![\"mouse_kelley.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/mouse_kelley.jpg\")
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Miller Blues Band\/Mother Earth\/Bukka White by Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse (1967).<\/em><\/p>\n I already had this piece roughed out before discovering that psychedelic artist Alton Kelley died last month<\/a>, something that doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely. I posted the picture above last October<\/a> then in January this year wrote something about San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition<\/a> of 1915. But it’s taken me until now to realise that these two things are connected.<\/p>\n The San Francsico poster artists of the Sixties, of which Mouse & Kelley<\/a> were leading members, borrowed frequently from earlier sources, especially Art Nouveau stylists such as Alphonse Mucha and the Symbolist painters. A recent Thames & Hudson book, Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco<\/em><\/a> traces some of the more obvious influences but this is one example which seems to have eluded them.<\/p>\n Descending Night and <\/em>Rising Day by Adolph Alexander Weinman (1914).<\/em><\/p>\n The statue that Mouse & Kelley used was titled Descending Night<\/em> and was, with Rising Day<\/em> (aka The Rising Sun<\/em>), one of a pair of symbolic works created by sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman (1870\u20131952) for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. The photos above are from one of the books I linked to earlier, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts<\/em><\/a> by Juliet Helena Lumbard James. The identities of artists’ models are rarely preserved but in the case of Descending Night<\/em> we know that one Audrey Munson was the model. And I know that<\/em> thanks to a well-timed overview of Ms Munson’s career by Silent-Porn-Star<\/a>.<\/p>\n Weinman later worked his statue designs into these rather fine figurines which became his best-selling small bronzes. These pictures make visible the stars at the feet of Night<\/em> and the sun at the feet of Day<\/em>.<\/p>\n left: Adolph Alexander Weinman in his studio with a study for Descending Night in the background; right: Alton Kelley in the Sixties.<\/em><\/p>\n Weinman didn’t live long enough to see his work exploited on a gaudy concert poster and given his adherence to a pre-Modern, Beaux-Arts style it’s perhaps just as well. He’s most remembered today for his Liberty design for the American Silver Eagle<\/a> which also used Audrey Munson as the model. Ms Munson lived to 1996 so I can’t help wonder if she ever saw her youthful figure return on Mouse and Kelley’s poster. The same year as the San Francisco Exposition she played an artist’s model in Inspiration<\/em>, a film by George Foster Platt which is only notable now for being the first American non-porn film to feature a nude woman. She stripped off again a year later for Rae Berger’s Purity<\/em>. Audrey was 76 in 1967 but something tells me she that her free spirit would have identified with the Summer of Love more than many others of her generation.<\/p>\n Elsewhere on { feuilleton } Previously on { feuilleton } Miller Blues Band\/Mother Earth\/Bukka White by Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse (1967). I already had this piece roughed out before discovering that psychedelic artist Alton Kelley died last month, something that doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely. I posted the picture above last October then in January this year wrote something about San … Continue reading “San Francisco angels”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4,48,3,17,41],"tags":[905,4537,449,442,1875],"class_list":["post-3310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-design","category-illustrators","category-music","category-psychedelia","category-sculpture","tag-alphonse-mucha","tag-alton-kelley","tag-audrey-munson","tag-stanley-mouse","tag-thames-hudson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-Ro","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"weinman.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/weinman.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"weinman2.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/weinman2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"weinmann_kelley.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/weinmann_kelley.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u2022 The Evanescent City<\/a>
\n\u2022 Family Dog postcards<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"