Miscellany

 

Poster for the 1965 West German re-release of The Seven Year Itch; designed by Dorothea Fischer-Nosbisch (1921 - 2009)

Yasmeen Ghauri, Nadege du Bospertus, and Beverly Peele

Poster for India Song, 1975

Careers board game, USA 1950's

1970's New York, unidentified photographer

Early to Mid 20th Century Kimono

 

Machine-spun pongee silk woven with stencil-printed warp thread (meisen) Japan, Taisho period, 1912-26.

Machine-spun pongee silk woven with stencil-printed warp and weft threads (meisen). Japan, late Taisho-early Showa period, 1920-40.

Gauze weave silk (ro) with stencil-printed patterning (kata-yuzen). Japan, early Taisho period, 1912-20

Machine-spun pongee silk woven with stencil-printed warp and weft threads (meisen). Japan, early Showa period, 1930-40.

Hand-spun pongee silk (tsumugi) woven with stencil-printed weft threads. Japan, Taisho period, 1912-26

Machine-spun pongee silk woven with stencil-printed warp and weft threads (meisen). Japan, early Showa period, 1930-50

All of the Kimono here can be found in the book, Fashioning Kimono: Dress and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Japan. They were shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art in 2005 and 2006, on loan from the collection of Jeffrey Montgomery, a prominent collector of Japanese folk art.

CoBrA

The CoBrA artists' movement was established in Paris, but its name is an acronym of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam; the cities from where the founders hailed. The highly collaborative group banded together in 1948 and was active until 1951, though the members still occasionally work together even today.

Considered to be an offshoot of surrealism, CoBrA sought to recapture the whimsy and naive spirit of children's art, creating subconscious renderings of imagined creatures. They welcomed poets to their group to collaborate equally on paintings, mixed media pieces, books, and periodicals.

The key figures in CoBra are Karel Appel, Hugo Claus, Pierre Alechinsky, Constant Anton Niuwenhuys, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn, and Jean-Michel Atlan.

There is a museum dedicated to the movement in Amstelveen, Netherlands called Cobra Museum of Modern Art

Series of 15 book covers, 1950.  

De Blijde en Onvoorziene Week (The Joyful and Unexpected Week), Karel Appel and Hugo Claus, 1950

L'Oie Belge (The Belgian Goose), Pierre Alechinsky and Hugo Claus, 1980

More about CoBrA
Underground Arts: The COBRA Group

Saul Leiter's Sketchbooks

Saul Leiter is an American photographer, known for his striking color photography of New York in the 1940's and 50's. They are really incredible, and I will be certain to present them one day soon, but today I want to take a look at his equally fantastic sketchbooks, which he shared with This Long Century. A major retrospective of Leiter’s work will be on show at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen Museum, from February 2 – April 22, 2012.

Miscellaneous B&W Photos

Patrick Hunt for Vogue UK, June 1969. 

Laura Levine, Prince NYC 1981

Janette Beckman, Rude Boys, London, 1981

Kim Novak in Life Magazine for the film Bell, Book, and Candle, 1958

Andy Warhol shot by Dennis Hopper, circa 1961

Miscellaneous People

Lionel Richie, as drawn by Richard Amsel. I have always felt that Lionel seems like a cool guy, and I wish he was a friend of mine.

Inez Dickerson shot in 1951, by Carl Van Vechten for the Living Portraits Series 1939-1964. I've tried to find out, but I don't know who she is or what she may be known for.

Still from Alejandro Jodorowsky's  1970 film, El Topo (he also directed The Holy Mountain). Sourced from one of my faves, I Love Hot Dogs.

Old friend, David Bowie, putting on his face in the 70s. It looks like so much fun to play with all of that pigment!

Pianist Mauricio Kagel, 1937-2008

Cards

Back of a vintage playing card, 1950's.

Above and below: These, of course, are not real. They're part of a series called Rock-n-Punk Baseball Stars, from Glyph Jockey. These were my faves. Hilarious.

Mille Bornes is a French-origin card game having to do with a car rally. I had it as a kid; it wasn't this edition though. This one looks to be from the 60's or 70's, and I think mine was from the early 60's. It probably came from my grandparents' house.

Oooh! Just did a quick search and found the exact set I had! Below:

Above and below are cards from a 1940's British game called Vacuation. I haven't been able to locate much concrete information on it.

Miscellaneous

Every so often, my info gets lost. If anyone knows anything at all about the painting above, please let me know. Thanks!

This is a late 50s Austin Healey "Bug-Eye" Sprite. It's always been one of my favorite cars, because it looks like a cartoon. The photo comes via the Vintage & Classic Car Club of Pakistan.

A Stephen Sprouse look.  Love the color and love the tights.

Hayv Kahraman, Melancholic Aristocracy 

Holiday Magazine

Holiday was a travel magazine published by Triple A from 1928 to 1945, and by the Curtis Publishing Company until 1977. The covers are so cute!

Rome, April 1960. Illustration: George Giusti

I'm not really sure about the babies sucking on the cow's teats...

Africa, April 1959. Illustration: George Giusti

September 1957. Illustration: George Giusti

Wisconsin, July 1949. Illustration:  Richard E. Howard

See more Holiday covers after the jump.

Miscellaneous

This is from a March 1990 fashion editorial in Spin magazine. I was happy to discover that there's an archive of old Spin magazines, page-for-page, on Google Books. I used to read it like a handbook when I was a teenager. Ha!

Poster for the German release of the 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7, by the only female French New Wave director, Agnés Varda, and starring Corinne Marchand. It's about a French pop star who is wandering around Paris, awaiting the results of a biopsy between 5 and 7pm, while most people in the city are out messing around.

The Camel Thru the Needle's Eye was a 3-act comic play published in 1929, written by Frantisek Langer. It was performed between April and October of that year.

This is either a poster or a program guide for the play. It was designed by Frank Walts, a somewhat obscure African-American illustrator. The majority of his known work are covers for The Masses, an American socialist periodical published from 1911 to 1917.  A short biography of Walts appears in Art For The Masses by Rebecca Zurier (Yale University Art Gallery, 1985).

Chet Baker and his wife Halema in 1955. His plight (and concurrent heroin face) is terribly sad.

Vanity and Prince