualified success was Le Manoir a l’Envers (The Upside-Down Manor). One entered this building through the roof. The furniture was suspended in the air and in the drawing-room people could walk round a chandelier whose lamps illuminated their feet; through the ventilator holes of the cellar there [...]
More eccentric exposition architecture. This edifice towered briefly over the Stockholm skyline for the General Art and Industrial Exposition of 1897, an event for which there seems to be very little information online. The exposition doesn’t receive an entry at ExpoMuseum and this is the only photo at the Library of Congress’s wonderful Photocrom archive. [...]
A pair of adverts from the Guide Lemercier for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, available as either a PDF or individual page scans at the University of Heidelberg’s archive. This looks like it would have been a very usable guide, with coloured maps and a good selection of photographs. The Suchard adverts provide splashes [...]
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 [...]
Do all roads lead to the Internet Archive? Not really but I keep ending up there when I happen to discover an interesting old book and wonder whether they have a PDF of the volume in question. The volume for consideration today, The House of Orchids, is a 1911 collection of verse by George Sterling [...]
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