The image of “Fortune” was deeply connected with a specific artistic American tradition of Social Realism. The Magazine was founded in 1939, in the era of the Great Depression and an art director like Leo Lionni, who was resonsible for the appearence of the magazine from 1940 on,updated this specific ethos by engaging illustrators like Robert Weaver, who continued the tradition of the “Masses” and the Ashcan School by sending artists on stories. “Lionni trusted the artist, and once he picked the right practitioner, he let him alone”(Robert Weaver, in: Steven Heller, Innovators of American Illustration.1986)
Alexander Roob’s “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921. The Age of Graphic Journalism” is out now. (Taschen Cologne, Hardcover, 24.6 x 37.2 cm). In over 600 pages, this far-reaching compendium presents press illustration and graphic journalism as a distinct and unique genre and a laboratory for developing avant-garde aesthetics. The images are largely taken from the […]
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
Heavenly Zo / INRI becomes ISO / Swabian and Lorraine Somnambulism Heavenly Zo Richard’s emblematic sexual symbolism originated in the theurgic Neoplatonic geometry of Alexandrian late antiquity and had found its way from there into Jewish mysticism and Hermeticism. The most famous example was the Seal of Solomon, the hexagram, which consisted in the interpenetration […]