Drawings
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Make It Work: Street Style for the Sensitive German Renaissance Man
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — It’s 1520 in Augsburg, Germany, a bustling cosmopolitan city at the height of the Northern Renaissance. On his 23rd birthday, Matthäus Schwarz, a successful accountant with a flair for dressing well, launches a special project he calls his or “little book of clothes.” Schwarz had been fascinated by historic clothing trends since he was a child, and like many at the time, he was inspired to experiment with new media, blurring the boundaries of art, fashion, and self-representation. “In my...
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Joking Aside, Rube Goldberg Got Tech Right
By Ben Marks — Every day, exciting new technologies and inventions designed to make our lives better make us crazy instead—if we’re lucky. A document you’ve been working on all day disappears from your computer, having been saved to an obscure folder you didn’t know existed; a social-media app secretly shares your personal information with Russian hackers, spawning a Constitutional crisis; a self-driving car kills a pedestrian, giving us yet another reason to fear the future. Indeed, it’s been quite a...
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What Makes Cartoonist Roz Chast Laugh?
By Ben Marks — Right now, if Roz Chast were a cartoon character, smoke would be steaming out of her ears and lightning bolts would be shooting from her eyes. My bad: I’ve just asked the author of an unpleasant question. "I still have my stupid life and these stupid thoughts that go through my head." We’ve been talking in a gallery at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, where 250 of Chast’s drawings and watercolors, from "New Yorker" cartoons to illustrations for books authored by the...
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Double the Fun: The Husband-Wife Team Who Made Everyone Want to Chew Gum
By Ben Marks — As a kid growing up in Seattle, art director and design historian Norman Hathaway got his first taste of Otis Shepard graphics the same way most of us did—by chewing a piece of gum. He didn’t know it yet, but from the 1930s to the 1960s, Shep, as Otis was known, designed everything from the slender sleeves that wrapped sticks of Spearmint, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit to the enormous billboards that promoted these iconic Wrigley’s products to the world. "Otis was a pragmatic person when it...
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Naughty Nuns, Flatulent Monks, and Other Surprises of Sacred Medieval Manuscripts
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Flipping through an illustrated manuscript from the 13th century, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Jesus loved a good fart joke. That's because the margins of these handmade devotional books were filled with imagery depicting everything from scatological humor to mythical beasts to sexually explicit satire. Though we may still get a kick out of poop jokes, we aren't used to seeing them visualized in such lurid detail, and certainly not in holy books. But in medieval Europe, before books...
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Storybook Apocalypse: Beasts, Comets, and Other Signs of the End Times
By Ben Marks — It’s tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the “Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs” as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen’s new, 568-page boxed volume called “Book of Miracles,” the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written...