Genevieve Elizabeth Disdéri, Plougastel Cemetery (1856)
Bertha Wehnert Beckmann
Hilda Sjolin portrait of Ida Hultgren (1863)
Thora Hallager, portrait of Hans Christian Andersen (1869)
Thursday, February 22, 2024
early women photographers
The Harper's Dinasty
The rise of American editorial and advertising design begins with the Harpers brothers. They started their publishing business J. & J. Harper in 1817. The company changed its name to "Harper & Brothers" in 1833.
 |
| From Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March, 1858 |
Harper & Brothers began publishing Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850. The brothers also published Harper's Weekly (starting in 1857),
Harper's Bazar (starting in 1867). Harper's New Monthly Magazine ultimately became Harper's Magazine, which is now published by the Harper's Magazine Foundation.
 |
| First Harper's Bazar's Cover, 1867 |
Alphonse Mucha
"After Alphonse Mucha presented his poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play, Gismonda in 1895(above), he became a celebrity. Spurning the bright colors and the more squarish shape of the more popular poster artists, the near life-size design was a sensation.
Living above a cremerie that catered to art students, drawing illustrations for popular (ie. low-paying) magazines, getting deathly ill and living on lentils and borrowed money, Mucha met all the criteria. It was everything an artist's life was supposed to be.
Some success, some failure. Friends abounded and art flourished. It was the height of Impressionism and the beginnings of the Symbolists and Decadents. He shared a studio with Gauguin for a bit after his first trip to the south seas."-- Jim Vadeboncoeur.
 |
| Mucha in his studio |
Selwyn Image, The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1886), how to represent an ideal integrated graphic design
Artist Selwyn Image, writer Herbert Horne, and other founding members of the Century Guild used the Hobby Horse to represent an idea of integrated graphic design and the fine arts.
Selwyn cover design for The Tragic Mary, 1890.
1- The Hobby Horse was a quarterly Victorian periodical published by the Century Guild of Artists in England. The magazine ran from 1884–1894 and spanned a total of seven volumes and 28 issues. It featured various articles on arts and design and other subjects, including literature and social issues.
2- The Century Guild Hobby Horse was one of the last versions of the literature and art journal, a genre born with the Pre-Raphaelite Germ in 1850.
3- Unlike The Yellow Book and The Savoy, The Hobby Horse was not solely committed to elite aestheticism.
the typewriter (self-printing 101)
commercially viable typewriters were patented in the period just after the civil war. the challenge of mass-producing precise movable parts was met by refinements of earlier industrial methods. the typewriter helped standardize communications and behaviors.
women entered the workforce as clerks and typists, their roles partly defined by these mechanized processes and protocols.
(here a cool video of the history of typewriters)
__________________________________
as a side note: here's my Olivetti graphica (1958), with its Cassandre typeface. I wrote my first papers here. the best so-called "proportional typewriter" (it's all about spacing between fonts) and that carbon ribbon's indelibly superb mark!
natural science gets illustrated
flowers (and its different parts)
fruits,
vegetables,
in natural science illustration the goal is to render the image as didactic as possible, clear, faithful, but also beautiful.
insects,
take a look at this amazing biodiversity heritage library of images!
after Morris, movements took up the challenge of social design
 |
| Morris' design is far removed from Victorian aesthetics |
nouveau (tatoo artists)
fabio maduro, buenos aires
chinese canadian artist nomi chi
the nouveau touch of Eugène Grasset
Eugène Grasset (1845-1917) was an admirer of Egyptian motifs and Japanese art, both of which influenced his creative designs. Grasset worked as a painter and sculptor in Lausanne snf moved to Paris in 1871 where he designed furniture fabrics and tapestries as well as ceramics and jewelry. His fine art decorative pieces were crafted from ivory, gold and other precious materials in unique combinations and his creations are considered a cornerstone of Art Nouveau motifs and patterns. He turned to graphic design in 1877, producing income-generating products such as postcards and eventually postage stamps for both France and Switzerland. However, it was poster art that quickly became his forté.(Above, Grasset's exhibition poster for Salon des Cent, 1894).
Grasset's self portrait, 1866
l'eventail, 1890
Privat Livemont (how typography layout expresses a moment in culture)
Rajah Coffee Poster, 1899
Privat Livemont, who worked in Paris and then in Brussels, is the quintessential nouveau artist. His style borrows slightly from Mucha's idealized women, their tendrilous hair and lavish ornament." His major innovation consists of the white contour he added to his figures.
biscuits de chocolat, 1901
as
le bec liais, 1904
art nouveau is the form of the curl, the fold, the squiggle, the coil
photo of model posing for Mucha
wallpapper (Morris, arts & crafts)
graphic design (Mucha)
AI architecture
this is what we have from 1890 to about 1910 in the West.
where does it come from?
nature,
what is art nouveau?
Whistler, Peacock Room (1976) Freer Gallery, Washington
Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts, that was most popular between 1890 and 1910.
1- reaction against 19th century academic art,
2- natural forms and structures,
3- curved lines of plants and flowers,
Staircase for the Salle du Theatre in the Grand Magazins (1905)
early medicinal advertising (anything works!)
Early medicinal ads used outrageous rhetoric to claim the virtues of drugs, cures, and products for health, beauty, or virility. Any enterprising could make, bottle label, and sell something that promised to renew lost vigor, promote longevity, cure baldness, or treat hysteria --often with the same ointment.  |
| cigarettes to help soothe asthma?? |
or this,
heroin??
the reddish-brown and extremely bitter tincture of opium is called laudanum. it contains almost all of the opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine, and its high morphine concentration makes it a potent narcotic. laudanum was historically used to treat various ailments, but its principal use was as an analgesic and cough suppressant. until the early 20th century, laudanum was sold without a prescription and was a constituent of many patent medicines.
pictorialism: photography as art
 |
| Edward Steichen, Pond, 1904 |
Above is the most expensive photograph auctioned so far, by American photographer Edward Steichen (Pond, New York City, 1904), which sold for 2.9 million in February 2006. At some point photographers deliberately made their photographs look like productions of other graphic media, most often prints.
There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface (from Wikipedia).
This superficial similarity to the representational quality of accepted media was a direct appeal to artistic tradition: the photograph had the look of an etching; an etching is art; so the photograph was art.
 |
| Alfred Stieglitz, Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918 |
 | ||
| Clarence White, The Watcher, 1906 |
 | |
| Julia Margaret Cameron, Sadness (1864), a portrait of Ellen Terry, the American actress |
 |
| Heinrich Künh (1907-10) |
 |
Pierre Dubreil, L'Opera, 1909 |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)