Art

Jimmy Raynes, 'Australia has promised Britain 50,000 more men'
Art, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Contemporary, Other, Pictures

Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate emergency?

Heavy rains are finally starting to extinguish the distastrous bushfires that covered a last part of eastern Australia during the last couple of months (and of course, bringing floods). Back while they were still burning, James Raynes tweeted a series of images he adapted from Australian recruitment posters from the First World War, which I […]

Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart's Arrival (1932)
1930s, Art, Periodicals, Pictures

Miss Earhart’s Arrival

Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart’s Arrival (1932). A fascinating image. The occasion is Amelia Earhart’s arrival at Hanworth aerodrome on 22 May 1932, after her solo flight across the Atlantic, the first by a woman and in record time. She was already well-known as an aviator, but this feat made her a celebrity. You can see

Popular Mechanics, October 1922
1900s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Aircraft, Art, Australia, Before 1900, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Pictures, Words

The never-arriving aerial train

John Ptak asks of this cover from the October 1922 issue Popular Mechanics: ‘why?’ It’s a good question. The accompanying article doesn’t really help: Consider yourself aboard a giant airplane whose whirring propellers rapidly drive from view faint objects on the earth far below. As towns and hamlets recede in the distance you realize that

Dare-Devil Aces, November 1937
1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Art, Periodicals, Pictures

Pulp aviation

This is the cover of the November 1937 issue of an American pulp magazine called Dare-Devil Aces. I vaguely knew about the existence of these aviation adventure magazines, or air pulps, but I’d assumed they were filled with stories of chivalric air combat of the Great War. Many undoubtedly were, but that’s not what this

Walter Nessler, Premonition
1930s, 1940s, Art, Pictures

Anticipation vs experience vs memory

Walter Nessler called this painting Premonition. A premonition of what? It’s clearly London, judging from St Paul’s, the double deckers, and so on, but it’s an unsettling version. Everything is jumbled together and smothered by blood-red clouds. But apart perhaps from the ominous sky, the only direct evidence of what’s wrong with this picture is

John T Collins, Aerial Pageant
1930s, Aerial theatre, Art, Australia, Pictures

Aerial Pageant

A drawing by an Australian, John T. Collins, perhaps as a student exercise. Unlike in Britain, there was no dominant ‘aerial pageant’ here but rather many local ones, so it seems like a generic advertisement. It’s dated to 1932 or 1933, but assuming the context is Australian then those would be Hawker Demons and it

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