Nike (1971) by Franciszek Starowieyski. My thanks to Marco Witzig for sending some promotional materials for a new exhibition of work by the great Polish artist Franciszek Starowieyski (1930–2009). The exhibition is running at the gallery of the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland from now until Spring 2013. There’s a selection of photos of [...]
50 Watts (formerly A Journey Around My Skull) followed its 2009 Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest with a contest to design a Polish book cover. The results were announced a few hours ago, the winner being the above design by Ben Jones who happens to be from Manchester. The rest of the entries can be seen [...]
Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below). • At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus [...]
Poster for Mademoiselle (1970) by Franciszek Starowieyski. Work has cranked into overdrive this week so posting will no doubt be minimal until some semblance of normality is restored. I can however mention two essential exhibitions which will be running through the forthcoming months. Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech [...]
left: Mame (1974); right: Excalibur (1981). Matthew Peak, son of film poster artist Bob Peak, left on a comment this week on an earlier post I made about his father’s art with news of the relaunch of the Peak site. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets posted there especially since the additions to date [...]
First Love Inferno (1968). There’s very little web information available for Aquirax Uno, a Japanese artist active in the 1960s and 1970s who really ought to have a dedicated site. Much of his work seems to be poster art for cinema or product advertising, and, as usual on the web, what there is tends to [...]
Poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, designed by Bronis?aw Zelek (1965). Freedom on the Fence is a 40-minute documentary film by Andrea Marks about the history of the Polish poster which includes a look at the many unique cinema and theatre designs produced in the 1960s and ’70s. Marks spent ten years working on this [...]
I’ve not seen Jack Smight’s 1966 caper movie for years, and don’t remember much about it beyond Maurice Binder’s kaleidoscopic title sequence. But I like this collage poster, a suitably frenetic piece for one of Hollywood’s many attempts throughout the 1960s to capitalise on modish fashion. I can’t find a credit for the designer so [...]
Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from [...]
An example from this Flickr set. Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise [...]
Not only Philip José Farmer but Polish poster artist Franciszek Starowieyski also died this week, something I probably wouldn’t have known had it not been for the indefatigable Jahsonic. I mentioned Starowieyski’s stunning work earlier this month since he produced the poster for Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has. There’s a further link to Bruno Schulz [...]
The original Polish poster by the incredible Franciszek Starowieyski. The shrinking pool of films still unavailable on DVD contracted by at least one title recently with the surprise appearance in the UK of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydra; 1973) from the distinctively-named Mr Bongo Films. I’ve been waiting to see this for at least [...]
I wouldn’t be surprised if these have been linked all over but I hadn’t come across this site before, Czech posters from the Cold War period when promotional material for Hollywood films was home-produced. This makes for some surprising results as with the psychedelic confection for Dumbo shown above. Elsewhere there’s a Piranesian collage for [...]
Previous posts about fantastic, surreal or visionary artists. • The art of Joanna Chrobak • Giger’s Tarot • Giger’s Necronomicon • The art of Thomas Cole, 1801–1848 • Raymond Bertrand paintings • Raymond Bertrand’s science fiction covers • Visionaries: The Art of the Fantastic • Starowieyski in Switzerland • The art of Luis Toledo • [...]
Stay updated via RSS.
