This was the alternative for kissing during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919. Will it work for COVID-19?
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| (From The Australasian, Melbourne, February 15, 1919) |
Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts
February 23, 2021
February 8, 2021
22 Amazing Vintage Superhero-Themed Cards for Your Valentine’s Day
Exchanging cute Valentine’s Day cards featuring fictional characters and romantic phrases is a holiday tradition as old as candy hearts with silly phrases on them. What better way to let the object of your affection feel loved and appreciated than by giving him or her a message from their favorite superhero? Sometimes, though, a seemingly sweet pun from Spider-Man just sounds more like a reference to auto-erotic asphyxiation.
January 22, 2021
VROOOOM! Batman Is Out to Get You on Valentine’s Day!
1966 was the debut of the massively popular Batman TV series. However, the show debuted so early in the year that there was no time to do any direct tie-ins with the show itself, so the licensed Valentine’s Day products were all just using art inspired by the comic book itself.
Here, you can see in the early days of Valentine’s Day cards for kids, they were still trying to look somewhat like a normal greeting card. It’s best to read the various cards in Adam West’s voice, making greetings like “You’re just my SPEED, Valentine!” “I’m out to get you, VALENTINE!” “I’m FALLING for you, Valentine!” and “Valentine, you really pack a WALLOP!” all the more hilarious.
December 27, 2020
Grotesque Sheet Music From Chansonnier of Zeghere van Male (1542)
The 16th-century scribes of Bruges had a lot of fun illuminating this musical manuscript, because it’s full of gorgeous, fascinating and downright bizarre illustrations. The song book is called the Cambrai Chansonnier and was made for the pleasure of aristocratic local Zeghere van Male.
The songbook of Zeghere van Male consists of four complementary part-books: Superius, Altus, Tenor, and Bass. The chansonnier became part of this public collection after the French Revolution, beforehand it was in the Bibliothèque de Saint-Sépulcre, also in Cambrai.
The book contains 229 compositions, extremely varied, some of them present only in this source. The special aspect of this manuscript is its marriage of music, art and culture: drawings adorn each folio. Executed by quill and with lively colors the drawings describe realistic scenes of daily life, leisurely activities, and include animals and monstrous creatures, obscene depictions and vegetal decorations. With mixed elements inherited from the Middle-Ages, the Antiquity and the vogue of the grotesque, they are a testimony of the prevailing taste in Flemish civil society in the first half of the 16th century.
Zeghere van Male (1504–1601) was a Bruges merchant dealing in linen, yarns and dyes. Also a politician, writer and cultured member of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, he is credited with not only preserving an extensive music repertory—13 masses, 2 mass fragments, 64 motets, 125 French secular pieces, 9 Flemish secular pieces, 3 Italian secular pieces, 12 textless pieces by the best composers of the time—but providing an extraordinary backdrop of illustrations, 1200 in all, together with vivid initials, foliage and grotesque characters, that depict all aspects of 16th-c. life: processions, funerals, ceremonial settings, scenes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch.
It is interesting to note that Zeghere achieved this feat not via some sort of monumental print (music publishing by 1542 was well established) but in a sumptuously hand-made manuscript, the only way to fully take advantage of the painterly and pictorial arts. The material in this wonderful book is invaluable for musicians, folklorists and art lovers.
Controversial Springmaid Fabrics Ads From the 1940s and 1950s
Springs Cotton Mill traces its beginnings to the organization of the fort Mill Manufacturing Company when it opened a plant in Fort Mill, South Carolina in 1888. The Springmaid Fabrics line was introduced by owner Elliott White Springs (1896–1959) and he used sex appeal to advertise the line during the 1940s and 1950s. This collection includes several of the racy illustrated advertisements that made liberal uses of double entendres.
The Springmaid ads, clearly influenced by pin-up art, made use of double entendre and liberal doses of voyeurism. The illustrations generally fell into one of two categories, with some exceptions: looking up a woman’s skirt or seeing her panties fall down around her ankles. That’s about it. Most of the ads came with a short tagline such as “Defy Diaphoresis,” “Protect Yourself,” “Perfume and Parabolics,” or “We Put the ‘Broad’ in Broadcloth!”
December 23, 2020
“The Next to Go. Fight Tuberculosis!” – Posters for the American Red Cross Christmas Seal Campaign
“The Next to Go, Fight Tuberculosis” was a poster commissioned by the Red Cross to encourage support for the Red Cross Christmas Seal Campaign. Tuberculosis was the dominant chronic illness of the first half of the 20th Century. With no effective drug treatment at the time, everyone exposed to it gained the primary infection which usually healed spontaneously.
Over a period of months or years the primary could develop into the second infection which lead to the gradual destruction of one's lungs. Someone with the second infection would be isolated from everyone and usually went through grueling surgeries and treatments that did not work most of the time.
During the end of WWI, the army was not prepared for the high count of tuberculosis patients. This lead to many men being discharged in order to stop the spread of tuberculosis.
The Red Cross used posters about fighting tuberculosis to make more people aware of the dangers of the disease. Long after the war ended, in the 1950s, a drug treatment, streptomycin and isoniazid, was invented and the cases of tuberculosis went down dramatically.
December 15, 2020
Ludwig Hohlwein: The Munich Poster King
Born in Wiesbaden, Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949) was a German poster artist, a pioneer of the Sachplakat style. He trained and practiced as an architect in Munich until 1911, when he moved to Berlin and switched to poster design.
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| Posters designed by Ludwig Hohlwein |
Hohlwein was born in the Rhine-Main region of Germany, though he and his work are associated with Munich and Bavaria in southern Germany. He travelled to the United States in the 1920s to conduct commercial work. A large portion of his work dates to 1912-1925.
Hohlwein was one of the best illustrators of early century. His style usually consists of sharply defined forms, bright colors, a good portion of humor and textured patterns.
By 1925, Hohlwein had already designed 3000 different advertisements. His work was also part of the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics and the 1936 Summer Olympics.
Here below is a photo set of amazing posters designed by Ludwig Hohlwein from between the 1900s and 1920s.
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| Winter in Bayern, 1907 |
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| Hermann Scherrer sportswear, circa 1907 |
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| ODEON CAFÉ and BILLIARD ACADEMY, 1908 |
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| YELLOWSTONE-PARK, 1910 |
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| Coffee Hag, 1913 |
November 29, 2020
Vintage Posters for the Early ‘Tom and Jerry’ Cartoons in the 1940s
Tom and Jerry is an American animated franchise and series of comedy short films created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Best known for its 161 theatrical short films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the series centers on the rivalry between the titular characters of a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Many shorts also feature several recurring characters.
Tom and Jerry sound like two perfectly generic, ethnically vague, mid-20th century American male names. In other words, they were perfect for the names of a stylistically simple cartoon cat and mouse. But creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera didn’t come up with those names — the ones for their iconic, undying creations — until after they’d already produced a cartoon about the pair. The first Tom and Jerry cartoon, 1940’s Puss Gets the Boot, is actually a Jasper and Jinx toon. Jasper was the name of the cat and Jinx the name of the mouse. Hanna and Barbera just didn’t think those monikers suited their creations, and seeking ideas from crew members, they went with animator John Carr’s suggestion of Tom and Jerry.
Carr didn’t invent that pairing of words that just happen to sound good together. “Tom and Jerry” was a phrase floating around the English language for more than a century. In 1821, British writer Pierce Egan wrote Life in London, the stories of a couple of roustabout toughs named, you guessed it, Tom and Jerry. The book was so successful that it inspired a stage play and a boozy eggnog cocktail called the Tom and Jerry that would ultimately outlast the popularity of the source material.
November 21, 2020
45 Amazing Posters by Leonetto Cappiello in the Early 20th Century
Born 1875 in Livorno, Tuscany, Italian-French poster art designer and painter Leonetto Cappiello mainly lived and worked in Paris. He is now often called ‘the father of modern advertising’ because of his innovation in poster design.
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| Posters by Leonetto Cappiello |
The early advertising poster was characterized by a painterly quality as evidenced by early poster artists Jules Chéret, Alfred Choubrac and Hugo D'Alesi. Cappiello, like other young artists, worked in a way that was almost the opposite of his predecessors. He was the first poster artist to use bold figures popping out of black backgrounds, a startling contrast to the posters early norm.
Over the course of his career, Cappiello produced more than 530 advertising posters. He died in 1942 at the age of 66. Today, his original posters are still collected, sold at auction and by dealers around the world.
Here below is a set of amazing posters designed by Leonetto Cappiello from between the 1900s and 1930s.
ABSINTHE Extra-Superieure, 1900 
Absinthe Gempp Pernod, 1900 
Biscuits H Lalo Amandines de Provence, 1900 
Absinthe Ducros Fils, 1901 
Corset Le Furet, 1901
November 18, 2020
Stop Germs Spreading: Vintage “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases” Posters From the Early 20th Century
“Coughs and sneezes spread diseases” was a slogan first used in the United States during the 1918–20 influenza pandemic – later used in the Second World War by Ministries of Health in Commonwealth countries – to encourage good public hygiene to halt the spread of the common cold, influenza and other respiratory illnesses.
It was later promoted by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Health in 1942 to encourage good public hygiene and prevent the spread of the common cold, influenza and other respiratory illnesses. Critics have said that the slogan, alongside “Keep Britain Tidy”, were an example of “postwar Britain’s nanny state”.
Posters were designed by British cartoonist H. M. Bateman and advised people to “trap the germs by using your handkerchief”. The original posters of these were published during the Second World War and showed people in the workplace, on the street and on public transport sneezing without covering their nose or mouth, spreading their respiratory droplets. The National Archives notes that these posters were created in an attempt to prevent wartime work absenteeism because of illness.
The slogan was later used intermittently by the National Health Service (NHS) following its establishment in 1948, as well as public officials, in the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The phrase was also used by the European branch of the World Health Organization in 2019 in a video on influenza. It was combined with washing the hands. More recent campaigns by the NHS (such as “Catch it, Bin it, Kill it”) promote hand washing and the use of disposable paper handkerchiefs or coughing or sneezing into one’s elbow so as to not contaminate the hands.
