Art Nou­veau, Art Deco… these are terms we asso­ciate not only with a par­tic­u­lar peri­od in history—the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry and the ensu­ing jazz-age of the 20s—but also with par­tic­u­lar locales: Paris, New York, L.A., Lon­don, Vien­na, or the Jugend­stil of Weimar Munich. We prob­a­bly do not think of Rio de Janeiro. This may be due to bias­es about the priv­i­leged loca­tion of cul­ture, such that most peo­ple in Europe and North Amer­i­ca, even those with an arts edu­ca­tion, know very lit­tle about art from “the colonies.”

But it is also the case that Brazil had its own mod­ern art move­ment, one that strove for a dis­tinct­ly Brazil­ian sen­si­bil­i­ty even as it remained in dia­logue with Europe and the U.S. The move­ment announced itself in 1922, the cen­ten­ni­al of the South Amer­i­can nation’s inde­pen­dence from Por­tu­gal.

In cel­e­bra­tion, artists from São Paulo held the Sem­ana de Arte Mod­er­na, sev­en days in which, the BBC writes, they “con­struct­ed, decon­struct­ed, per­formed, sculpt­ed, gave lec­tures, read poet­ry and cre­at­ed some of the most avant-garde works ever seen in Brazil.”

1922 also hap­pened to be the year that a Rio de Janeiro-born artist, illus­tra­tor, and graph­ic design­er who went by the name J. Car­los (José Car­los de Brito e Cun­ha) took over the direc­tion of the mag­a­zine Para Todos. Found­ed in 1918, the mag­a­zine began as a film rag, and its cov­ers faith­ful­ly fea­tured pho­to spreads of movie stars. But in 1926, Car­los, who had already proven him­self a “major tal­ent in Brazil­ian Art Deco graph­ic design,” writes Messy Nessy, began draw­ing his own cov­er illus­tra­tions, and he con­tin­ued to do so for the next four years, as well as draw­ing thou­sands of car­toons and writ­ing vaude­ville plays and sam­ba lyrics.

His work clear­ly draws from Euro-Amer­i­can sources, includ­ing sev­er­al unfor­tu­nate racial car­i­ca­tures. But it also intro­duces some unique­ly Brazil­ian ele­ments, or unique­ly Car­los-ian ele­ments, that seem almost pro­to-psy­che­del­ic (we might imag­ine a jazz-age Os Mutantes accom­pa­ny­ing these trip­py designs).  J. Car­los was a pro­lif­ic artist who “col­lab­o­rat­ed in design and illus­tra­tion in all the major pub­li­ca­tions of Brazil from the 1920s until the 1950s.” In all, it’s esti­mat­ed that he left behind over 100,000 illus­tra­tions. So devot­ed was Car­los to the art and cul­ture of his native city that he appar­ent­ly turned down an invi­ta­tion by Walt Dis­ney to work in Hol­ly­wood.

Print mag­a­zine describes Car­los’ work as “a cross between Aubrey Beard­s­ley and John Held Jr.,” and while there is no short­age of the wil­lowy, doll-like flap­pers, elon­gat­ed, elfin fig­ures, and intri­cate, spi­dery pat­terns we would expect from this deriva­tion, Car­los is also doing some­thing very dif­fer­ent from either of those artists—or real­ly from any­one work­ing in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. He has since become a hero­ic fig­ure for Brazil­ian artists and schol­ars, inspir­ing an exten­sive web project, a visu­al the­sis on Issuu, and two recent doc­u­men­tary films (all in Por­tuguese), which you can find here.

In 2009, Car­los received a posthu­mous hon­or that prob­a­bly would have thrilled him in life, a trib­ute song by the Académi­cos da Rocin­ha sam­ba club. Lis­ten to it here and find sev­er­al more of Car­los’ Para Todos cov­ers at Messy Nessy, Print, and the Brazil­ian blog Os cam­in­hos do Jour­nal­is­mo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Hun­dreds of Issues of Jugend, Germany’s Pio­neer­ing Art Nou­veau Mag­a­zine (1896–1940)

Down­load Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Mag­a­zines from the Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry: Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, Futur­ism & More

Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illus­trat­ed by Aubrey Beard­s­ley in a Strik­ing Mod­ern Aes­thet­ic (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It’s an ungain­ly word for Eng­lish speak­ers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gle­ich­schal­tung. Yet the con­cept remains cen­tral for a clear view of what hap­pened to Ger­many in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation com­plete­ly trans­formed, seem­ing­ly overnight, through “a con­cert­ed pol­i­cy of ‘coor­di­na­tion’ (Gleis­chal­tung),” the U.S. Holo­caust Muse­um writes. “Cul­ture, the econ­o­my, edu­ca­tion, and law all came under Nazi con­trol.” Those artists and orga­ni­za­tions that were not purged had their essen­tial char­ac­ter changed to reflect an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of artis­tic and polit­i­cal val­ues. One pub­li­ca­tion, espe­cial­ly, serves as an exam­ple of the Naz­i­fi­ca­tion of cul­ture.

The arts jour­nal Jugend (Youth), writes Messy ’N Chic, “had been turned large­ly into pro­pa­gan­da” between 1933 and 1940, its final year. But pri­or to the regime’s takeover, Jugend show­cased the most avant-garde, “degen­er­ate” artists of the era, and might have been “the ‘braini­est’ peri­od­i­cal of the day,” as one crit­ic wrote in a 1904 issue of The Yale Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zine. “There is no mag­a­zine pub­lished in Eng­land or in this coun­try which is at all like it.”

You can take a look yourself—browse, search, and down­load hun­dreds of scanned issues of Jugend at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hei­del­berg’s dig­i­tal archive, thou­sands of pages in PDF form, span­ning the mag­a­zine’s forty-four year his­to­ry. You can also see images at Flickr.

As in Eng­land, France, Aus­tria, and the U.S., the Art Nou­veau move­ment in Ger­many emerged from a whirl­wind of post-Impres­sion­ist paint­ing, Ori­en­tal­ist motifs, folk art, mod­ernist art and adver­tis­ing, book illus­tra­tion, and graph­ic and indus­tri­al design. Appro­pri­ate­ly, giv­en its perch on the thresh­old of a new mil­len­ni­um, Art Nou­veau looked both backward—to the medieval, goth­ic, and Romantic—and for­ward toward a more mod­ernist, urbane, and urban­ized sen­si­bil­i­ty.

So influ­en­tial was Jugend that Art Nou­veau in Ger­many became known as Jugend­stil. The Oxford Crit­i­cal and Cul­tur­al His­to­ry of Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines writes, “Among Jugend’s most impor­tant qualities—indeed, an essen­tial aspect of Art Nou­veau and its Ger­man equiv­a­lent Jugend­stil—was its bril­liant escapism.” Found­ed in 1896 by writer George Hirth, the mag­a­zine was “from the start a venue to pro­mote the new cul­tur­al Renais­sance with­out recourse to the estab­lished ‘vin­tage’ art.” (See its very first cov­er right above.)

Jugen­stil was pri­mar­i­ly based in Munich, where most of its artists, design­ers, and writ­ers lived and worked, until the turn of the cen­tu­ry, when, notes the Art Ency­clo­pe­dia, “the Munich group dis­persed, head­ing for Berlin, Weimar and Darm­stadt.” Art Nou­veau in Ger­many devel­oped in two phas­es, “a pre-1900 phase dom­i­nat­ed by flo­ral motifs, them­selves root­ed in Eng­lish Art Nou­veau and Japan­ese art,” and a “post-1900 phase, marked by a ten­den­cy towards abstract art.”

While we know the names of many Art Nou­veau artists from else­where in Europe—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Aubrey Beard­s­ley in Eng­land, Gus­tave Klimt in Aus­tria, for exam­ple— Jugend­stil in Ger­many pro­duced few inter­na­tion­al stars. Many of the artists pub­lished in its pages were rel­a­tive­ly unknown at first. But its shock­ing­ly bril­liant cov­ers and rad­i­cal edi­to­r­i­al tone put it at the fore­front of Ger­man arts for decades. “Jugend’s polit­i­cal and social plat­form,” wrote the The Yale Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zine crit­ic, “is one of opposition—opposition to every­thing.”

In 1933, how­ev­er, the mag­a­zine was forced to com­ply with the kind of dour con­ser­vatism it had arisen explic­it­ly to protest. Its wild cov­ers and proud­ly orig­i­nal con­tents turned som­bre and neo­clas­si­cal, as in the bust of Niet­zsche on the cov­er above from 1934. Many of its artists dis­ap­peared or went into exile. But as we observe this trans­for­ma­tion hap­pen­ing abrupt­ly in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hei­del­berg archive, we still see a mag­a­zine whose edi­to­r­i­al staff held fast to notions of artis­tic qual­i­ty, as they were forced to turn away from every­thing that had made Jugend excit­ing, cut­ting-edge, and wor­thy of its title.

via Messy ’N Chic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Mag­a­zines from the Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry: Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, Futur­ism & More

Down­load 36 Dadaist Mag­a­zines from the The Dig­i­tal Dada Archive (Plus Oth­er Avant-Garde Books, Leaflets & Ephemera)

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When humorist and New York­er con­trib­u­tor David Sedaris quit smok­ing about a decade ago, he chose Tokyo in which to do it: “Its for­eign­ness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me some­thing to con­cen­trate on besides my own suf­fer­ing.” That first extend­ed trip not only allowed him to kick the habit and gave him plen­ty of cul­ture clash­es to write about, but began his rela­tion­ship with Tokyo that con­tin­ues to this day. “Win­dows flanked the mov­ing side­walks, and on their ledges sat pot­ted flow­ers,” he writes in appre­ci­a­tion in his first diaries there. “No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How dif­fer­ent life looks when peo­ple behave them­selves.”

Most strik­ing­ly of all, there stood all “those vend­ing machines, right out in the open, lined up on the side­walk like peo­ple wait­ing for a bus.” The then-Paris-based Sedaris com­mis­er­ates with a French Japan­ese lan­guage school class­mate: “ ‘Can you believe it?’ he asked. ‘In the sub­way sta­tion, on the street, they just stand there, com­plete­ly unmo­lest­ed.’ ”

Our Indone­sian class­mate came up, and after lis­ten­ing to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.

“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.

The Indone­sian raised his eye­brows.

“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Per­sons would break the glass and cov­er every­thing with graf­fi­ti.”

The Indone­sian stu­dent asked why, and we were hard put to explain.

“It’s some­thing to do?” I offered.

“But you can read a news­pa­per,” the Indone­sian said.

“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t sat­is­fy your basic need to tear some­thing apart.”

Those vend­ing machines, a basic expec­ta­tion to Toky­oites but a bare­ly imag­in­able lux­u­ry to many a for­eign­er, appear on one cov­er of the Toky­oi­ter, a col­lab­o­ra­tive art project pro­duc­ing a series of cov­ers for an imag­i­nary New York­er-style mag­a­zine based in the Japan­ese cap­i­tal. This trib­ute to a dis­tinc­tive­ly Japan­ese form of auto­mat­ed side­walk com­merce comes from Hen­nie Haworth, an illus­tra­tor based in Eng­land (where Sedaris also now lives, inci­den­tal­ly) who spent six months in Japan doing noth­ing but draw­ing its vend­ing machines.

“I have a fam­i­ly mem­ber liv­ing in Japan which gives me excuse to vis­it every now and again,” writes illus­tra­tor Yuliya. “One of the main inspi­ra­tions I find in folk­lore and all the mag­i­cal beings of Japan. I’m orig­i­nal­ly from Ukraine and grew up sur­round­ed by folk tales and super­sti­tions, and even though I nev­er tru­ly believed in any of it, it always fas­ci­nat­ed me. I miss that in mod­ern West­ern world. So the crea­tures on my cov­er are made up but they are inspired by Japan­ese Yokai and just like the rest of Tokyo, they’re tak­ing a spon­ta­neous nap on the train.” Oth­er Toky­oi­ter cov­ers, con­tributed by artists from all around the world, take as their sub­jects Toky­o’s archi­tec­ture, its food, its street life, its bath hous­es, and much more besides.

Tak­en as a col­lec­tion, the project presents a com­bi­na­tion of images of Tokyo famil­iar even to those who’ve nev­er set foot in the city and ref­er­ences whose nuances only a Toky­oite — or at least some­one with a Sedaris-lev­el famil­iar­i­ty with the place — can imme­di­ate­ly grasp. What could be more Tokyo, for instance, than the Rock­a­bil­ly dancers of Yoyo­gi Park, por­trayed here by Aus­tralian artist Grace Lee, who for more than 40 years have spent their Sun­day after­noons tak­ing 1950s Amer­i­cana to its absolute lim­it for the enjoy­ment of all who pass by? And if you’ve gone to see them your­self, you’ll know that, if you get thirsty while watch­ing, you can sim­ply buy a drink from one of the many vend­ing machines near­by, all lined up right out in the open.

See more cov­ers in the Toky­oi­ter col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Vin­tage Japan­ese Mag­a­zine Cov­ers (1913–46)

New Archive Presents The Chicagoan, Chicago’s Jazz-Age Answer to The New York­er (1926 to 1935)

Mashup Artist “Kuti­man” Trav­els to Tokyo and Cre­ates an Incred­i­ble Musi­cal Post­card

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.