| This retro print reminds us of the Bauhaus or synthesis period of Kandinsky- bold geometric designs in a shirt worthy of a museum! Show your love of the point, line and plane with a just enough 50s twist to make something all new.
The art floats on a light green background shaded heavily with brushstrokes in jade.
Accented with real wood buttons.
100% Cotton barkcloth
Made in the USA.
A really long shirt description:
Does this pattern salute the 50's artist? This floating mobile of a printis reminiscent of Kandinsky's work, like Composition VIII, plus if you haven't yet picked up on the motif, there are always the artist palettes actually in the design. Skewered shapes include crescent moons, ovals, the 50s boomerang and the artist palettes. Some boomerangs have actually morphed into artist palettes. Some skewers end with an arrow - as though shooting across the print yet trapped still in that very print. Perpetual motion was a theme of 50s graphic art. There is a secondary motif though; after all the 50s couldn't resist technology and especially the television. Little twinkles straight out of an illustrated 50s ad, or a twinkle on a smile in a TV ad.....a line up of bars reminiscent of the TV emergency broadcast system or just a broken TV screen.
The light green background is highlighted with occasional brush strokes in a sage green. Figures are featured in black, jade green, salmon pink, dark yellow black and white.
An image of Kandinsky's Composition VIII can be found here:
http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/comp8640.jpg
This print is on barkcloth, which is a type of cotton weave that is denser and more textured, which is authentic to the 50s.
Our retro line really recalls the very best of 1950's graphics. The 50s weren't all hip and cool - like most decades, even the 50's fabric was dominated by florals. But when a designer did diverge, what a marvelous thing it was!
You can see the history of florals in some retro prints - but the floral motifs have been reinterpreted as amoebic blobs, highly stylized leaves and flowers that start to seem mechanical. In contrast, often mechanical and scientific figures, such as TVs, airplanes, antennae, tubes, atomic symbols - are drawn as biomorphic - given the contours and lines related to flora and fauna. Take the famous 50s' graphic design of the boomerang - it originated as a reinterpretation of the delta wng jet aircraft, but it flings across the fabric like a living thing.
The book, Famulous Fabrics of the 50s (and Other Terrific Textiles of the 20s, 30s, & 40s) by Gideon Bosker (Author), Michele Mancini (Author), John Gramstad (Author), Bruce Beaton (Photography), Michele Mancini (Author) , John Gramstad (Author) contains several pages of authentic fabric htat clearly originated our own collection. This book attributes the sources of inspiration, or in some cases the very designs themselves to modern artists Jean Arp, Joan Miro and Harry Bertoia. For samples of their work:
Jean Arp - Strasbourg born sculptor. Retrospectives of his artwork were being held in the 50s.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_8_0.html
Joan Miro, a Spanish surrealist painter and sculputor
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_109_0.html
Harry Bertoia- Italian-born American Abstract Sculptor and Deisnger (1915 - 1978)
It is regrettable that Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s contains only a few pages of retro fabrics, and probably less than 1/3rd of the book contains 50s fabrics at all! Most of the book is dominated by florals from the 20s, 30s and 40s in order to trace the evolution of the 50s' floral design.
The 1950s embodied an exciting post-war utopia built on a new scientific and mechanical frontier. The exhilarating new iconography embodied this dynamism that represented the promise of a new future. Wear one of our retro shirts and represent that very dream!
Additional keywords: atomic, retro, future, lounge, bachelor pad, green |
