Oh boy, the lighting. But first, the exhibition was really good and I say that as someone who doesn’t wake up every day wondering how I can see more marble statues. Somehow all the objects seemed special and engrossing. It made me wonder if some people are just better at choosing what to put on display than others. Maybe it had to do with the curator being the archaeological curator of the city of Rome, or that many objects had never left Italy before so maybe we’re not used to seeing things of this calibre.
The most fun I’ve had in a long time was at the Missouri Historical Society looking through the archives of long-gone grand department stores which is redundant since they were all grand. These are newspaper inserts from the 1960s advertising annual promotions based on foreign countries accompanied by cultural programs with hundreds of events. In person it’s breathaking how much larger the papers were then and how intense the ink colors were. I have a feeling the inks and/or technology for printing this vivid don’t exist any more or would be so expensive it amounts to the same thing except in fine art printmaking, and yes I spend a lot of my time examining printing inks because someone has to.
“Under Three Flags” celebrated St. Louis’ bicentennial and the day of its founding when the city “flew in succession the banners of Spain, France and the United States”. Merchandise included tripe, escargot, and candied lilacs. Candied lilacs barely exist in France itself any more (I’ve looked).
As always, a personal selection of things you’re unlikely to see anywhere else and none of the greatest hits that you don’t need me to tell you about.
In the major sights nowadays mostly what you see is the back of peoples’ heads such as here at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s getting worse, there’s no end in sight, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. It’s been about ten years since the number of visitors passing through the Louvre’s pyramid entrance starting exceeding double what it was designed to accommodate. They’ve been lowering the daily maximum admissions in recent years but that doesn’t help given that 90% of them are concentrated in the 5% of the galleries that are social media blockbusters (rough numbers) and anyway it’s still double what the Ministry of Culture recommends.
Banner by Toulouse-Lautrec for the traveling show tent of La Goulue, a Moulin Rouge can-can dancer you’ve probably seen in his posters and other works. Goulue is French for “glutton”.
The St. Louis Art Museum only has one small gallery for textiles but its exhibitions are always miniature showstoppers. This one was on commercial fabrics which is a topic you rarely see even in design museums. The focus was on the U.S., U.K. and Italy 1940 to 1970 and it really showed how little flair we have around us nowadays. There’s multiple photos because I really need you to see the patterns as a whole as well as close up so you can see the texture. Otherwise it’s like watching a TV from across the street!
On the left is a pattern from 1954 called Concetto spaziale (Spacial concept) by the artist Lucio Fontana who’s known for distorting and slicing canvases rather than just painting them. The raised texture is an illusion on plain flat cotton printed with an ethereal pastel pink and murky dull eggplant. The design on the right was the winner of a competition in Italy in 1957 that got five thousand submissions.
Oy, so much art out there, who has the time? This was a really good exhibition at the Clark in Massachusetts, co-organized with the Louvre, that I highly recommend on a mixed-race artist from Guadeloupe named Guillaume Lethière (1750-1832) who was one of the most successful and prominent painters in Napoleonic France and since then has been almost completely forgotten in except in the Caribbean. They also had a few works by other creoles along with paintings of important creole figures made by white artists in France. This Caribbean-French world should have been the main focus instead of just a minor addition to a Lethière solo exhibition because the fact is he’s just not that good a painter. It would have been plenty to include him as just one among many creole artists.
Shaker “gift” drawings such as these from the 1840s and 50s are the only objects where Shakers used ornament or decoration. Only around 200 are known to exist and 25 of them are at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts where I saw these. Today they’re called ‘gift drawings’ only because they’re referred to as gifts the few times they’re mentioned in journals, where ‘gift’ meant a spiritual message received supernaturally from deceased Believers. Otherwise we don’t know what the Shakers called them and in fact no record exists of the Shakers referring to them as drawings at all, or as art.
Yes of course when it’s things you don’t see every day such as the French counterpart of Target, chocolate-scented postage stamps and mail being delivered on stilts! As usual I’m posting pictures of things I’m pretty sure you’re not going see to anywhere else, with one or two exceptions.
I know, the Postal Museum sounds less interesting than watching paint dry –
but trust me it’s riveting and absolutely worth a visit.
They used to deliver mail by dog cart…
and on stilts in marshy areas…
and by pigeons carrying microfilm during the siege of Paris in 1870-1871 during the Franco-Prussian war (one of the actual pigeons and yes actual microfilm like in 1960s spy movies)
Projection of mail from microfilm, 1870-71
…and by ski
Chocolate-scented stamps celebrating 400 Years of Chocolate (2009). Sorry for the glare. They really need to get anti-refliective glass!
This is a 20-foot long map from 1265 of routes from Bordeaux to India or rather a reprint of it from 1887
“I’m so used to people not knowing about anything but Eloise. That sort of disappoints me.” – Hilary Knight, illustrator of Eloise
Here’s my collection of seldom-seen illustrations by Hilary Knight, who drew the pictures for the Eloise books and turns out to have had a long career as a brilliant and witty illustrator for magazines, books and posters, along with pictures from the fascinating history and background of Eloise, also seldom seen. Much of his work shares the droll, quirky charm of the Eloise books, making Knight one of our most inspired illustrators.
Some of what’s here I saw at an exhibition at the Normal Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts and had only been published once, ephemerally, such as in long-vanished magazine articles of the 1950s, before completely disappearing from view; others are never-published drafts and other rarities from the exhibition. Still others I dug up myself in online libraries and auction catalogues. Altogether, most of it has never been gathered all in one place.
Also I’ve pulled together the first-ever collection of all the material from the first Eloise book which was published in 1955 but underwent revisions in the 1980s, when it was decided that certain parts that were acceptable for children in the 1950s were now too racy, such as toilets, cannabis and poking fun at Peter Rabbit. As fas as I know the changes have only been mentioned once or twice in print and never all together in one place .
Drawing for Saks Fifth Avenue advertisement c.1971
This is actual German currency from around 1914 to 1923 when the country issued hundreds of varieties of so-called emergency currency (Notgeld, “emergency money”) as a response to a number of different economic crises. By far the most famous of these was the hyperinflation from 1921 to 1923, when 100-trillion mark notes were issued and the exchange rate was around 4 trillion marks to one U.S. dollar. At bottom left are notes ranging from 100 to 100 million marks.
These are electrical safety posters from the 1920s and 30s from various countries that I found in the online archives of a science museum in Vienna (deeply buried and complicated to track down, by the way – poor database design!) Originally they were in the Museum of Electropathology which existed from 1906 to 2002 and was founded by a Jewish doctor named Stefan Jellinek who was the first to specialize in the science and treatment of electric shocks to the human body due to accidents and lightning, and electrical safety in the home and workplace.
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