Will Bradley – { feuilleton }

More Aubrey fakery

It’s surprising to find such blatant examples of fraudulence on a major museum website yet here we are with 13 poor attempts at the Beardsley style credited by the Art Institute of Chicago to “Imitator of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley”. Imitators usually sign their work with their own names, not with the name of the artist being imitated, the description required here is “faker”. As Beardsley imitations go, these examples aren’t as clumsy as some of the Nichols fakes; they’re also not as widely disseminated but then Nichols published a book of his attempts. Chicago just happens to be the home of a group of Beardsley’s contemporaries led by Will Bradley who championed the Beardsley style in The Chap-Book. There’s the vague possibility that these drawings may have been the work of a Chap-Book artist (the Art Institute site offers no information) although Bradley himself can be ruled out, he was a much better artist than this.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

Les Maîtres de l’Affiche

Alphonse Mucha.

Les Maîtres de l’Affiche was a multi-volume guide to the state of poster art in the 1890s, published in five volumes from 1896 to 1900. Being a French publication, the contents are mostly by French artists but other nations are represented—Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States—although fewer contributions than you might expect given the quantity of pages to be filled. The chief attraction of these books is the attention they give to each design, all of which are printed in colour on a full page, and the time of publication which coincides with the birth of Art Nouveau. In addition to the great Alphonse Mucha there are designs by Eugène Grasset, Henri Privat-Livemont, Georges de Feure, Will Bradley, Louis Rhead and others. There’s also a lot of cabaret stuff from Montmartre which has never been to my taste (although I like the Steinlen posters) but those designs were the typical ones of the period.

Henri Privat-Livemont.

The first four volumes in this set may be found at Gallica (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4) but not the fifth volume—isn’t a national library supposed to be more thorough than this?—which may be seen at NYPL. For those who prefer paper reproductions, there’s a reprint in Dover Publications’ Pictorial Archive series, The Complete “Masters of the Poster”: All 256 Colour Plates from “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche”.

Louis Rhead.

Will Bradley.

Joseph Sattler.

Continue reading “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche”

Constructive Cover Designing

Not a guide from myself but a sample book from 1923 produced by the Hampden Glazed Paper and Card Co. of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Seventy-six designs by different artists are arranged by theme—landscape, architectural and so on—the common thread being the way they all give prominent space to the paper that provides the background of the design. The restrained colour palette and use of space reminds me of some of the posters produced by Noel Rook and others for the London Underground at this time. This isn’t an isolated style, in other words, and the prevalence of the look in the 1920s may have filtered into the cover designs Edward Gorey was creating for Doubleday in the 1950s. Mark Dery’s Gorey biography mentions Japanese prints being an influence on Gorey’s covers but he would have grown up around books and poster graphics that looked like this, designs which themselves (via Aubrey Beardsley, Will Bradley and others) possess a Japanese influence.

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American Art Posters of the 1890s

Selections from a 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhbition catalogue which features many more colour plates. My choices gravitate as usual to the American Beardsley, Will Bradley. The other artists here are EB Bird (above) and Louis Rhead, both of whom also produced bookplate designs (see here and here).

Continue reading “American Art Posters of the 1890s”

Weekend links 144

Ruins 3 by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith.

“Dan wanted to do something on a really large scale and was looking at a lot of Piranesi and started talking to me about ruins. I then started looking at modern interpretations of this idea, I was obsessed with the post modern architecture of SITE, Disney fantasy settings, Busby Berkeley, Sotsass ceramics, Art Deco motifs in general, Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, Arabic temples and on and on…” Rachel Thomas talks to Daisy Woodward about Imaginary View, an exhibition currently showing at Somerset House, London.

• A brief description of The Yokel’s Preceptor (1855), a guide to Victorian London’s gay underworld by William Dugdale. When do we get to see a facsimile of this document? The slang is a treat.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 054, a great selection by Biosphere of doomy ambience from the Post Punk/early Industrial era, 1979–1981.

Stella (Ernest Boulton) with Fanny (Frederick Park) (c. 1860–1870).

While Stella and Fanny might be the most terrible show-offs, not to mention industrious sex workers, even they drew the line at coupling in public places. Over the course of the subsequent trial, and despite bribing witnesses, the prosecution failed to prove that sodomy had ever occurred, either between the two young men themselves, or within their circle of genteel “sisters”, or even in a dark corner behind the Haymarket with a passing guardsman. Eventually, and only after a second trial a year later, the young men were found not guilty and allowed to slip back into their lives of pro-am theatricals, touring together and separately in such limp pieces as A Comical Countess and A Morning Call.

Kathryn Hughes reviews Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England by Neil McKenna. Related: photographs of the pair.

• The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, a book of essays and a cassette tape dedicated to the television dramatist.

• Sheltered and Safe from Sorrow: “Victorian mourning rituals, tombstones, epitaphs, and other creepy things”.

• Crate digging and the resurgence of vinyl. Related: Men & Vinyl, a Tumblr devoted to men and their discs.

• Designer Shirley Tucker talks about her cover for the first edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

• More Will Bradley at The Golden Age (formerly Golden Age Comic Book Stories).

• The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2), a new track by The Haxan Cloak.

• Psychedelic Press UK | Related: Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?

• Paris in colour circa 1900.

• Twilight (1983) by Pete Shelley | Twilight (2000) by Antony and the Johnsons | Twilight (2005) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd