Tag: Jazz Age

Art and Design of the New York Central Railroad

The other fab Jazz Age exhibit at the Albany Institute of History and Art is Romancing the Rails: Train Travel in the 1920s and 1930s, which focuses on the New York Central Railroad.

It’s cool to see the original paintings for some of their now classic advertising posters. There’s also a lot of items from industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss’s work on the 20th Century Limited, “The Most Famous Train in the World.” Dreyfuss designed everything from the streamlined locomotives to the dinner plates.

Romancing the Rails is on display through February 2022.

Original oil on canvas painting by Walter L. Greene, c. 1927 (right), next to a printed poster used by the New York Central Railroad (left).
Original oil on posterboard painting by Chesley Bonestell, c. 1929.
Glassware (by Libbey) and ceramic dinner plate designed by Henry Dreyfuss for the 20th Century Limited, 1938.

Original designs for the 20th Century Limited’s cars by Henry Dreyfuss, gouache on paper, 1938.
Bar Lounge design for the 20th Century Limited by Henry Dreyfuss, gouache on paper, 1938.

Featured image: Observation Car design for the 20th Century Limited by Henry Dreyfuss, gouache on paper, 1938.

Jazz Age Adventurers: Fashion Edition

At the Albany Institute of History and Art: Fashionable Frocks of the 1920s showcases the adventurous dresses of the Jazz Age.

Silk Evening Coat, 1929.
Quintessential flapper dress in silk and rayon exemplified the “relaxed morals” of the decade.
Chiffon “Bab” dress, c. 1925, Paris.
If you couldn’t afford a Paris original, Montgomery Wards and other department stores provided fashionable alternatives.

Featured image: Silk dress with flower, worn by former Girl Driver of Hospital Truck, D.T.A. Cogswell.

Vintage Barware Auction

If you don’t already have a penguin-shaped cocktail shaker, check out this Sotheby’s auction underway now. The shakers, ice buckets, and glasses were selected by Alan Bedwell to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Prohibition. While Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933, the items in the auction range from the 1700s to the 1980s.

Penguin Cocktail Shaker, c. 1936. Source: Sotheby’s.
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Archaeology at Petra 1929

The site of Petra in Jordan had been a tourist destination for almost a century when two British archaeologists, George Horsfield and Agnes Conway, arrived in what was then called the British Mandate Transjordan. Petra 1929 transcribes the field journal of their excavations in and around the Nabataean city.

The Treasury at Petra from Al Siq. Source: David Bjorgen [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

Explorers Club and Infiniti Celebrate Roy Chapman Andrews’ 1920s Gobi Desert Expedition with SUVs

Source: Infiniti.


The Explorers Club, Hong Kong Chapter (which for no real reason immediately brought to mind the Flying Elvises, Utah Chapter) and the Mongolian Institute of Paleontology and Geology (IPG) recently teamed up for a twenty day jaunt into the Gobi Desert to look for dinosaur fossil and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Roy Chapman Andrews’ Central Asiatic Expedition.

Point of order here: On his trip to Mongolia one hundred years ago, Andrews was actually working as a spy for the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence during World War I. His more famous Central Asiatic Expeditions, where his team from the American Museum of Natural History made so many important paleontological discoveries, including the first dinosaur egg fossils, began in 1922.

That 1918 mission did result in valuable information that helped make his later scientific expeditions to Mongolia so successful – including his conviction that a motorized vehicle expedition was feasible.

Continue reading Explorers Club and Infiniti Celebrate Roy Chapman Andrews’ 1920s Gobi Desert Expedition with SUVs

“Tall, Dark, and Tweedy”: Jazz Age Artist John Held Jr. was also an archaeological illustrator – and a World War I spy

Life Magazine cover from 1926, by John Held, Jr. Source: Washington University in St. Louis.

In the 1920s, John Held, Jr., became famous for his drawings in Life, Vanity Fair, and other magazines that enshrined the iconic flapper image: lean and leggy, with beaded necklace swinging as she danced the Charleston with her companion, the round-headed, pencil-necked, Joe College.

The “tall, dark and tweedy” (Shuttleworth 1965) artist had come to New York City from Utah in 1912, where he found work as a commercial artist. As America entered World War I, John Held would take on another, clandestine, responsibility.

Continue reading “Tall, Dark, and Tweedy”: Jazz Age Artist John Held Jr. was also an archaeological illustrator – and a World War I spy

Fewkes and Field Workers Fight Florida Mosquitoes

From the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian: Jazz Age archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes and co-workers showing off their anti-mosquito gear while working at the Weeden Island archaeological site in Florida, 1923.

Source: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMNH-01364100

 

The Jazz Age in Britain: New Exhibit at Two Temple Place, London

Rhythm and Reaction: The Age of Jazz in Britain has opened at William Waldorf Astor’s former Mansion, Two Temple Place, in London.

From the press release:

Jazz provoked reactions ranging from devotion to abhorrence when the idea, and then the sound, of the music first entered the consciousness of the British public in the aftermath of the First World War. Visiting American groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra offered Britons their first chance to experience the music live.

The growing interest in jazz brought black and white musicians, artists and audiences together, and was crucial in influencing changes in British society, moving from stereotypes descended from the minstrel show to a more nuanced understanding of and interest in African American and black British culture.

The exhibition brings together painting, prints, cartoons, textiles and ceramics, moving film, instruments and the all-important jazz sound, to explicitly examine the influence of jazz on British art, design and wider society.

More details and photos at 1843 Magazine.