Category: {design}

Design

Gay book covers

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Gay on the Range (very apt name in the year of Brokeback Mountain) has a great selection of gay paperback covers from the 1950s and 60s. The one above is one of the more psychedelic examples (I was 7 years old in 1969; no one told me it was “the gay year”.) Lots of hysterical art and titles, some of them genre parodies, others delicious examples of steamy prurience that teasingly imply “exposure” of the terrible world of “the gay”. For balance, the Strange Sisters site has a similar collection of lesbian book jackets from the same period.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The book covers archive

Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

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Another favourite painting for many years and Böcklin’s most well-known work.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883. The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died.

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