Arthur Radebaugh

Advertising the Future: Illustrations by Arthur Radebaugh

Arthur Radebaugh was born in Coldwater, Michigan in 1906. He developed his interest in art and briefly attended the renowned Art Institute in Chicago. It was there that Radebaugh first began experimenting with airbrush painting, a technique he helped popularize and used throughout his career.

One of his first clients in 1935 was MoToR Magazine, which purchased a painting for $450 and used it for the highly coveted cover of the Annual issue through 1957. With the exception of years 1941-1946, he designed covers for every Annual issue through 1957. Radebaugh’s artistic vision of the future fell in line with the forward-thinking nature of the automotive trade shows that the Annual issues were published to coincide with.

His paintings drew heavily upon the art deco movement of the 1920s through the 1940s, though his style would evolve with the passage of time. His renderings of the future were inspired by the context of his present.

Radebaugh’s work with MoToR garnered him widespread attention, and his list of clients grew to include several big-name brands including the Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Coca-Cola, and United Airlines. The automotive industry also took note, with Chrysler contracting him to do artwork for their 1939 Dodge Luxury Liner sales literature and advertisements. For the marque’s 25th anniversary, Radebaugh blended the present with the future by painting the 1939 model year cars in front of lush science-fiction-inspired cityscapes. These are shown in images two and three of this blog post.

Michael deMeng

The Artwork of Michael deMeng

Michael deMeng is an assemblage artist from Vancouver, Canada who exhibits throughout the United States. As an educator, he has been actively involved with VSA Montana, providing art education and encouraging participation in the arts to people with disabilities. Through these activities, as well as his artwork, deMeng fosters community awareness, and offers creative methods to explore the human experience.

In his art, he addresses issues of transformation. Discarded materials find new and unexpected uses in his work; they are reassembled and conjoined with unlikely components, a form of rebirth from the ashes into new life and new meaning.

These assemblages are metaphors for the evolutions and revolutions of existence: from life to death to rebirth, from new to old to renewed, from construction to destruction to reconstruction. These forms are examinations of the world in perpetual flux, where meaning and function are ever-changing.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Pasiphae”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 142.6 x 243.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Finished just after Pollock’s first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter’s mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover).

Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist’s unconscious is used to organize composition.

Antoine Laurent Dantan

Antoine Laurent Dantan, “Young Bather Playing with His Dog”, Marble, 1833, Louvre, Paris

Antoine Laurent Dantan, also known as ‘Dantan the Elder’ distinguishing from his younger brother also a sculptor, was born in Saint-Cloud, France, in December of 1798. He and his brother entered the studio of Francois-Joseph Bosio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the same time in 1823. Antoine Dantan wone the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1828.

Sculpted by Dantan during his stay in Rome, the “Young Bather Playing with His Dog” was exhibited at the Salon of 1835. The sculpture of marble, 1.05 meters in height, was purchased by the Louvre in 1835 and resides at the Department of Sculptures, Richelieu, on the ground floor of the Louvre.

Misha Gordin

Photography by Misha Gordin

Misha Gordin was born in 1946, the first year after World War II ended. Having survived the hardships of evacuation, Gordin’s parents returned back home to Riga, Latvia, after the war which was then under Soviet occupation. Growing up among the Russian speaking population of Latvia, Russian became Gordin’s root culture.

Gordin started to photograph when he was nineteen, driven by his desire to create a personal style and vision. He was involved in portraiture and did some documentary shots, but soon realized the results were unsatisfactory. Putting his camera aside, Gordin concentrated on reading (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov) and cinematography (Tarkovsky, Parajanov). He was constantly looking for the right way to express personal feelings and thoughts using photography.

One year later it came to him clearly and simply. Gordin decided to photograph “concepts” rather than the literal capturing of a moment on film. In 1972, Gordin created his first, and most important image, ‘Confession’. Instantly recognizing the potential possibilities of his conceptual approach and the knowledge acquired from creating this image,

Victoria Topping

Victoria Topping, “Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders”

Victoria Topping has worked with designing the identity of an independent record label; designed and made many bespoke wallpapers; hand painted murals; been an interior designer and designed and installed a record shop, club and created the artwork for several festivals. Her work has found its way on to a successful greetings card range and even on to a nice bottle of french wine. Above all her favorite thing is to create and sell prints and original works through her online shop

She draws inspiration from her passion for music, specifically Jazz, Soul, Funk, Disco and World music. This vibrant scene has given her an everlasting source of joy and focus. She collects records and any visual snapshots she can find of the musicians and dancers she admires, from her favourite avant jazz composer Sun-Ra right through to her favorite disco star Sylvester, and even dipping in to the colour palette of Soul train.

Gio Black Peter

Gio Black Peter, “Don’t Let Me Down”, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 2016

Gio Black Peter (born Giovanni Andrade Paolo Guevara) is a New York based performance artist as well as an ardent visual artist. He examines text and subject, truth and fakery, rebellion and authority. His subversive work has quickly earned him a name in the downtown New York scene of young emerging artists who participate in today’s dialogue about the deconstruction of high profile, white box presentation and the desire to raise art awareness.

At the core of Black Peter’s thinking is the idea that the life of art depends on the viewer’s willingness to suspend his or her rational thoughts and play into the believability of lies and realistic falsehoods. Familiarity and a seductive aesthetic draw the viewer back to Black Peter’s art- a visceral exploration of vulnerability and self-reflection.

Roland Rafael Repczuk

Roland Rafael Repczuk, Title Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 1999

Roland Rafael Repczuk is a surrealistic painter from Hanerau-Hademarschen, Germany. He mixes his own oil paints out of light-fast pigments. He also does mosaic panels of Venetian glass pieces.

Roland Rafael Repczuk was born in 1963 in Kassel, a city located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. He relocated, with his family, to Euskirchen, a seven-hundred year old city close to Cologne, Germany. Influenced by the artwork of german painter and sculptor Joseph Beuys and American craftsman Gustav Bereur, Repczuk decided to pursue an art career.

Roland Repczuk exhibited his first works at an action art exhibition held in July of 1980 in Carqueiranne, located in southeastern France. This was followed by several exhibitions in the city of Euskirchen in 1981. After extensive traveling through Europe, Repczuk moved to the south of France and changed his style in 1985 from contemporary modern to a more tradition craft. Since then, he has had many exhibitions of his work in Germany and throughout Europe.

Using the techniques of the old master painters, Roland Repczuk creates realistic oil paintings of a surrealistic nature. At the end of 1990, he moved back to Germany with his family, settling in Hamburg and continued producing his paintings, mosaics and frescoes.

Sir Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer, “The Bridge”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Tate Museum

Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.

Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and for the ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ series which was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Spencer’s work frequently combined real and imagined elements. As a result, his paintings have a strong sense of narrative even if the subject is not wholly explicable. He painted “The Bridge” in a temporary studio in the Fee School, Maidenhead. The subject is believed to be spectators watching a boat race, probably the annual Cookham Regatta. They are standing on an invented stone bridge instead of Cookham’s cast-iron bridge, although the decorative quatrefoil motifs are taken from the metal version. The Airedale terrier dog lying on the bridge was called Tinker. Tinker belonged to a Cookham resident, Guy Lacey, who taught Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert to swim.

Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan, “Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party” from His Graphic Novel “Rules of Summer”

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for “The Lost Thing”, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include Red Tree” and “The Arrival”.

Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. The same book won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Premier’s Prize in 2006

“In a book that reads like an homage to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Lindgren award-winner Shaun Tan offers a sequence of paintings that represent a boy’s cumulative summer knowledge, framed as rules and populated by Tan’s now-familiar menagerie of one-eyed robots, malevolent rabbits, and windup dinosaurs. The rules appear on the left, while lavish, brilliant paintings of the accompanying disasters light up the opposite pages.

An older boy yanks his younger brother away from a platter at a soiree full of glaring raptors (“Never eat the last olive at a party”); frowns when bats, lizards, and sea anemones move into the living room (“Never leave the back door open overnight”); and, after a fistfight, bundles the younger boy into a locomotive and sends him off through Siberian wastes (“Never lose a fight”).” – Publishers Weekly

Raoul Pene Du Bois

Raoul Pene Du Bois, “Nudes Stepping Forth”, Theatrical Sketch, Painted Gouache, circa 1945, 40 x 30 Inches

Du Bois was born on Staten Island in New York City, the son of René Pène Du Bois, a banker. He started his career as a costume designer when he was 14, by designing four showgirl costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies. He went on to design the costumes for the Broadway revues “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″, his first show and “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936″.

Du Bois designed the costumes and/or the scenery for some 48 Broadway shows, starting in 1934 with the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″ and his last, “Reggae” in 1980; his designs were used in Jerome Robbins’ “Broadway” in 1989. Among his work was “Gypsy””(1959) and many other musicals starring Ethel Merman. He worked on Billy Rose’s Aquacade for the New York World’s Fair (1939–40).

He won the 1971 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award, Best Costume Design for “No, No, Nanette” and the 1953 Tony Award, Best Scenic Design, for “Wonderful Town” and was nominated for the Tony Award, Costume Design, for “Sugar Babies” (1980), “Doctor Jazz” (1975) and “Gypsy” (1960), and for scenic design for “The Student Gypsy” (1964).

https://www.1stdibs.com Reference Number LU86512102682

Donal Hord

Donal Hord, “Morning”, Black Granite, 1951-1955

“Morning” by Donal Hord, a San Diego artist, is in the Embarcadero Maria Park at Seaport Village, California. The six foot figure made from black granite is a figure of a muscular man, waking in the morning. The man sits on a base of symbols, the sun and moon, fangs and corn. The fangs are an Aztec symbol of man’s birth from the earth and corn is both a Mexican and American Indian symbol for the basic source of life giving food.

Donal Hord carved the sculpture between 1951 and 1955, keeping it at his home. The sculpture was acquired by the Port of San Diego in 1983, twenty three years after his death. Having lived in San Diego most of his life, many of his large outdoor sculptures are located in the city.

Sir Frederic Leighton

Sir Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron PRA, “The Athlete Wrestling a Python”, Bronze, 1877

Frederic Leighton was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history. Leighton was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

Leighton received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17 in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and painted his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper—the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. In Florence at the age of twenty-four, Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and painted his 1853-1855 “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession”, a large-scaled work which originally hung in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace in 1862. From 1855 to 1859, Leighton lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

The supposition that Frederic Leighton may have been homosexual continues to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton with letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

John Augustus Walker

John Augustus Walker, “Science and Invention”, Mural, 1935

John Augustus Walker (1901-1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture.

The murals are on display in the History Museum of Mobile lobby located in Mobile, Alabama.

N. C. Wyeth

N.C. Wyeth, “The Battle at Glens Falls”, from “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper, NY: Scribner’s First Edition, 1919

“Each of the combatants threw all his energies into that effort, and the result was, that both tottered on the brink of the precipice.”

“The Last of the Mohicans” is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent, as they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the more numerous British colonists.

The novel is primarily set in the upper New York wilderness, detailing the transport of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, Alice and Cora, to a safe destination at Fort William Henry. Among the caravan guarding the women are the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (known as Hawkeye), Major Duncan Heyward, and the Indians Chingachgook and his son Uncas. These characters are sometimes seen as a microcosm of the budding American society, particularly with regards to their racial composition.