Down the Shore

In celebration of my very first beach trip this year (yes, I’m aware it’s the end of July) I’ve pulled together some Jantzen ad campaigns from the days of yore. Let’s hope that my day is similarly characterised by glamour, wacky hijinks and burly men. Sadly, I am not possessed of the suit above, else I don’t think I’d need to worry about anything ever again.

Enjoy! And keep your fingers crossed for good weather for me. My skin has achieved astounding new levels of pallidity.

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[via] This one above may be my favourite of the series… I love the green and the stylised lines of the design.

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[via] Not strictly swimwear, but i couldn’t resist the patterns and that little father-son interchange in the background.

[via] You see? Jantzen =  wacky hijinks and burly men!

[via] And how adorable is this suit?!

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Une Femme est une Femme

I’m in love with these illustrations done by Rene Grau for Dior. Such simple subjects, but so easily evocative of glamour, luxury and beauty. I also love his illustration work for other houses, but for now I’ll focus on Dior.

Images found here.

Strange Little Girls

Those of you who have been playing along for a while might have learned that my taste runs a little to the bizarre and macabre side of things. Not to any crazy extent– I’m not possessed of a cabinet full of deformed things in jars, for instance, but I do enjoy things that are just a bit twisted.

Ray Caesar‘s art suits me perfectly. The world of his work is a world of nightmares, peopled with creepy little girl-women equipped with coy glances and tentacles. His aesthetic simultaneously repulses and compells me, with the tension it holds between the prim costuming and the subjects’ sexuality and creepiness. It’s a depraved little world, toeing the line between fantasy and realism, but I find it fascinating. I’m desperate to know more about all these characters, and what is going on in each scene. Might have to make up the stories all by myself.

More pictures below:

Leon Bakst

I’m a not-so-closet ballet devotee. I’m amazed by the strength dancers have, and the incredible grace and control they have over their bodies. This interest coupled perfectly with my love of Russian history to allow me to discover the designs of Leon Bakst, one of the major set and costume designers for the Ballets Russes.

I first discovered Bakst while spending the summer studying Russian in St. Petersburg. During the White Nights Festival, theatre, opera and ballet tickets are ridiculously cheap. I took the opportunity to glut myself on culture, attending a different perfomance every night and emerging afterwards into a magical world where the sun still blazed overhead at eleven pm. The atmosphere combined perfectly into an aura of fairytale. I made a lot of ballet converts that summer. In the middle of this, I found myself talking to one of my Russian teachers about my theatre-going experiences. She replied that I must, then, know about the Ballets Russes. When I confessed my ignorance, she shook her head impatiently, frog-marched me to the library and thrust a book on the subject into my hand. The book fell open at the illustration above and I fell in love.

Bakst’s work is redolent of the magic of the theatre for me. It carries all the imaginative, folkloric qualities that so seduced me the first time I went to a performance as a child. Looking at his work makes me think of a peek into the Arabian nights or a book of Russian fairy tales, rich and over-the-top with precisely the right amount of fantasy and humour. Added to all of that is the incredible lushness of his colours and the amount of detail he went in to with his designs. I could go on about him– and the Ballet Russes in general, for tha matter– at greater length, but I’ll stop here and let the designs speak for themselves.

Above image: Nijinsky, for L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune

Costume design for Tamara Karsavina in The Fire-bird

The Fire-Bird

Le Dieu Bleu, Bayadere with Peacock.

Le Dieu Bleu, the Bride.

Le Sultan Samarcande

Le Sultan Vindicatif

Narcisse Bacchante

Sadko

from Scheherazade

from Scheherazade

The Wolf from Sleeping Beauty.

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Dali Atomicus

One of my favourite pictures of Salvador Dali, by Philippe Halsman. I think it works pretty effectively as a portrait of both Dali himself and his ideas on art.

Here‘s a 2002 essay by Brandon Luhring about the photo, saying effectively that but in a more erudite manner and going into greater detail. It also gives a good history of the photograph itself and of the photographer. Highly recommended, if you’re feeling scholarly today.

Bernard Villemot for Bally

I grew up on Bernard Villemot’s fantastic Orangina ads, but they were just so much a part of pretty things  around me that it simply never occurred to me to think of his having designed anything else. Recently, I saw his Bally ads for the first time, and fell in love. The saturated colours and simple, graphic designs are the same, but taken out of the sand, sea and oranges context they take on a more appropriate, more sophisticated feeling. These posters combine my favourite things– clean lines, bright colours and shoes. Not very hard to go wrong with that.

Kyohei Inuaki

Another gem from the Juley Collection. Actually the first photo in the series I found, but it somehow didn’t fit with the abundance of women in the previous post. Segregating the sexes, that’s how I roll.

Anyway, I simply find this picture beautiful beyond words. The mirrored poses with the similar, yet contrasting aspects really underscores and plays with the notion of artist and creation. I also am captivated with the background, and seeing how the drapery behind him works with and against the neutral background in the painting. I’ll stop blathering, but need to reiterate my love for this photograph.

Mornin’

I’m at work at an ungodly hour, waiting to schlep boxes downtown to a place located three blocks from my apartment, so I thought we could use some silliness to start us off today. Bubblegum!

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By the way, it’s surprisingly hard to find good bubblegum pictures on the net. Or maybe I’m just persnickety in the hours before coffee. Hmm.

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Look at the Harlequins!

Leaning Harlequin. 1901.

As it turns out, ol’ Pablo P. was rather fond of characters from the Commedia dell’ Arte, with special emphasis on Harlequin. He painted him many times throughout his career, seeming to find something of interest in the varieties of his costume and demeanour.  Also, when painting a stock character of this sort, it’s interesting to question whether these pictures are of the imagined character of Harlequin himself in action, or of people in costume, as they would be at Carnival. Here below, I’ve collected the examples of Picasso’s Harlequin paintings I’ve been able to assemble. I’ve left them in chronological order, because it’s interesting to see his take evolve over the years. It’s curious to think why he would return to this character so often.  It’s tempting to say that the great number of paintings he made of it in his early years were in part because the costume itself, with its coloured diamonds, formed a way to begin to play with colour blocks and geometry within the realm of realism, that would become more fully realised with his later work. Ok. No more thinking about this. Paintings!

In ‘Lapin Agile’ or Harlequin with a Glass. 1905.

Harlequin Sitting on a Red Couch. 1905.

Note the lack of colour on this one’s costume. Why did he still call him Harlequin?

Acrobat and Young Harlequin. 1905.

This one is one of my favourites and was the impetus for this collection.

Harlequin. 1915.

Harlequin with a Guitar. 1918.

The Seated Harlequin. 1923.

Paulo, Picasso’s Son, as Harlequin. 1924.

Paulo, Picasso’s Son, as Pierrot. 1925.

I’m perfectly aware that this isn’t Harlequin, but I just couldn’t resist putting up this picture to pair with the prior one.

Images thanks to Olga’s Gallery.

Castles in the Sky

Robert McCall‘s paintings show off what is most interesting about science fiction– the challenge of taking known, given landscapes and cultural norms, and projecting the what if on it, casting one’s vision into the future and seeing what will be different, what layers will have been added to the status quo. McCall’s combination of realistic, distinctly terrestrial landscapes– no purple moons or pod people here– with his graceful, fantastical cities in the sky creates a series of fanciful images, forcing viewers to stretch their imaginations in order to grasp the sheer logistics of what they see in front of them. Or maybe I’m just overthinking and my misspent youth, spent curled up reading glorified space opera is showing. (They remind me very much of the illustrations from the jackets of the books I stole from my uncle’s childhood bedroom.) Either way, these paintings show a beautiful, very different vision of these vistas.

via but does it float? (Permalink is broken for some reason)

Also, I can’t link to other paintings of his, but check out his website. There are many other beautiful things to be found on there.