Giv­en the his­to­ry of New York’s East Vil­lage as the first for­eign lan­guage neigh­bor­hood in the coun­try after waves of Euro­pean immi­gra­tion, per­haps it’s only nat­ur­al that Klaus Nomi, opera-singing Ger­man per­for­mance artist who made a name for him­self in the punk clubs of the late 70s, would find a home there.

By his time, the ten­e­ments had giv­en way to oth­er demo­graph­ic waves: includ­ing Beat­niks, writ­ers, actors, Warho­lian Fac­to­ry super­stars, and punk and New Wave scen­esters, whom Dan­ger­ous Mind’s Richard Met­zger calls a “sec­ond gen­er­a­tion” after Warhol, “drawn in by that Warhol myth but doing their own things.”

Even amidst the thriv­ing DIY exper­i­men­tal­ism of Post-Warho­lian art, fash­ion, and music, of a scene includ­ing Talk­ing Heads, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kei­th Har­ing, Nomi stood out. It was the way he seemed to inhab­it two time peri­ods at once. He arrived both as a cabaret per­former from Weimar Germany—a trag­ic clown with the voice of an angel—and as a thor­ough­ly con­vinc­ing inter­galac­tic trav­el­er, tele­port­ing in briefly from the future.

No one was pre­pared for this when he made his New York debut at Irv­ing Plaza’s New Wave Vaude­ville show in 1978, evok­ing an even ear­li­er era by singing “Mon cœur s’ou­vre à ta voix,” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1877 opera Sam­son et Dalila. After his stun­ning per­for­mance, he would dis­ap­pear from the stage in a con­fu­sion of strobe lights and smoke. East Vil­lage artist Joey Arias remem­bers, “It was like he was from a dif­fer­ent plan­et and his par­ents were call­ing him home.”

Oth­er acts at New Wave Vaude­ville, a four-night East Vil­lage vari­ety show, were “doing a punk ver­sion of Mick­ey Rooney, ‘We’re going to do a goofy show,’” says Kris­t­ian Hoff­man, the musi­cian who became Nomi’s musi­cal direc­tor. In came Nomi with “a whole dif­fer­ent lev­el of accom­plish­ment.” MC David McDer­mott was oblig­ed to announce that he was not singing to a record­ing. You can see Nomi debut at New Wave Vaude­ville above, in a clip from the 2004 film The Nomi Song.

The sig­nif­i­cance of these ear­ly per­for­mances goes far beyond the imme­di­ate shock of their first audi­ences. At these shows, Nomi met Hoff­man, who would form his band and write the songs for which he became best known. Pro­duc­er and direc­tor of the New Wave Vaude­ville show Susan Han­naford and Ann Mag­nu­son were also the own­er and bar­tender at Club 57, where Nomi would help them orga­nize exhibits by artists like Ken­ny Scharf.

See­ing Nomi’s debut can still feel a bit like watch­ing a vis­i­tor arrive from both the past and the future at once. And it is lucky we have this ear­ly footage of an artist who would to on to per­form with David Bowie and become a gay icon and pio­neer of the­atri­cal New Wave. But we should also see his arrival on the scene as an essen­tial doc­u­ment of the his­to­ry of the East Vil­lage, and its trans­for­ma­tion into “a play­ground,” as Messy Nessy writes, “for artis­tic mis­an­thropes, anar­chists, exhi­bi­tion­ists, queers, poets, punks and every­thing in between,” includ­ing opera-singing aliens from West Berlin.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enchant­i­ng Opera Per­for­mances of Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi Per­forms with Kraftwerk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1982)

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

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

“In the late 1800’s new tech­nol­o­gy was chang­ing the way the world worked, and the way that it looked,” the Vox video above explains. “Some peo­ple, espe­cial­ly artists, liv­ing through the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, were not so into all the new indus­try. To be blunt, they thought it was ugly.” They respond­ed with organ­ic forms and intri­cate pat­terns that evoked a pre-indus­tri­al world while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly show­cas­ing, and sell­ing, the most mod­ern ideas and prod­ucts.

Draw­ing on the hand­craft­ed aes­thet­ic of the Arts and Crafts Move­ment, the Goth­ic revival, the florid, ornate paint­ings of the Pre-Raphaelites, a fas­ci­na­tion with Japan­ese wood­block prints, and the strange, beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions of sea crea­tures by Ernst Haeck­el, artists began to chal­lenge late Vic­to­ri­an ortho­dox­ies. The style we now know as Art Nou­veau emerged.

It went by many names: Jugend­stil, Mon­dernisme, Tiffany Style, Glas­gow Style, Stile Lib­er­ty, Sezes­sion­stil. Each iden­ti­fied a col­lec­tion of traits with which we are now famil­iar from the many hun­dreds of posters and adver­tise­ments of the time. Grand, flow­ing lines, intri­cate pat­terns, vibrant, often clash­ing col­ors, bold hand-let­ter­ing, fem­i­nine fig­ures and elab­o­rate, exot­ic themes….

The descrip­tions of Art Nouveau’s qual­i­ties also apply to the poster and album cov­er art of the psy­che­del­ic 1960s, and no won­der, giv­en the sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence of the for­mer upon the lat­ter. The artists of the acid rock peri­od rebelled not so much against indus­tri­al­iza­tion as the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al-com­plex. At the epi­cen­ter of the move­ment was the San Fran­cis­co of Jef­fer­son Air­plane and the Grate­ful Dead.

Venues like the Fil­more and the Aval­on adver­tised the hip­pie rev­o­lu­tion with eye-catch­ing posters inspired by those that once lined the thor­ough­fares of Europe in an age before TV, radio, and neon signs. Art Nou­veau-like designs had already returned with the flower pat­terns pop­u­lar in fab­rics at the time. 60s graph­ic design­ers saw these seduc­tive styles as the key to a new psy­che­del­ic vision.

It’s easy to see why. Flow­ers, curves, pea­cocks, updates of Art Nou­veau images from the past (includ­ing skele­tons and roses)—dialed up to 11 with “eye-vibrat­ing” colors—made the per­fect visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment for the acid-fla­vored Roman­ti­cism that took root dur­ing the Viet­nam era. Even the fonts were poached from turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry graph­ic art. Famous 60s design­ers like Wes Wil­son con­fessed their admi­ra­tion for mod­ernism, “the idea,” Wil­son told Time in 1967, “of real­ly putting it all out there.”

Just as Art Nou­veau flow­ered into an inter­na­tion­al style, with some pre­scient­ly trip­py man­i­fes­ta­tions in Brazil and oth­er places, so too did the 60s psy­che­del­ic poster, spread­ing from San Fran­cis­co to every cor­ner of the globe. And as Art Nou­veau became the house style for the coun­ter­cul­ture of the ear­ly 20th century—celebrating sex­u­al and cul­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion and occult interests—it announced the birth of flower pow­er and its recov­ery of mod­ernism’s expres­sive free­doms.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Down­load 200+ Belle Époque Art Posters: An Archive of Mas­ter­pieces from the “Gold­en Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Designs of Brazil’s 1920s Art Deco Mag­a­zine, Para Todos

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