Category: pictorials

  • The Art of Louis Sabattier II: 1900 – 1918

    Many of Louis Sabattier´s soft focussed photo-paintings for the French magazine L Illustration conveyed a ambiguous cultural – critical content. Especially his popular scenes of colonial tourism could easily be read as a subversive comment on the Eurocentric perspective of the oriental painting tradition of his teachers Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. Exoticism and alienness, […]

  • The Art of Louis Sabattier I: 1897 – 1904

    The trained history painter Louis Sabattier was one of the most interesting press illustrators of the late 19th century. None of the numerous accredited special artists managed to catch the tense atmosphere of the spectacular trials against Alfred Dreyfus and Émilé Zola in a comparable subtle way. Many of his soft focussed photo-paintings for the […]

  • Doré´s works for “Journal pour Rire” (1847-51) – II

    Thirteen years before his coeval successor Wilhelm Busch began his career at the Munich “Fliegende Blätter”, young Gustave Doré had already established a mature and distinct Comic imagery in Charles Philipon´s groundbreaking “Journal pour Rire”. Doré´s Art of Comic was a livley blend of various influences: The loose improvised “romans en images” of Rodolphe Töpffer […]

  • Doré´s Works for “Journal pour Rire” (1847-51) – I

    In 1847, the pioneering publisher Charles Philipon launched a new graphic periodical. The success of his “Journal pour Rire”, which can be regarded as the world´s first Comic magazine, was based not least on the graphical inventiveness of the sixteen-year-old exceptional talent Gustave Doré. In the large folio pages “Doré proved himself master of three […]

  • Bangs, shakings and floodings (Masters of Faits Divers – Painting V)

    Faits divers-coverart was a transformation of history painting into the realm of urban civil culture, with the middle class-reader as sovereign.

  • Scenes from the Armenian Massacres of 1896

    These first near-genocidal series of atrocities committed against the Armenian population were carried out during the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the last sultan effectively to rule over the Turkish state. The police responded to a demonstration held in Constantinople in September 1895 by Armenian political organizations which sought to pressure the government and the […]

  • Robert Weaver VI: Baseball & Gang War

    “Illustration is an essential to great painting. Abstractness cannot be equated with it; it is merely the grammar.(..) Many illustrators of today are too little concerned with the actualities of their time. Too often they merely aid and abet the pre-sold illusion of the age.” (R. Weaver, 1959)”The state of the art of illustration might […]

  • The album of the 52 postillions (Anon., ca. 1840)

    The drawer has depicted 52 postillons in this travel book. If you leaf through the travel book quickly, it behaves like a movement picture. Some postillons are slumped on their saddles, others stand up afterwards, straighten up on their stirrups, or sway in their saddles; the whips sometimes stand still, and later draw dissolute movements. […]

  • The Nuremberg Diary (A Father and Son Project)

    Haejun Jo has lived in Nuremberg between 2009 and 2011. He has gathered his observations and experiences, especially stories connected to Albrecht Dürer, and has written them down in the form of dialogues. These he sent to his father Donghwan Jo in Korea who translated them into a pictorial version.

  • The Cries of London; exhibiting several of the itinerant traders of antient and modern times. London 1839 , Posthumous Edition

    “Now as the Cries of London are sometimes the topic of conversation, the author of the present work is not without the hope of finding, amongst the more aged as well as juvenile readers, many to whom it may prove acceptable, inasmuch as it not only exhibits several Itinerant Traders and other persons of various […]