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One-Eyed Stockton Mulford's One Really Fine Illustration
Stockton Mulford (1886-1960) lost his right eye in an accident when he was seven years old, yet became an illustrator. The best source of information regarding Mulford is David Saunders' Pulp Artists...
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Edmund Dulac Book Illustrations
Edmund Dulac (1882-1953) was yet another artist who abandoned a professional career track (law, in his case) for art. He also left his native country (France) for another (England) where he became a...
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Jacob Elshin: From Czarist Army to Seattle Murals
As regular Art Contrarian readers probably sense, I am perhaps more interested than I should be with paintings made in the 1920s and 1930s.This post is yet another in that vein. But I can justify it!...
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Example of New Apple Store Architecture
A mental game I sometimes play is trying to guess how a highway interchange or building under construction will look when completed. Yes, in many cases I could get on the Internet to find out. But that...
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Late 1920s Early '30s Cigarette Advertisement Illustration
Cigarette makers haven't been allowed to advertise in publications or broadcast media in the United States for a long time now. Before that, cigarettes were heavily advertised and a number of...
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Poster: Stadtbahnstation Karlsplatz, Vienna
Otto Koloman Wagner (1841-1918) was one of the first architects to move away from Classicism towards Modernism. His mature style was something of a geometrical version of the Art Nouveau style or...
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Helene Schjerfbeck: From Skilled Realism To ...
Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is widely regarded as one of Finland's most significant artists. I'd put her raw talent up there with that of Albert Edelfelt and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. She was a very...
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Neuschwanstein Murals by August Spieß
This post is frustrating to write. That's because I want to make a point, but have nearly zero in the way of illustrations to support it.This has to do with the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. The...
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The rue Mallet-Stevens Then and Now
A while ago I wrote about the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens and included some period images of the rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris'16e arrondissement, a private street containing Moderne...
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A Graham Sutherland Churchill Portrait Survivor
Several years ago I did a Molti Riratti post on Winston Churchill.One of the paintings was the one in the image above, a 1954 portrait by Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903-1980), his Wikipedia entry here....
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Who Was Illustrator August Bleser, Jr.?
August Bleser, Jr. (1898-1966) was an illustrator active during the 1920s and 30s and probably beyond, for whom I can find no biographical information on the Internet. Well, I dug five pages into...
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Some Unfinished Thomas Lawrence Portraits
I last wrote about Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) here.He was a prolific portrait painter, creating works both fine and mediocre, though most were competently done. Some were never completed, and a...
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Illustrator John Clymer Artifacts, Plus a Tom Lovell Bit
Recently I was on a get-out-of-town jaunt and found myself driving through Ellensburg, a college town in central Washington where I noticed signs directing folks to the Clymer Museum & Gallery. I...
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Carl von Piloty, an Accessible Pompier
Carl Theodor von Piloty (1826-1886) was a leading Munich academic painter during the third quarter of the 19th century (Wikipedia entry here). That entry and Google prefer to spell his first name as...
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Some London Architecture 1912 and Recent
Some European cities have chosen to keep large Modern and Postmodern buildings separated from their core areas that contain premodern architecture. Examples that come to mind are Paris (to some...
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Great War Group Portraits Displaying Commentary
London's National Portrait Gallery has been using the centenary of the 1914-1918 Great War as a theme for presentations in some of its rooms. Among the paintings I saw there in April were three huge...
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Adolphe Willette's "Parce Domine"
If you happen to be interested in the Paris art scene from around, say, 1880 into the 1920s, a museum well worth a visit is the Musée de Montmartre. It's located on grounds containing a vineyard and...
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Kolo Moser: Some Graphic Art
Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the key players in the Vienna Secession movement, active in a variety of media as I posted here. Biographical information can be found here and here.He was very...
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Some of Degas' Unfinished Paintings
I enjoy posting about unfinished paintings because I am curious as to how various artists went about their work, and unfinished paintings reveal intermediate levels of that process. For more on this,...
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Zack Mosley's Character-Driven Smilin' Jack Comic
In the 1930s most American adventure-type comic strips lacked illustrator-quality artwork. One example I used here was the Buck Rogers strip drawn by Dick Calkins. There were a few comic strips that...
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