Moderner Volkskunst Zierat

Ornament designs from about the 1920s

printed by the pochoir stencilling technique.

"Pochoir is a refined stencil-based technique employed to create prints or to add color to pre-existing prints. [It] was primarily used to create prints devoted to fashion, patterns, and architectural design and is most often associated with Art Nouveau and Art Deco. [..]

Pochoir begins with the analysis of the composition, including color tones and densities, of a color image. Numerous stencils were designed as a means of reproducing an image. [C]oloristes applied pigments using a variety of different brushes and methods of paint application. The thick paint medium, gouache, causes a build up against the stencil's edge resulting in a surface elevation that can be both seen and felt [and] textural variety is achieved by varying the technique for applying the paint: daubing, spraying, spattering, or sponging are the most common choices.

The manual aspect of pochoir has been both one of its most valuable attributes and one of its greatest failures as a medium. Pochoir is both labor-and time-intensive, making it an expensive and slow process of printmaking. As a result, techniques such as lithography and serigraphy, mechanized in nature, have replaced pochoir as a method of reproduction. Pochoir has been used in conjunction with other medium such as engraving, lithography, or photography as a means of adding color to a print."
[Text from: 'Vibrant Visions: Pochoir Prints' in the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum]

[This uncropped/untouched image shows the normal page layout;

the other images have been very lightly background cleaned]

'Moderner Volkskunst Zierat' (Modern Folk Art Ornament) by P. Siegel (n.d.) is hosted online by the University of Houston Digital Library.

This album presents ornament design templates for use in decorating textiles, ceramics, wallpaper and related household items. They are fairly sophisticated patterns for folk art. The book of eighteen illustration plates was produced in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century, although the actual date of publication is unknown.

The scant mentions of this book online offer up release dates ranging from 1910 to 1930. I would guess 1920: the organic motifs are Art Nouveau in style, but the overall symmetry and order in the designs hint at the emergence of an Art Deco aesthetic. Or so I tell myself^; I'm often in two minds about specific eras and artistic styles (is it Baroque or Mannerist?; Renaissance or Early Modern? etc etc.). I think the fence is the right place to be on this occasion.

Later, I asked a web mate for his more professional opinion. He pegs the album to about 1910 and concludes it belongs to an artistic style that evolved in parallel with the Art Deco and Art Nouveau elements. It's the modernising of regional folk art into a stylised publishing form - with influence from Neoclassicism - that most associates 'Moderner Volkskunst Zierat' with a reform movement, and particularly the Vienna Secession^, in my mate's opinion. (this is a very brief summary of his reply and I hope I've got the gist of it correct)

Obviously this gets into the academic - and maybe pedantic - weeds of art history; whereas I was simply attracted to this set by the bold, colourful designs and interesting print style. The Saxony publishing firm of Christian Stoll issued quite a number of books in the first three decades (at least) of the 20th century on contemporary decorative arts.

• Pochoir: Vibrant Visions intro ~ & ~ The Art of the Pochoir Book.
• Wikipedia: Art Nouveau -- Art Deco -- Pochoir.
• Previously: Kiowa Pochoir Prints ::: Deco Vignettes ::: Design Nouveau ::: Pochoir Insects ::: Severini Pochoir ::: Pochoir.
• Andreas Closer Antiquariat lists 'Moderner Volkskunst Zierat' for €1200.
• Christian Stoll Publisher books: Internet Archive, Worldcat, Amazon

Early Explosives

Grenades, projectiles, fireworks and offensive weaponry

illustrations from a 16th century German manuscript

Beyond the novel inclusion of our rocket bird and turbo cat - up top - this 1584 treatise on explosive devices appears to illustrate weaponry seen in earlier manuscripts and offers no new technologies for the Renaissance commando types.

The sketches show various types of barrel bombs, hand grenades, nasty fragmentation/shrapnel explosives, cannons, throwing stars caltrops (anti-personnel ground spikes), unsophisticated spear and staff-mounted 'rockets' or bombs, catherine or pin wheel fireworks and your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine fire vessels and defensive emplacement stakes. Good to know that our modern evil ways build on the twisted imaginations of artistic forebears.

• Ms. Codex 109 ('Feuer Buech' or 'Feuerwerkbuch' - Fireworks Book) is an anonymous paper manuscript of ~230 leaves, including more than 30 colour sketches, hosted online in full by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
• The accompanying bibliographic description notes that the manuscript contents bears similarities with a Berlin work from the 1420s.
• Previously: Combat -- includes a number of similar illustrated Renaissance/Medieval military manuscripts and books (particularly: Artillery Firepower from a few decades later)
• Note: the images above are cropped slightly and a modest amount of background staining has been removed.
• ADDIT (Jan 2013) - @MitchFraas observes: "Here's another lovely explosive cat+bird illus. from a different Penn Ms. http://twitpic.com/bxgle8 "
• UPDATE !!: See: A Rocket Cat? Early Modern Explosives Treatises at Penn --> Mitch Fraas from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries has gathered together all the information that has surfaced since the Rocket Cat image (or Turbo Cat, as I originally dubbed it) careened around the interwebs. [Unique at Penn : blog homepage]
• Elsewhere: Twitter -<>- Delicious -<>- Pinboard.

Discovering Australia

The images below - all spliced together from screencaps - were produced in the early 19th century by the first (free) professional artist in Australia, JW Lewin. Except where stated, all the sketches are in watercolour. Lewin arrived from London in 1800 with a mission to collect, draw and publish Australia’s natural history for a European audience. The images were contributed by a number of institutions to a NSW State Library exhibition - Lewin: Wild Art - held in Sydney earlier in 2012. [book]

Koala and Young (1803)

This is likely the first ever sketch of a koala by a European. The animals are rightly placed adjacent to their favoured gum leaves but, against the size of the koala, they are enlarged out of true proportion.

Australian Nuthatch or varied sittella (1808)

Daphoenositta chrysoptera [factsheet]

Waratah (floral emblem of NSW) (1806)

Telopea speciosissima [RBG | pics]

Fish Catch and Dawes Point* (1812)

This oil painting is a bit surreal with the fish appearing to hang in mid-air

Sydney Cove (1808)

"This watercolour shows the west side of Sydney Cove. At the right is merchant Robert Campbell's house and warehouses, now the site of the Park Hyatt Hotel. The Rocks lie behind. Lewin's watercolours are unromantic and plain. Most views of Sydney made at this time were composed to emphasise its supposed similarity to picturesque English towns."
{? The artist's viewpoint may be from the site of the future Sydney Opera House [map]}

Echidna (or porcupine ant-eater or short-beaked echidna) (1807)

Tachyglossus aculeatus [EDGE]

That's not a totally accurate depiction, especially around the back end [pics]. I've only seen one in the wild, up on the north coast of NSW, near Byron*, sunning itself in the middle of the road. I picked it up - wearing motorcycle gloves, thankfully - and moved it into the bush.

Acacia (1805)

One of the black wattle species*

??Acacia mearnsii [info]

Perhaps Lewin's most original, naturalistic and sophisticated artistic design

Blueit, a native of Botany Bay (1810)

"Lewin made few commercial images of Aboriginal people, perhaps reflecting the generally static interest among colonists towards Aboriginal people during his time in the colony. Many more portraits of Aboriginal people were made during the first 10 years of colonisation, and then from the 1820s onwards. Lewin's watercolours were designed to show Aboriginal people in 'typical' poses."

Wombats (1801) {of which there are 3 species - [W]}

"In 1801 William Paterson sent an English colleague a drawing of a wombat, which he had owned and had 'alive for some days'. This is one of Lewin's first watercolours to locate specimens within a specific local environment, an idea he continued to push."

Spotted Side Finch or Diamond Firetail (1800)

Stagonopleura guttata [factsheet]

Platypus (1810)

Ornithorhynchus anatinus [W]

Just by the by: Flickr pool: Marsupials & Monotremes

"Of all the mammalia yet known, it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation, exhibiting the perfect resemblance of a the beak of a duck engrafted onthe head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means; the very epidermis, proportion, serratures, manner of opening, and other particulars of the beak of a shoveler, or other broad-billed species of duck, presenting themselves to the view: nor is it without the most minute and rigid examination that we can persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout of a quadruped." [George Shaw's 'General Zoology' 1800*]

Banksia Beauty or Banksia Moth (1803)

Psalidostetha banksiae

hand-coloured etching

"A newly discovered animal of the Derwent" : Tasmanian Tiger (1809)

Thylacine cynocephalus [DPIPWE]

"All known Australian footage of live thylacines, shot in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, in 1911, 1928, and 1933" - from Wikipedia.

There have been no conclusive sightings of the Tasmanian Tiger since 1936.

The southern leaf-tailed gecko

Phyllurus platurus (1807)

Oddly, there seems to be two separate animals called the southern leaf-tailed gecko: Phyllurus platurus* AND Saltuarius swainii*; but it/they is/are camouflage experts so maybe they're leading double lives.

"A veiw [sic] of the River Hawkesbury, N.S. Wales" (1810)

Hawkesbury river* essentially marks the north
and north west margins of greater Sydney.

"This watercolour depicts the fertile Hawkesbury River. It is Lewin’s most elaborate landscape, which alludes to the richness of the district through its formal composition."

John William Lewin (1770-1819) was a trained natural history artist in England - with a family background in art - who was enticed to visit Australia by stories of the fantastical exotic fauna.

Lewin contributed illustrations to a number of books on local insects and birds. That subject matter had already fallen out of favour by the end of the first decade of the 19th century, so Lewin was unable to raise sufficient funds to return home to England, per his master plan.

Instead, Lewin did portrait painting, upgraded his scientific specimen collecting and sketching techniques and assisted Sydney government office holders with his artistic talents. He gained associate membership of the Linnean Society and was awarded farming land in honour of his well regarded contributions to his adopted city's cultural record.

Lewin was held in high regard by both his peers and by art historians from the modern era too. His sketch works are often cited as groundbreaking attempts at representing Australian scenes in a natural way, moving on from classical/European artifice:

"Art critic Robert Hughes comments that he [Lewin] was the first to record the distinct 'look' of Australia without being blinded by European art conventions".

The praise is most noteworthy because Lewin developed his style and talents independently. He wasn't associated with the normal scientific community of the time that included such a luminary figure as the naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, who arrived with Captain Cook in the 1770s.

All the images above were spliced together from screencaps, sometimes many per illustration. Variable, but modest, amounts of cleaning of background stains was performed on the majority of pictures.

• The images come from a set of 160 pictures that were gathered together by the State Library of NSW for the Lewin: Wild Art exhibition site. The images are best seen in the pseudo-megapixel 'collection viewer' expanded to full screen. Each image can be seen easily in the frame at high resolution. Once you zoom in, descriptive information appears in the margin as well as very short curator videos for many of the illustrations.
• Biographies: Wikipedia & Australian Dictionay of Biography.
• Exhibition review at Oz Wildlife Studio.
• 'Mr JW Lewin: Painter & Naturalist' 2012 by Richard Neville was published to coincide with the SLNSW exhibition. [interview with the author]
• Previously: Australia.

Art for Ape Sake

A suite of anthropomorphic engravings

from 1635 by Quirin Boel & David Teniers

Twee apen houden een wereldbol

Two monkeys holding a globe

Twee apen maken muziek

Two monkeys making music

Twee apen spelen triktrak

Two monkeys playing backgammon

Twee apen kaarten

Two monkeys playing cards

Twee apen roken pijp

Two monkeys smoking a pipe

Twee apen eten oesters

Two monkeys eating oysters

Een aap legt een verband aan

Two monkeys: one heating a compound; the other applying a dressing (?)

This small print series is called 'Verschillende Bedrijven uit het Menselijke Leven Door Apen Voorgesteld' [approx: Various episodes of human life performed by monkeys] from designs by the Flemish painter David Teniers.

The engravings were executed by (or after) Quirin Boel (or Coryn Bol). The series is dated 1635 which would make Boel 15 years old at the time of publication. I'm not saying it's impossible, and the prints are certainly less sophisticated than his later engraving work, but I would have presumed Boel's date of birth or the printing date (or both) is/are inaccurate. Alternatively, 1635 is the date the designs were conceived; it's a little ambiguous to me and of passing interest in the great scheme. It simply caught my attention because it's a fun set of parodic/comical figures.

The series was found via the newly revamped Rijksmusem, in particular the API service and specifically through the Arkyves ICONCLASS search database that uses the API. All this means is that there are now many and varied ways to sample or store digitised material or build applications on the massive holdings of the Rijksmuseum. Thanks very much to Charley of Lines and Colors for the heads up.

Rijksmuseum hompage.

[Addit. for the record, I've used a variation on that title pun before: I'm nothing if not lazy consistent: Heart for Art's Sake.]