From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—”the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

What is it with Spanish-speaking countries and poster art? They’ve got something going on. In addition to the work of Bachs, I’ve become a bit obsessed with Spanish Civil War posters. I’d been vaguely aware of them for a while, and I had a general understanding of their cultural and political importance during that conflict, but now I’m in awe of their greatness. Some of the most amazing poster art ever. I’ve been dreaming of owning a couple of custom-framed originals that I could hang in my apartment. Chisholm Larsson in Chelsea sells some well-preserved originals, and reproductions are available online in various places. For now I will make do with the six framed postcards that I recently hung from my bathroom wall; I bought the postcards for a buck each at Chisholm Larsson. The one below is my favorite. I love the type on this, and the powerful energy swooping toward the upper left.

Lots more posters and history here.

In my ongoing quest to find great, unusual stuff to hang on my walls, I’ve discovered a few amazing poster artists I’d never known about. One is the Polish artist Jan Lenica. But first and foremost is the Cuban illustrator Eduardo Muñoz Bachs (1937-2001), who created more than two thousand posters, most of them for movies. He did much or most of his work for ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica, founded by the Castro government in 1960 to make and promote Cuban films. I found some of Bachs’s work online and I thought, I have to get some of these. Bachs used vibrant colors in a very Cuban way, and he had an incredible sense of space and proportion.

I now own four Bachs posters, including the first two below (I couldn’t find graphics of the other two I bought):

I found them here in New York at the Cuban Art Space at the Center for Cuban Studies, which is located at 124 West 23rd Street. They have a few dozen silkscreened Bachs posters for sale, as well as a bunch by other talented Cuban artists. Original posters are generally $100, high-quality reproductions (also silkscreened) are $55. I bought four reproductions, and had to stop myself from buying more. They’re a slightly odd size—20” X 30”—but after looking around for a while I found great frames in that exact size at Sam Flax, which is the go-to place in Manhattan for high-quality prefab frames.

Here is a 1995 interview with Bachs. To see more of his posters, and maybe buy one or two, try eBay, Stony Hill Antiques and Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (linked page contains work by Bachs and other Cuban poster artists), and Soy Cubano, based in Cuba.

The walls in my apartment are a little too bare, so today I ran around a bit looking for some nice framed stuff to buy. I’ve also been poking around the web trying to find things. And that’s how I stumbled onto the incredible James Brown poster below. I’m not sure if it’s available for sale; it’s the poster of the week on gigposters.com, a very cool site devoted to the art of contemporary concert posters. The site itself doesn’t sell posters, but apparently some of the designers sell their creations. I gotta e-mail the artist—he goes by the name Moctezuma—and find out if I can buy one of these. More of Moctezuma’s work is here.

Greetings from my new apartment on East First Street, where I moved ten days ago after having lived on the Upper West Side since the Harding administration. The move, combined with a couple of busy periods at work, is the reason for the relative silence here so far this year. But I’ll be putting up a fair amount of stuff over the next few weeks—I have a big backlog of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

I have a lot more wall space in my new place than I did in my old one, so I’ve been happily accumulating things to hang on the walls. For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to find books of original scores by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb (b. 1929), who often uses highly unconventional, and graphically gorgeous, techniques to represent his music on the page. I haven’t heard much of Crumb’s music, but the scores themselves are simply sublime works of art. The staves on Crumb’s manuscript pages often dip, curl, and twist back into themselves, forming crucifixes, peace signs, closed loops, and various other symbolic shapes.

I bought two Crumb collections from sheetmusicplus.com: Makrokosmos Volume I (1972) and Makrokosmos Volume II (1973), both of which are for amplified piano. The design of my site can’t accommodate large, detailed graphics, but these images should give you a sense of the beauty of Crumb’s manuscript pages. The first image is a composition called “Twin Suns,” which is part of Makrokosmos Volume II. I rotated the image about 100 degrees clockwise so it would fit in this column:

Here’s a detail from “A Prophecy of Nostradamus,” also from Makrokosmos Volume II:

I’m going to frame four or six or eight of these and put them up in my apartment. As unplayable as they look, Crumb’s scores are all quite playable by experienced musicians. Don’t ask me how.

Here are video excerpts from an interview with Crumb in which he talks about some of his techniques. And on this page you can listen to sound samples and download cropped PDFs of some Crumb scores.

Okay, more soon…