Four different artists give pictorial informations about their experiences in Japanese prisoner-of- war camps: The German lance-corporal Willy Muttelsee spent four years, from 1916 – 1920, behind barbed wires in the refined atmosphere of the exemplary Bando camp on Shikoku island. The Dutch illustrator Charles Burki (1909 – 1994) was arrested in camp Fukuoka close to Nagasaki when the American A-bomb fell. The two British artists Jack Chalker (b.1918) and Ronald Searle (b.1920) experienced the brutal conditions in Changi Prison in the eastern part of Singapore and in the Thai-Burma Railway camps.
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 […]
The Ichts / The Sator Arepo mechanism / Two Evas The Ichts When looking through these magic books, one is quickly confronted with the question of whether there was a system here that was comprehensible and decipherable, at least in parts, or whether it was an entirely idiosyncratic construct, a blooming nonsense, a crazy simulation […]