Future Clothing Styles From the 1930s

What might The World of the Future be like? For instance, what sorts of clothing will people wear?

That great philosopher and New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra has been cited as saying something like "Predicting is difficult, especially about the future." This post presents some World of the Future costumes, mostly from movies from the 1930s. At the time, the influence of Modernism was in full flow with streamlining and simplicity as ideals. Even so, only one film of the batch in Gallery below went super-modernist where costuming was concerned.

Below are images from the following: "Metropolis" (1927), link here; Buck Rogers comic strip (started early 1929) and 1939 movie serial, link here; "Just Imagine" (1930), link here; Flash Gordon serial (1936), link here; and "Things to Come" (1936), link here.

Gallery

Metropolis (1927)
Not a 1930s movie, but both near enough and a very early science-fiction epic.  Above is a scene at the office of the father of the hero. Clothing is not far from current fashions, though proportions are slightly distorted.

Metropolis (1927)
The hero is wearing a shirt and necktie along with sort of puffy riding britches, whereas the lady's clothes are skimpy.

Metropolis (1927)
On the other hand, the heroine is dressed modestly; her skirt (not seen here) is long, unlike 1920s flapper fashion.

Buck Rogers (comic strip started 1929)
Promotional drawing by comic strip artist Dick Calkins. Buck and Wilma Deering are wearing futuristic variations of 1930-vintage pilot helmets. Like the Metropolis hero, Buck is wearing jodhpur pants, but in the 1930 military style. Wilma wears tights and a form-fitting top. Strapped on their backs are flying belts.

Just Imagine (1930)
Here the hero is on Mars confronting the queen. His outfit has a military appearance thanks to the large belt and side pouch. The featureless bib on his chest seems vaguely military, but lacks functionality. This was how men in 1980 might dress according to the costume designers.

Things to Come (1936)
A British film extrapolated by H.G. Wells from his book "The Shape of Things to Come." It did correctly predict that England would be at war in 1940. The scene above is set farther into the future when a technocracy prevails. The costumes strike me as being inspired by Roman military outfits supplemented by those odd pieces that exaggerate shoulder widths. All very 1930s futuristic, but only for fit folks under 40 years of age. Makes me wonder how ordinary, dumpy folks were clothed.

Flash Gordon serial (1936)
Flash was not a character of the future, but rather a Yale graduate transported to the planet Mongo. Nevertheless, the setting was futuristic in spirit. The costumes were based on those depicted in Alex Raymond's comic strip.

Buck Rogers serial (1939)
Buck's adventures took place 500 years in the future -- the 2430s. The costumes designed for the serial strike me as being a bit more removed from those in the comic strip than the Flash Gordon outfits. They do seem pretty functional and not overly contrived. However, all the characters seen here are wearing variations of 1930s airplane pilot helmets.

Miscellany

Now for an American Thanksgiving Day holiday break from the usual art-related material -- but not a complete one.

I was on a cruise in October that sailed around Italy, taking in a few other nearby locations. I took a number of photos, and thought I'd pass along a few here. Included is a non-cruise one of a location about a mile and a half from where I live.

Gallery

Harry's Bars seem to be everywhere.  This is the one in Rome where I dined once a few years ago.  It's on the Via Vittoria Veneto, the setting of Fellini's La Dolce Vita.  In the background is Rome's wall.

Like Fez in Morocco, Kotor in Montenegro is noted for its stray cats.  Here are a few.

A wall in Koper, the port city for Slovenia.  Seen above on a wall is a commemoration of residents who fought on the Republican (leftist) side in the Spanish Civil War and died there.  At the time, Koper was part of Italy and called Capodistria -- the majority of its population then being Italian.  Since Italy was on the side of Franco's Nationalists in Spain and sent a good many troops there, almost surely there were Esercito Italiano casualties from Capodistria.  But in post- World War 2 communist Yugoslavia when the commemoration was installed, they probably were ignored.

When I was in Valetta, Malta, there were four cruise ships in port.  Above is Republika, the main street, around noontime that day.

A news stand in Salerno, Italy.  Note the calendars for Che Guevara (communist) and Benito Mussolini (fascist).  I can't imagine an American university store having a similar display.

Fantagraphics is a major publisher of reprinted comic strip and comic book content.  Above is their intergalactic headquarters in northeast Seattle.  Technically, this is the house's back side, as the address relates to the street on the opposite side that was altered around 60 years ago when the Interstate 5 freeway was built.  That is, there is a tiny front yard and a front entrance that can't be accessed from the street due to a fence.  Pretty basic, but I suppose these simple digs make a lot of economic sense.  Note the two trash bins.

Admirals Descended from Artists

Back in 2012 I posted about the interesting (to me) case of a famous artist's son who became an admiral and the son of an important admiral who became a painter. I wrote:

"Let's start with Augustus John (1878-1961), best known as a portraitist who sired children by his wife and other women. His second son (by his wife) was Caspar John (1903-1984), who went on to become First Sea Lord (1960-63), attaining the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in 1962. In the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord [was] the highest position that an officer can attain."

Caspar John's Wikipedia entry is here.

Recently I became aware that the grandson of Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet (1829-1896) also became a Royal Navy Admiral. Millais was one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and later went on the become a successful portrait painter and, not long before his death, president of the Royal Academy.

"Bubbles," a 1886 painting of a young boy, became famous because it was controversially for Millais used for many years in advertising material by England's Pears Soap company (more information about it here).

The boy in the painting was Millais' grandson William Milbourne James (1881-1973) who later rose to the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy.

Sir William had to bear the cross of the painting in the form of having the nickname "Bubbles" during his naval career. He was a prolific author during and after his time in the navy. In the early years of the Great War he was executive officer of the battlecruiser Queen Mary, serving under Sir William Reginald "Blinker" Hall who later was in charge of the famous Room 40 decoding center where James also served. Both Hall and James transferred from Queen Mary before the Battle of Jutland where the ship was destroyed when a magazine exploded: only 20 men survived of a complement of 1,286.

Gallery

Caspar John by Augustus John - c. 1920

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John in 1963
When he was First Sea Lord.

"Bubbles" by John Everett Millais - 1886

Admiral Sir William Milbourne James

Did Raymond Perry Rodgers Neilson Copy Richard E. Miller?

There is almost no Internet information regarding the skilled American portrait painter Raymond Perry Rodgers Neilson (1881-1964). The most detail I could find is here.

It seems that Neilson was a 1905 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who resigned from the service in 1908 to study art. He returned to the navy as a Lieutenant (equivalent to army captain rank) when the United States entered the Great War and served as an aide to Vice Admiral William Sims who commanded U.S. naval operations in Europe (the latter point from this source): clearly Neilson had connections. The second link also mentions that he was "Member American Artists Professional League. N.A.; Clubs: Salmagundi, Century. Home and Studio: 131 E. 66th St. New York City 21, New York." That address was not and is not in a shabby neighborhood. But then, he was married to the daughter of a Pittsburgh steel maker.

The first link notes: "Neilson studied with William Merritt Chase and at the Art Students League with George Bridgman and George Bellows. He continued his art education in Paris, studying at the Académie Julian, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Académie Colarossi, and the Academie Grande Chaumière." This surely took place mostly before the war began in 1914 and when many American artists returned home.

Now for speculation about connections with Richard E. Miller (1875-1943). Miller's Wikipedia entry is here. It mentions that Miller spent much of his time from perhaps 1900 to 1914 in France, spending some summers with the colony of American artists in Giverny, nearby where Claude Monet lived. Neilson and Miller might well have met either there or in Paris. In 1917 Miller moved to arty Provincetown at the northern end of Cape Cod, even during the 1920s only a day's journey from New York City where Neilson was based.

Now consider the images below.

This Miller painting is of a young woman holding a necklace. He painted many somewhat similar works both before and after the war. Moreover, he often posed his subjects in the same costumes, as I posted here. Not all Miller paintings seem to be dated, but his one is almost surely from his Provincetown days. Note his signature at the lower left (click to enlarge).

Here is a near-copy by Neilson whose signature it at the lower right.  The model is the same, and the poses are nearly identical. The dresses differ in that Neilson's version has a blue item on her waist (I'm not sure what it's called). The backgrounds are essentially the same, but differ in details such as the positioning of the French door at the left and tabletop items at the right.

Here is a Miller painting featuring what appears to be a different model, but where background items are arranged similarly to those in Neilson's painting. Even the costume and the lighting on the floor are about the same. Ditto the brushwork.

Photo of Miller in his Provincetown studio.

A painting by Neilson in his typical style, also done in the 1920s.
I should add that Neilson painted a few other Impressionist-style paintings of women that can be found by Googling on him and then selecting Images. From the looks of these, they might have been done in Giverny before the war.

What to make of this?

Almost certainly Neilson was experimenting with Miller's style, perhaps because he was, or was about to become a painting instructor and wanted to re-familiarize himself with Impressionist portraiture. Furthermore, he surely knew Miller.

From this, I can think of two alternatives.  The first is that Neilson went to Provincetown and worked on his painting during the time Miller was painting the two images of his shown above.

A second, possibly more likely explanation is that Neilson visited Miller and semi-copied elements from both while Miller provided some coaching. A variation on this is that Neilson saw the paintings together elsewhere while doing his version -- though I consider this possibility unlikely.

Please comment if you have more solid information about this matter.

Shedding Ivy from the Empress

Some older American colleges and universities have a springtime Ivy Day tradition that, among other activities, involves placing a stone plaque on a building and perhaps planting ivy nearby. They were doing that at Penn when I was there, though as a grad student I wasn't involved. Penn still has its Ivy Day, but I don't know if any ivy is still planted.

Ivy is not physically kind to building exteriors and camouflages a building's architecture. It's my impression that actual ivy is disappearing from Ivy League buildings and elsewhere: correct me if I'm wrong.

One example of disappearing ivy is the famous Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Once upon a time it was covered with ivy, and now it has none.

Gallery

The Empress as seen from a ship in the mid-1920s. The dark areas are ivy.

A view from the 1940s. The hotel got its final major enlargement in 1928 and much of that part is ivy-covered.

A July, 1948 photo with, in the background, the north side of the hotel (at the left in the previous image) covered with ivy.

A photo of the Empress I took in 2013. The north (left) part of the hotel is now ivy-free, but plenty remains on the original section.

A photo I took recently, following the hotel's latest renovation. There's no ivy to be seen. A big improvement, in my opinion.

Kolo Moser: Some Graphic Art

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the key players in the Vienna Secession movement, active in a variety of media as I posted here. Biographical information can be found here and here.

He was very good at everything he did except, perhaps, painting. Below are examples of his graphic art -- posters, Ex Libris stickers, book covers and the like.

Gallery

Study and the final, printed version of "Allegory of Spring" from around 1896.

Full book cover design -- back, spine and front -- for a book of German poetry.

Poster for exhibit of German art and decoration.

Ex Libris sticker.

Poster for a Secession event.

Vorfrühling - Illustation zum gleichnamigen Gedicht von Rainer Maria Rilke - 1901
"Early Spring" poems by Rilke.

Neuschwanstein Murals by August Spieß

This post is frustrating to write. That's because I want to make a point, but have nearly zero in the way of illustrations to support it.

This has to do with the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. The famous one "mad" King Ludwig II caused to be built that's now a major tourist attraction. I visited it perhaps 20 years ago and finally got around to seeing it again in May, this time paying more attention to its murals.

The place is filled with murals, most dealing with German legends that Richard Wagner (who Ludwig patronized) incorporated in his operas. A sense of this is conveyed here on the part of the Neuschwanstein Web site that presents a "tour" of the castle.

My problem? It's that I noticed that one artist who seemed especially good at conveying facial expressions -- something akin to stage actors who act even with their eyes to convey something to the audience. But the castle tour rules strongly state that no photography is permitted, so I couldn't capture images of examples. Worse, the number of images of Neuschanstein murals on the Internet is small, so only one decent example turned up. All of this meaning that it's essentially impossible to convey to you what I found on my tour of the place.

The artist who stagecraft I noticed is August Spieß (1841-1923), a Munich-based painter about whom little can be found other than this. Worse, there are almost no images of his work on the Web other than parts of some of his Neuschwanstein murals or possibly related work.

So the point of this post is to alert readers planning to visit Neuschwanstein to keep their eyes peeled for murals by Spieß in various rooms (they aren't all in Ludwig's bedroom).

Gallery

Ludwig's bedroom where the murals deal with Tristan and Isolde.

This is the only example I could find regarding stagecraft: note the woman at the left. The images below are also  dealing with Tristan and Isolde, but they lack that stagecraft. For some reason, Spieß portrayed Isolde as being rather bland, undramatic.

Binary Stoplights

The typical stoplight or traffic light or traffic signal (these are alternative names for the same thing) has three lenses of different color. The one at the top in a vertically-oriented unit shines red when lighted. Below that is an orange light, and the one at the bottom signals in green. For more information that you will likely want or need, link to this Wikipedia entry.

But there was a time when stoplights were binary -- only red and green lenses were mounted. I remember seeing them here in Seattle when I was very young. Don't believe me? Then take a look at this:

This fuzzy color photo taken in the summer of 1941 is of an intersection in downtown Seattle. Note the stoplight at the upper-left corner.

It can be pretty hairy driving along when all of a sudden that green light switches to red when you're driving 25 miles per hour and are less than 100 feet from the intersection. You have no choice but to continue on through, hoping that cars getting the green light don't immediately enter the intersection. How it probably worked was that when the signal changed from red to green, drivers would hesitate stepping on the accelerator, realizing that cars could still be approaching on the cross-street.

At the time I first became aware of stoplights, Seattle was transitioning from binary to the triple-lens variety, and binary lights were long gone by the time I learned to drive.

All-in-all, this is an instance of human factors being neglected in design work: The problem should have been recognized much earlier.

Some Hard Female Faces

Part of what keeps this blog chugging along (we're now at more that 1,000 posts) is that I seem to have a modest knack for finding associations, for making comparisons. One of those occasions happened a few weeks ago while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I viewed two paintings that I was already familiar with with, noticed a similarity, then recalled a photograph that struck me in the same way.

The painters were Thomas Anshutz, who I wrote about here, Thomas Hart Benton, whose early career I covered here, and the was photographer Walker Evans, Wikipedia entry here.

The nature of the subject matter is young women with "hard" expressions on their faces. They are surprisingly similar.

Gallery

A Rose (detail) - 1907 - Thomas Anshutz
The subject is Rebecca H. Whelen, daughter of a Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts board member. Anshutz taught there for many years. This is an unusual pose for that time and place: a more tranquil expression would have been expected.

City Activities with Dance Hall (detail) - 1930 - Thomas Hart Benton
From a panel of Benton's America Today mural, now prominently displayed at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The subject is Elizabeth England, future wife of Charles Pollock, older brother of the more famous painter Jackson Pollock. The Pollock brothers studied under Benton, hence the connection.

Girl in Fulton Street (cropped) - 1929 - Walker Evans
From one of Evans' New York street scene photos of the late 1920s.

A Bouguereau at the Meat Packers

The photo above was taken at the Frye meatpacking facility in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood perhaps sometime around 1940. The reason why all those paintings are there is because they were overflow from the home of Charles Frye and his late wife Emma who had an extensive collection. The painting at the upper left is Dans le bois (also called "The Sisters") a late (1905) work by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) the prolific French painter whose works were not worth much when the photo was taken, but now can be bought at auction for more than a million dollars.

The packing plant was destroyed in 1943 when one of the three prototype XB-29 bombers experienced an engine fire and crashed into it. The entire crew was killed, including famed test pilot Eddie Allen, and more were killed in the plant. The Bouguereau was not destroyed, and perhaps there were no paintings there at the time. What was lost was documentation for the Frye collection. More about the crash and the Frye collection is here and here. Some background on the Frye Museum, where the collection now resides, is here.

The two photos above and the one following are excerpts from the Fry Museum web site. This photo shows part of the collection when it was housed in the Frye residence.

Another Frye residence photo. Here the Bouguereau can be seen in the corner next to a portrait of Mrs. Frye.

And here is that Bouguereau as captured by my camera June 11th of this year.

Number One Thousand

This is the 1,000th post on Art Contrarian.

For the first few years of this blog I posted three times per week. But I've since cut production down to twice a week due to the need to keep my Car Style Critic blog chugging along. Plus I recently started a personal blog titled Retired Blowhard that has postings whenever I feel the urge to bloviate on one topic or another.

About Blogging

I wrote this for a Facebook posting, and thought I might as well post it here and on my Car Style Crtic blog.

It was almost exactly 12 years ago that I got involved with blogging. Since then I’ve written more than 2000 blog posts.

The first blog for me was the late, lamented (because it was pretty popular) 2Blowhards blog. The guy running it was Ray Sawhill who wrote bylined articles on art and culture for Newsweek magazine in the 1980s and 90s. Ray blogged using the nom-du-blog “Michael Blowhard” in order to maintain separation from his Newsweek day job. The other Blowhard was “Friedrich von Blowhard,” a Princeton buddy of Ray’s based in Los Angeles.

The blogging software they used was primitive by today’s standards — an important defect being that post drafts couldn’t be stockpiled for later publication scheduling. That meant each post had to go live shortly after it was written. That put strain on the bloggers who wanted content flowing at the rate of one or two posts per day in order to keep readers interested and returning to see what was new.

So for some reason Ray pulled me from the commenter ranks to full-time 2Blowhards blogger to ease the load on the original 2. Except that I posted using my actual name.

At first, I was worried that I could maintain a reasonably high rate of posting. I knew I had perhaps a dozen really nice items that I could write up, but after that? You see, I recalled what happened when old vaudeville stars such as Eddie Cantor first appeared in TV “specials.” They used the good stuff that they’d honed over decades on stage, so their first show would be a wowser. After that, in future specials, their material wasn’t nearly as good due to lack of testing.

So I resolved to hold back on my so-called good stuff and write what came to mind each day. And it worked. As far as I recall, I never used up the “good stuff.”

Here’s the deal. Be sure to blog on topics you know something about. Then you must stay alert and notice things related to those subjects that might serve as hooks for posts. It’s even better if you can relate whatever it might be to similar or opposite examples, because that can make for a deeper, more interesting post. Apparently, it’s a special skill set: Ray Sawhill once told me that he thought I was “a natural blogger.”

Eventually, after his Newsweek buyout, Sawhill tired of 2Blowhards and turned it over to me. I carried on for a few months and finally decided to strike out on my own. My first blog, Art Contrarian, debuted in 2010. It is based on the idea that modernism in art was an experiment that largely failed. More interesting work had been done by more traditional painters in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Illustration, architecture and industrial design are other subjects I treat.

I’ve always been interested in automobile styling, so in 2013 I started Car Style Critic blog. I post two articles per week on each blog and maintain a backlog of two or three months’ worth of post drafts. Readership for each blog is several hundred page views daily, which is good enough for me.

My New Book: How Cars Faced the Market

My latest e-book has just been released at Amazon.com. That's the cover above.

It deals with automobile grilles and other details of the “face” or front end of a car. Facial appearance has long been an important consideration in the automobile industry because it is a major means by which people – especially potential buyers – identify makes of cars.

Over the years, different brands (actually their management, stylists, marketing and advertising personnel and consultants) have taken varying approaches to continuity of styling themes for fronts of their cars. The degree of such continuity is the theme of this book.

More than 30 brands are dealt with here, some sketchily, others in detail, depending on the points I think need to be made.

In most cases, there is considerable model-year coverage for American cars from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. That is because this was the time when styling evolution largely ended, when cars received so-called “envelope” bodies where fenders and other items were no longer the clearly distinct objects they were before. Therefore stylists began to grapple with new themes that were more fashion-related than having to do with goal-related lines of body development.

Chapters are ordered alphabetically by brand, so readers are urged to first read the Introduction and then skip around the chapters depending upon their interest in the various makes of cars. The format of the chapters can be characterized as a series of captions to the images presented.

Brands covered are Rolls-Royce, Plymouth and Volkswagen (in the Introduction), followed by in separate chapters: Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, BMW, Bugatti, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, DeSoto, Dodge, Ford, Honda (Civic), Hudson, Imperial/Chrysler Imperial, Jaguar, Lancia, LaSalle, Lexus, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Mercury, Nash, Oldsmobile, Packard, Pontiac, Saab, Studebaker and Volvo.

Thanks to Amazon's automated conversion-to-Kindle processing, the illustrations are not as large as they were in my Word draft. Therefore, for people buying the book, I suggest they download it to their device with the largest available screen.

But thanks again to Amazon, if you have a desktop computer or a laptop with a reasonably large screen, they have a free Kindle App that displays the book and lets you size a page so that the images are as large as they were originally. Of course, you need to have already purchased the book and downloaded it to your iPad, Kindle or other device before you can access it via the app.

One-Work Artists

The title of this post does not refer to artists who created only one work in their careers. Instead, it has to do with artists who suffer the fate of being known to the general public for one really famous work. Often, the public at large will know of the work of art, yet cannot recall the name of the artist who made it.

I can't make up my mind as to whether or not this is a good thing. Many artists would be perfectly happy to have become famous or to have painted a famous painting. Others might prefer to be known for their career-wide accomplishments. Few, I would think, would rather remain essentially unknown.

Artists known for a number of their works where none looms over the rest include Rembrandt, Velázquez, David, Monet and Picasso, to name but a few.

Below are examples of famous paintings that, in my judgment, tended to overshadow the artist's other works. They are arranged alphabetically by the artist's name.

Gallery

September Morn - 1912
By Paul Émile Chabas (1869-1937).

Mona Lisa - ca. 1506
By Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519).

LOVE (print) - 1965
By Robert Indiana (b. 1928).

Washington Crossing the Delaware
By Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868).

Sunday on the Grande Jatte - 1884-86
By Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891).

Portrait of George Washington (unfinished) - 1796
By Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828).

American Gothic - 1930
By Grant Wood (1891-1942).