Constructivist art

And simply because I mentioned contructivism in my last post, and because Google picture search is so amazing:

Loretta Lux

I should hopefully be going to the Sally Mann exhibition in Copenhagen next week. In the meantime I'm already in a 'spooky childhood' kind of mood. Here are a few images from the Loretta Lux homepage. These haunting pictures certainly captures.... well... something about childhood. At least Childhood as I remember it. No, I was not a happy kid.

• Visit the Loretta Lux Homepage

Gothic pulp

I got this link from the Neil Gaiman blog... gothic book covers. Yay!

SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling)

One of the unexpected results of me starting a Carl Barks thread on the Comics Journal board has been the discovery of the art book "SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling)" by Niklaus Rüegg.

By now those Garfield strips with Garfield removed are very well known around the web...



... but this is something even more strange. It's "Donald Duck" comics by Carl Barks with all characters and speech balloons removed, leaving behind the impression of a disembodied camera floating slowly around an empty suburbian enviroment. Very eerie. And it's all done with very few lines.

Aage Sikker Hansen

I've bought more art books with legendary 1930s-1960s Danish illustrator Aage Sikker Hansen. Here are more images by that wonderful illustrator, including som ads for Tobacco and Coffee that are quite famous and iconic in Denmark. The guy definitely had a thing for black women.

Chinese Propaganda Posters

okay, so it's a bit of a stretch to relate Chinese communist propaganda to the thirties, but never mind, it's too cool for me not to post it.. and in a way it feels like the artistic style in some communist countries never developed, so it's like they continued living in the the 30s or 40s forever.:

Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages

"This site is dedicated to the Chinese propaganda poster as it has been produced from 1937 till the present day. So-called propaganda art has played a major supporting role in the many campaigns that were designed to mobilize the people, and throughout the People's Republic, the propaganda poster has been the favored vehicle through which art conveyed model behavior. I've been collecting these Chinese political posters for many years now, and have brought together quite a nice collection of some 2,000 titles, spanning almost six decades of Chinese poster production. From time to time, new sections will be added to the site, devoted to the political, social and economic movements and developments that have found their way into visual propaganda over the years. As my collection expands over time, existing sections will expand as well in order to include more or more exciting posters that I have acquired."

1930 posters

The International Poster Gallery has an excellent search feature that makes it possible to search for posters from particular decades. There are more than 600 posters from the 1930s.

The site also has an excellent outline, "A Brief History of the Poster".

Here are some of my favorites:

Vintage travel posters

Kerne Erickson (see one of the previous posts) is a contemporary artist capturing the essense of vintage travel posters, but this exhibition from The Los Angeles Public Library is the real thing:

"Speed, style and grace — these epitomize the Golden Age of travel in its simplest form.
The 1920’s and 1930’s ushered in an unprecedented era of travel to exotic and romantic destinations. And nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in the travel posters of that time. The Los Angeles Public Library ’s collection of travel posters perfectly captures this era. With this exhibition, the Library shares its bounty with the public for the first time."

some of the posters can be bought from the 'vintage' sections at www.allposters.com or www.art.com.

Kerne Erickson

Kerne Erickson is a contemporary artist who does graphic art in a nostalgic retro style. Really, really nice! Buy prints here.