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!
20-foot long map from 1265 (not a typo) of routes from Bordeaux to India (1887 reprint)
“I’m so used to people not knowing about anything but Eloise. That sort of disappoints me.” – Hilary Knight, illustrator of the Eloise books
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 illustrator for magazines, books and posters, along with pictures from the fascinating history and background of Eloise, also seldom seen. It all shares the droll, quirky wit 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Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts and was published once, such as in magazines, and then disappeared from view, or is unpublished drafts and other rarities that were on display. Others were found buried in old magazines that are online or have surfaced in auctions of Knight’s work in the last few years but don’t show up in the articles about him. Altogether though, very little of it has ever been gathered all in one place.
Also I’ve pulled together the first-ever collection of all the material from the first Eloise book that was changed starting in the 1980s, when it seems to have been 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
Recently in Amsterdam I trekked out to a semi-remote nondescript residential quarter to visit the world’s first modernist apartment building, built in 1917, which is also one of the most important examples of a gloriously eccentric, little-known and absolutely unique style called the Amsterdam School. Lasting from the late-1910s up to World War II, it combined the austere, spartan functionalism of 1920’s modernisn with Art Deco’s geometric extravagance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic intersecting planes; and – curve ball! – traditional Indonesian styles; and – another curve ball! – a quirkiness that looks like it could have come from Dr. Suess.
Click on images to enlarge and click again on the edges to jump to next or previous image.
Incredible exhibition of eighteenth-century drawings from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. The point was to show drawings that were made for all sorts of purposes other than just sketches for paintings or to practice drawing human figures, which normally are just about only kind you ever see in museums and the reason why the drawings galleries are the boring ones you always skip (admit it!) This showed how exciting the drawings departments could be.
Above: Design for a toy carriage; shells by Émilie Bonnieu, one of the many women who had lucrative careers producing illustrations of natural specimens; Parisian street vendors with their cries notated Continue reading “Drawings from the French National Library”
For two millienia, India was the only country that had figured out how to dye or print in color in cotton, because it was extremely difficult before the modern era, involving complicated methods and obscure plant extracts. Pliny marveled over it in 70 A.D. and England didn’t learn the methods until the mid-1700s . So India was more or less the sole supplier of printed cottons, or chintz – a Hindi word – not just to Europe but also to places such as Japan, southeast Asia, and the middle East, in patterns following the local traditions. An exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum entitled Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintztells the story.
Click to enlarge
Chintz made in India c.1875 for the Iranian market
Inside the St. Louis Art Museum looking out from the new wing onto the original building. Black and orange rectangles are a Frank Stella and a Barnett Newman reflected in the window. White ramp is outdoors in front of the old building.
Japanese print from 1873 depicting the moment when the Frenchman Josué Heilmann, inventor of he cotton-combing machine, was inspired by watching his daughter’s hair being combed, from the series “Biographies of Great People of the Occident”.
Coup de cœur means “a delightful special thing you’ll fall in love with” or “personal favorite” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere and I’m using the term half-ironically because the French use it so much. They’re crazy about it. You can’t go five minutes in France without seeing it, at least in print; I think not really in everyday speech. But these really are some of my coups de cœur.
Subway poster for exhibition “Baudelaire: Melancholic Modernity”
The Relief Map Museum (Musée des Plans-Reliefs) in Paris is one of my favorite sights anywhere. It has about 30 big, meticulously detailed scale models of towns, ports and forts and their surrounding landscapes. The models were built for military planning purposes from the 1670s to the 1870s.
In another room they show how they made the models, for example, grass and foliage were made of silk fibers trimmed into tiny bits using this device.
These are photos of protests in St. Louis for racial equality (1930) and voting rights for women (1920) from a spectacular exhibition of panoramas at the Missouri History Museum.
Incredibly, the roughly 5-by-30 foot photos are enlargments of the originals which are only about 8 by 50 inches and were also on display – yet they’re sharp enough that you can see individual hairs and the texture of the clothing fabrics. I believe they don’t make cameras any more that can obtain such high resolution except for the most sophisticated professional equipment used in science, the military or aerial photos on Google Maps.
We were in New Haven and rural New England just before the Coronavirus started getting bad in the U.S.. Everything was gorgeous, the food was great – I was nearly weeping at all the agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, which Berlin doesn’t have – and the people were without exception friendly. The pictures look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March that locals as well as guidebooks agree is the only bad time to visit. The beautiful snow has melted, the trees are bare, spring hasn’t started, mud is everywhere, and most sights and many shops and restaurants are closed or have very reduced hours – only in March. On the other hand there are no crowds.
Pictures of the excellent Yiddish Book Center in Amherst are here.
New Haven
Whitlock’s Book Barn, my favorite book store in the world
Girls’ Climate Justice poster at a high school
Yale British Art Center
Yale British Art Center
This piece of paper is completely flat (except for being folder in thirds) and the ripples are only an illusion from the hand marbling, which once was common in endpapers of books
