Saturday 26 September 2015

"1950's Clothes Catalogue" - Artist Unknown



These striking illustrations come from a 1950's fashion catalogue my dad always had in his songwriting workshop. It's dusty, torn, pages wrinkly, cover and many pages missing but it's still quite a thick catalogue with hundreds of pages filled with these brilliant illustrations! The printing quality is also superb which enables you to study in detail each line and drawing mark. I love the economy of the lines and how the artist can convey the type of the materials, the styling, the flow, colours and patterns of the dresses without over-crowding the artwork. The perfection on the faces of the beautiful models made a huge impression on me as a teenager! Some are obviously based on young Audrey Hepburn - or would it be the other way round? Shame we'll never know the name of the artist.





Thursday 24 September 2015

"The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra" By Gerard Hoffnung (Published by Dobson Books Ltd, London 1955) Part 4



Classic 1950's humorous caricatures by Gerard Hoffnung (born in Berlin 1925 - London 1959). Hoffnung was one of many artists and intellectuals whose families fled Nazi Germany in the 1930's to settle in Britain. Here's his biography from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Hoffnung  I was really lucky to find two of his books dating from 1957 and 1959 in a fairly good condition earlier this year. I'll be featuring the other book - called "Acoustics" - in this blog sometime next year.