John Sell Cotman is mainly known for his groundbreaking retinal and neoclassical approach to landscape painting which showed him as an early precursor of Cezanne. In contrast, his huge body of etchings enjoys a rather bad reputation. It is said that his printed works, which he mainly executed in commission of his patron Dawson Turner, a banker and amateur antiquary, exhausted his creative and physical resources. Especially the one hundred etchings that he accomplished from 1817 – 20 for Dawson Turner´s “Architectural Antiquities of the Normandy” are made responsible for an outbreak of depressions. The degradation of Cotman´s printed work neglects the fact that his revolutionary painterly views mainly derived from his experiences as a graphic artist. His Normandy series, where he operated for the first time with the mobile camera lucida, show him at the crest of his artistic development. Brigitte Pallast and Hans Lukas Lang, collaborators of the Melton Prior Institute, picked up the rather bulky travelogue from the collection and visited some of the spots that Cotman had depicted nearly two hundred years ago. The pictorial shows the meeting of two types of mobile cameras, the digital and the lit room one.
Alexander Roob’s “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921. The Age of Graphic Journalism” is out now. (Taschen Cologne, Hardcover, 24.6 x 37.2 cm). In over 600 pages, this far-reaching compendium presents press illustration and graphic journalism as a distinct and unique genre and a laboratory for developing avant-garde aesthetics. The images are largely taken from the […]
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
Theo Matejko’s dynamic and sensationalist style, which had a lasting influence on press graphic culture from the early 1920s onwards, was significantly influenced by cinematic views. The fact that he was commissioned by the UFA in 1924 to sketch the shooting of Murnau’s silent movie The Last Laugh (1924) underlines this connection. In this groundbreaking […]