\u201cSharp Sybaritic\u201d Retrofuturistic Deco Realism: Some Preliminary Notes on the 1980s Airbrush Art<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n\nUrsula-Helen Kassaveti<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nAbstract<\/strong>: Originating in the late 19th century, the airbrush spray gun was widely used in the mid-20th century as a photo retouch tool in advertising, while it contributed to the introduction of Photorealism in the early 1970s. The \u201cLA scene\u201d of the same decade popularized airbrush art through masterful illustrations. Using a variety of different representations, the 1980s airbrush art became the distinctive postmodern popular style of the decade, especially through the publication and distribution of posters and postcards, as well as in advertising. Although the 1990s saw its decline, in the late 2000s the 1980s airbrush art seems to be resurgent thanks to the Internet, providing an escapist narrative for the post-2007-2008 financial crisis landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
\nResume<\/strong>: Apparu \u00e0 l\u2019origine vers la fin du XIXe si\u00e8cle, l\u2019a\u00e9rographe a \u00e9t\u00e9 largement utilis\u00e9 au milieu du XXe si\u00e8cle comme un outil de retouche photo dans la publicit\u00e9, tout en contribuant \u00e0 l\u2019 introduction du Photor\u00e9alisme au d\u00e9but des ann\u00e9es 1970. Dans la m\u00eame d\u00e9cennie, la \u201csc\u00e8ne L.A.\u201d a popularis\u00e9 l\u2019art de l\u2019 a\u00e9rographie au travers d\u2019 illustrations magistrales qui ont d\u00e9ploy\u00e9 divers th\u00e8mes artistiques. \u00c0 l\u2019 aide d\u2019 une vari\u00e9t\u00e9 de repr\u00e9sentations diff\u00e9rentes, l\u2019 art a\u00e9rographe des ann\u00e9es 1980 est devenu le style populaire postmoderne distinctif de la d\u00e9cennie. Notamment, on le reconna\u00eet dans la publication et la distribution d\u2019 affiches ou de cartes postales, ainsi que dans la publicit\u00e9. Bien que les ann\u00e9es 1990 aient \u00e9t\u00e9 t\u00e9moins de son d\u00e9clin, l\u2019 art de l\u2019 a\u00e9rographie des ann\u00e9es 1980 semble maintenant resurgir de l\u2019 oubli gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 Internet, fournissant un lieu d\u2019 \u00e9vasion dans le paysage de crise financi\u00e8re post-2007-2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\nTable of Contents<\/a> | Article doi: 10.17742\/IMAGE.OI.10.2.4 | PDF<\/a><\/p>\nS<\/span>hortly after the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the European debt crisis of 2008, many of us started to look back to the decades of the twentieth century, confirming, to some extent, Svetlana Boym\u2019s assertion that, \u201cnostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals\u201d (Boym 2001 14). Trying to distance ourselves from those harder times, many of us headed towards a better \u201chome,\u201d even if the latter was only available in the digital world. New online social platforms became the hotspot for nostalgia allowing users to dig through and collate photographic remnants of past aesthetic movements, and re-shape an image of a shinier past, part real and part imagined.<\/p>\nDuring these years of financial instability and hardship in the first and subsequent decade of the 21st century, visual imagery from the popular culture and cinema of the 1980s especially resurfaced on the internet thanks to micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr and online social networks that focus on images like Pinterest (Munteanu). Through a vast network of user accounts (most anonymous), Tumblr and Pinterest uploaded thousands of scans of books, postcards, and details from posters, which together present a clear and fascinating record of airbrush art from the 1980s.1<\/sup><\/a> New publications in art history were also encouraging a renewed interest in the longer history of airbrush art: Norman Hathaway\u2019s Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of Airbrush<\/em> (2008), for example, shed light on the life of important airbrush artists mainly from the 1970s (Charles E. White III, Peter Palombi, David Williardson, and Peter Lloyd), and deepened airbrush enthusiasts\u2019 understanding of their influential work.<\/p>\nHowever, the long story of airbrush art could begin even earlier in the late 1960s with the use of a spray gun, which resembled the proportions of a fountain pen and had been used in the USA since 1888 (Van Hamersveld 16). This invention, attributed to Charles Burdick, could spray \u201cpigments onto a surface without ever touching the surface itself\u201d (Van Hamersveld 16). While airbrushing with gouache or acrylic paints, artists used masking paper to create different shapes, shadows, or color effects. As Bill Jonas, a former editor of Airbrush Action<\/em> magazine, argued, the airbrush was ideal \u201cfor rendering subtle gradations (i.e., flesh tones) and shadows, and metallic surfaces\u201d (8) and for emulating \u201cmist, light, smoke, vapor \u2026 and beautiful blendings with the slightest pull of a trigger\u201d (Tennant 9).<\/p>\nFrom its first use in the 1880s up until the 1980s, airbrushing has been applied in various artistic fields: fine art, advertising illustration, self-promotional art, architectural design, and technical illustration. However, it was in the late 1970s and the 1980s that airbrush became a prominent, popular style, particularly in illustration and where it became interwoven with the popular culture of the era. Its imagery consisted primarily of variations on different themes: female portraits, tropical landscapes, cars, fruits, various consumer goods, and architectural interior design. Such imagery was intertextual, as it tended to adopt and blend decorative elements from earlier aesthetic movements Art Deco, Photorealism, Memphis style, and retrofuturism. The airbrush art of the 1980s was produced by artists from various countries (the USA, UK, Italy, and Japan) as a postmodern form of expression; but it should not, at the same time, be considered as a unified artistic movement, as there were many different foci and styles located around the world.<\/p>\n
The global popularity of 1980s airbrush art in many ways hinged on the circulation of prints and posters as an important element of interior decoration. Describing some of the decorations of 1980s homes, Wayne Hemingway remarks that:<\/p>\n
\nAny chrome and tech room isn\u2019t complete without an Athena print. Athena in the 1970s and early 1980s brought affordable prints to us all. No house was complete without a red-lipped beauty sucking suggestively on a cherry, or a racy siren morphing into the bonnet of a red sports car. Prints of exotic cocktails on the window ledge of a glamorous hotel room looking onto Hong Kong Harbour, or images of Parisienne ladies with wide-brimmed hats and high heels, fulfilled dreams of foreign travel\u2026. (26)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The purpose of this article is to provide a short historical overview of the kind of airbrush art described by Hemingway and to identify its characteristic elements and influences. My research was carried out by reviewing existing publications on American, European, and Japanese airbrush art and its artists from the fifteen-year period (1977-1992) that witnessed the emergence, style, and applications of airbrush art as a dominant aesthetic. I also made use of a series of postcards, posters, and LPs featuring airbrush art, which were collected by three Greek collectors. These archival objects provided me with vivid paradigms of 1980s airbrush art. It should be noted, however, that it was extremely difficult to locate and make contact with other artists, and to preserve the respective rights to publish their illustration in a paper. So, inevitably, this article\u2019s focus has been narrowed to a particular set of artists and artworks; but the hope is that the ground it covers will be expanded by those who have been granted access a wider range of archives. The article explores the diffusion and popularity airbrush art achieved through the circulation of prints by companies like Athena International, which renewed and influenced the visual imagery of this popular style through their iconic and vibrant retrofuturistic posters (such as Long Distance Kiss<\/em> by South-African illustrator Syd Brak\u2014one of the most prominent 1980s airbrush illustrators). In conclusion, I theorize the reemergence of airbrush art in the 21st century, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s concept of \u201cchronotope\u201d to argue that\u2014amid the vast image collection that comprises the Internet\u2014nostalgic and escapist presentations of airbrush art in the post-2007-2008 landscape operate as a chronotopic habitat of 1980s prosperity.<\/p>\n\nAirbrushing as a Technique: From the 1920s to Photorealism<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
A<\/span>t the beginning, airbrush was an auxiliary tool for artists and photographers; it was only later that it gradually transformed into a key element in the production of a realistic visual style. In the 20th century and, especially, during the roaring 1920s decade, the airbrush was heavily used as a photo-retouching tool. According to Van Hamersveld, the premier airbrush illustration \u201cappeared in the New York Director\u2019s Annual in 1928\u201d and was created by Samuel Otis (42). In Europe, and particularly in France, the interest in the \u201cpochoir (stencil<\/em>) printing process\u201d resulted in various experiments with airbrushing in the fashion illustrations of the women\u2019s magazines of the era, such as Le Gazette du Bon Ton<\/em>, and in advertisements illustrated by artists such as A. M. Cassandre and Jean Carlu (Robinson 22-23). As Alistair Duncan observes, during this period of growing improvements in manufacturing techniques and the consequent abundance of consumer goods, advertising came to play a crucial role in developing consumer habits. In this context, minimalist posters set out on \u201ccolonnes d\u2019affiche\u201d in Paris with their \u201csharp linear compositions, floating on flat areas of background color quickly drew the eye\u201d of potential customers (Duncan 150). Meanwhile, Bauhaus artists like L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy used the tool to \u201csoften the differences between the various elements of a photomontage\u201d (Van Hamersveld 24; see also Kaplan 128-29 and Hariu 2-3). In succeeding decades, fashion and men\u2019s magazines, like Playboy<\/em> or Esquire<\/em>, started featuring airbrush illustrations by popular artists, such as pin-up illustrator George Petty and fashion illustrator Alberto Vargas.<\/p>\nAfter facing a short decline during the 1950s (excepting its frequent use by Push Pin Studios led by graphic designers Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, and Edward Sorel), the airbrush began to be used again in Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll posters and was legitimized as a tool and technique in the following decade, the era of Photorealism. After going through a variety of different articulations, such as \u201cSuper-Real, Sharp-Focus, Radical Real, Hyperreal (in France), Romantic Real and Magic Real,\u201d Photorealism was at last coined in 1968 by the American collector Louis K. Meisel (Meisel, Photorealism<\/em> 12).2<\/sup><\/a> The term was first used to describe the re-emergence of Realism in painting, associated with the \u201cTwenty-Two Realists\u201d exhibition at the Whitney Museum in January 1970, and artists that used the camera and other mechanical or semi-mechanical means to transfer visual information to the canvas alongside a newly refined technical capacity to give the finished work a photographic appearance.<\/p>\nThe laborious techniques adopted by Photorealist artists, such as Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Ben Schonzeit, and Don Eddy, depended upon two tools: the classical bristle brush and the airbrush. The latter was used for smoothing blended surfaces, but also, as photorealist artist Chuck Close contends, for \u201creasons that involve [the artists\u2019] philosophical and conceptual approaches to painting,\u201d which he identifies as, \u201cimpersonality, system, surface\u201d (Close qtd. in Meisel, Photorealism<\/em> 15).3<\/sup><\/a> According to art historian Frederick Hartt, airbrush was used by everyone, who created artworks in the \u201csharp sybaritic realist\u201d vein, a term which was first coined by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (Hartt 948-49; Dali 4-5).<\/p>\nThe re-emergence of the airbrush technique in the 1970s thus secured the popularity of the medium for the 1980s, and the enduring influence of new artistic trends associated with realistic and laborious representations. It was also in the 80s that this style began to be adopted by illustrators or advertisers, who explored its new possibilities and established its intertextual character by appropriating elements from even older styles and aesthetic movements.<\/p>\n
\nShaping the 1980s Airbrush Art Style: Influences and Themes<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
E<\/span>xploring the formal characteristics of the 1980s airbrush art, we come across a modern revival of the older styles that were the first to influence airbrush art. In a decade that saw the rise of postmodern aesthetics in Europe and the USA, the 1980s airbrush art is also recognizable as a style that shares specific postmodern attributes (Siegel 2).4<\/sup><\/a> Airbrush art produces a highly aestheticized, nostalgic art language that is curiously devoid of \u201cgenuine historicity\u201d , and, at the same time, uses this method of pastiche in a manner that \u201csubverts dominant discourses\u201d by creatively merging of different artistic styles and popular culture elements in a way that challenges the once characteristic dichotomy between \u201chighbrow\u201d and \u201clowbrow\u201d culture (Jameson 17-19; Hutcheon 46), such as in the case of American illustrator Patrick Nagel.<\/p>\nIn addition to Hyperrealism\u2019s photographic rendering of painted reality, the influence of Art Deco was central and formative for the look of 1980s airbrush art, providing it with many of its most common motifs. Art Deco, as the \u201clast truly sumptuous style, a legitimate and highly fertile chapter in the history of applied art,\u201d evolved its basic iconography from avant-garde painting (Cubism, Futurism, etc.) and a series of vernacular characteristics (such as zigzags, chevrons, flowers, high fashion) during the 1920s in Europe and in the 1930s in the USA, when the splendor of machinery and aerodynamic designs affected its various forms (Duncan 7). After its decline, Art Deco was revived many times later, as \u201can artistic amalgam\u201d (Duncan 8). According to Nancy McClelland, Art Deco not only proved to be a \u201cuseful language\u201d for the Pop Art of the late 1960s, revolving around \u201cthe flat colors and hard-edged shapes of the Deco graphics,\u201d but also achieved rebirth in different fashion trends and film in the 1970s (McClelland 251-53; Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival<\/em> 86).5<\/sup><\/a> Art Deco\u2019s revival had been one of the decisive factors in shaping the popularity of airbrush art in the 1970s in the USA, and specifically in Los Angeles. American airbrush art was incredibly popular: \u201cIt was everywhere\u2014magazines, album covers, high up on billboards; on clothing, as fine art, and in the film\u201d; and its aesthetics were based on the imagery of \u201cmetal, plastic and streamline\u201d which were reflected in the modern American city (Salisbury 7 and 10). Influenced by the pre-war nostalgic images created by Push Pin Studios, the LA scene\u2019s airbrush artists, such as Peter Palombi, Charles White III, and Dave Williardson, deployed Art Deco or Tropical Deco motifs in their airbrush art, creating stunning visual examples of imaginary and almost non-temporal still-life compositions and portraits.<\/p>\nThe dawn of the 1980s saw yet another revival of the Art Deco style in Europe: the seminal design collective Memphis, based in Milan and led by Ettore Sottsass, was inspired by older Art Deco aesthetics, blending them with popular Milanese culture, the traditions of the Orient, and elements of Streamline Moderne<\/em> (Horn 20). At the same time, the rich European style was assimilated into the American culture, resulting in the birth of Tropical Deco architecture in Miami, Florida, which \u201cevolved out of a softer palette and had a different vision from \u2018Big City\u2019 or \u2018Industrial Deco\u2019\u201d (Capitman; Cerwinske 11). For Cerwinske, Tropical Deco was \u201can architecture designed to evoke feelings of delight\u201d and its soft pastels, streamlined aesthetics, glass block windows, curved angles, and geometric compositions were some of the most frequently recurring themes of the 1980s airbrush art (12).<\/p>\nIn this regard, the 1980s airbrush art could be seen as a natural extension of its 1970s version. Apart from technical illustration, which stuck to the smallest representational elements, a heavy Deco influence can be traced in the attention given to the slightest details of the 1980s airbrush art, and is evident in both still-life illustrations and portraits from the era. These still-life compositions revolve around recurring themes, such as food and beverages (colorful and shiny cocktails, sundaes, and so on) (Image 1), deco buildings, palm trees, and vases with flowers. The same attention to detail, however, is evident in airbrush portraiture. Mal Watson, a British airbrush artist, produced a series of female portraits or \u201cladies,\u201d such as Oriental Lady<\/em>, Chic Lady<\/em>, and Midnight Lady<\/em>, which depicted various femmes fatales<\/em> in different urban landscapes. Echoing Art Deco and Japonisme, those female portraits were clad in high 1930s fashion, drank cocktails, wore sexy heels, and had New York\u2019s Chrysler building or the San Francisco bridge as backgrounds (Image 2). They deploy various decorative Art Deco motifs (i.e., the glamorous female sitters that could be seen in older fashion illustrations), using clear outlines, cool colors, while attention is given to the realistic depiction of a central female figure. Sometimes, in addition to its preoccupation with the \u201croaring 1920s,\u201d airbrush art would also revolve around representations of the 1930s, in which Art Deco style or Streamline Moderne<\/em> elements were prominent.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image1.png\")
<\/a>Image 1: Long Drinks<\/em> by Laura Rigo \u00a9 Arti Grafiche Ricordi \u2013 Milano. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image2.jpeg\")
<\/a>Image 2: Chic Lady<\/em> by Mal Watson \u00a9 Athena International London. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPierrots were also a recurrent theme. As Duncan observes, fashion illustrators from the 1920s, such as Georges Barbier, Georges Lepape, and Andr\u00e9 \u00c9douard Marty, \u201cmixed 18th-century pierrots, columbines, powdered girls and crinolines with the depiction of young women\u201d clad in haute couture fashion, and, therefore, were the first to popularize the pierrot motif. Pierrot-inspired portraits from European illustrators, like Luigi Patrignani, show the creative accumulation of Art Deco motifs in the 1980s postmodern airbrush art (Image 3). Sad Pierrot<\/em> by Patrignani presents the viewer with a tension between clear and blurred lines tracing the outline of the figure\u2019s face and clothing. These lines merge in a tense photo-realistic style that is as vivid as it appears to be empty, devoid of underlying or \u201chidden\u201d concepts.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image3.png\")
<\/a>Image 3: Pierrot<\/em> by Luigi Patrignani \u00a9 Arti Grafiche Ricordi \u2013 Milano. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIt should be noted that retrofuturism also occupied a privileged space in the airbrush art of the 1980s. Guffey and Lemay argue that retrofuturism in the culture of the 20th century identifies the future as a \u201cstyle,\u201d infused with \u201cnostalgia, irony, and time-bending dislocation\u201d (434). Retrofuturist imagery offers futuristic visions articulated in a retro style, creating a back-and-forth dialogue between the past and the future, as in the exemplary work of Japanese artists Hajime Sorayama and Pater Sato.6<\/sup><\/a> Shooting Wide<\/em> by Brak is an exemplary illustration in this vein (Image 4). Featuring cool and warm colors, three identical punkish female sitters with a gun in their hand appear in movement, manifesting their sensuality. The artist faithfully records their facial features (hair, eyes, etc.) and masters the textile form of their clothing in bright sequins and other textures. They appear against a horizontal, non-realistic, and futuristic background made of neon lights. They seem to be shooting towards a prospective era, somewhere in the near future.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image4.png\")
<\/a>Image 4: Shooting Wide<\/em> by Syd Brak \u00a9 Athena International London. Postcard.g<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nNostalgia for other decades, such as the 1950s and the 1960s, can be traced in the airbrush works of artists like Martin Alton, who delved into imagery of 1950s popular stars, diners, jukeboxes, ads, and so on. In the 1980s, Alton produced a series of portraits depicting 1950s film and music stars like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and James Dean. These portraits, which focus in on the slightest detail, also include a miniaturized full-body sketch of the star against a plain background placed at the bottom of the composition. The Presley portrait looks like a faded photograph, employing cool pastel tones, while Elvis\u2019s mellow gaze reveals a yearning for older and better days (Image 5).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image5.png\")
<\/a>Image 5: Elvis<\/em> by Martin Alton \u00a9 Athena International London. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nA final point should be made about the similarities between airbrush works that results from recurring subjects and themes and copycat productions that try to imitate the success or popularity of other artists. While this repetition and reduplication is troubling from the standpoint of originality and authenticity, it expands the notion of airbrush art\u2019s intertextuality that reinforces the meaning of the experience, rather than undermining the aura of the work\u2019s authenticity. In the case of Barry Lepard\u2019s Reflections<\/em> (Athena International) and Patrignani\u2019s New York Reflections<\/em> (Paperclub, Arti Grafiche Ricordi), the eye area in each portrait constitutes for both illustrations the focal point\u2014covered by either a mirror hat or huge sunglasses\u2014that initiates an interplay between light and shade. The reflected images in each illustration indicate New York as the sitter\u2019s most likely location. The main subject of such illustrations is life in the modern metropolis, seen not from different, but complementary, perspectives.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image6.png\")
<\/a>Image 6: Reflections<\/em> by Barry Lepard \u00a9 Athena International London. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image7.png\")
<\/a>Image 7: New York Reflections<\/em> by Luigi Patrignani \u00a9 Arti Grafiche Ricordi \u2013 Milano. Postcard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\nAchieving Popularity: Airbrush Art on Postcards, Posters, Album Covers, and Stationary<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
D<\/span>espite the fact that the airbrush style shared some high-brow characteristics with Photorealism and that some airbrush artists exhibited their work at art galleries, airbrush art was nonetheless considered a popular medium and mode of artistic expression tied to the circulation of prints, posters, and postcards, featuring still life, portraits, and landscapes. As everyday commodities, these iterations of airbrush art bore the twin characteristics of most popular graphic design artifacts: they were mass reproduced and therefore affordable (Jobling and Crowley 1 and 3).<\/p>\nThe American stationary company Paper Moon Graphics became one of the first stationary companies to publish postcards with various artworks by 1970s airbrush artists like Peter Palombi. However, it was graphic designer and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who gave prominence to the poster as an artistic form. As Elena G. Millie observes, \u201cNagel\u2019s posters have been in the forefront of the contemporary trend to move advertising art away from the product to other images; they also have an independent existence \u2026 tending to obliterate the line between the fine and applied arts\u201d (6-9). Nagel\u2019s line was imaginatively adopted by stationery companies, such as Arti Grafiche Ricordi from Milano in Italy, Verkerke from the Netherlands, and Athena International from the United Kingdom.7<\/sup><\/a> The latter two released a series of printed posters and postcards of airbrush art, which decorated hundreds of teenage bedrooms as well as various shops, cafeterias, and clubs in the 1980s.<\/p>\nSome of these prints and posters operated as a synecdoche for airbrush art per se. The South-African illustrator Brak, for example, admired the pin-ups by Alberto Vargas and the Palm Beach style and blended popular culture, iconic fashion elements, and nostalgia in many of his famous airbrush illustrations.8<\/sup><\/a> When Brak arrived in London, Punk was a dominant aesthetic trend, but, according to the illustrator, \u201cit lacked style,\u201d as it was \u201cslightly dirty and unfinished\u201d (Email communication). So, he re-imagined and re-designed the Punk look in \u201ca fashionable Milanese way\u201d (Email communication).9<\/sup><\/a> Seen in this light, the story behind the release of Long Distance Kiss<\/em> in print\u2014one of the most iconic Athena posters created by Brak\u2014was, in fact, a narrative of what was happening in the popular culture of the era (Image 8). As Brak recalls:<\/p>\n\nA company called Athena produced and sold art prints derived from famous artists like Monet, Degas etc. This was a limited market and they were in financial difficulties. They approached me to produce a series of posters, which would appeal to a wider market. I suspected that any expansion would come from a younger market so this took my interest back to the punk look. The task I set myself was to produce aspirational images for teenagers. I conceived emotional messages but using a punk approach to identify with the teenager. As I said I found the Punk look slightly dirty and unfinished. I, therefore, imagined the Punk look applied in a fashionable Milanese way. The result was the \u201cKiss\u201d series of which \u201cThe Long Distance Kiss\u201d became the world\u2019s bestselling poster for two years running and revived the fortunes of Athena. The success of this look led to The New Romantics era.<\/em> (Email communication) 10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image8.jpeg\")
<\/a>Image 8: Long Distance Kiss \u00a9 Syd Brak, 1982. Poster.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nLong Distance Kiss<\/em> took everyone by surprise, as it actually represented a departure from the classic airbrush style and an initiation into the stunning world of fashion, music, and youth. It features an interchange of harder and softer lines, bright and shiny reds in the photorealistic vein. It exemplifies Brak\u2019s choice of depicting heads in profile, while attention is drawn to the melting telephone, a medium of communication and, apparently, a love confession. Brak\u2019s female portraits may resemble the high fashion queens of the 1920s in terms of grace and style, but they also appeared as an extraordinary example of the successful integration of older and newer visual codes. It should be stressed that fashion illustration was also enjoying its heyday at this time, with artists like Antonio Lopez and Nagel, whose art was published in Playboy<\/em> magazine, allegedly defining the female portrait of the decade (see Caranicas).11<\/sup><\/a> Brak\u2019s airbrush works, including the well-known Long Distance Kiss<\/em> and Lost Love<\/em>, are designed with the same technique: hyper-exposed faces emerge from the illustration\u2019s background and are confined to some basic facial features. The bright reds on the lips or cheeks of the sitters of Brak\u2019s designs provide a youthful tone, while their eyes stand in for the total absence of hair, ears, neck, and body. In the meantime, no time and space are suggested, forms float in an imaginary \u201ctime space,\u201d which can partially be indicated thanks to the vibrant fashion details that echo the trends and the subcultures of the decade.<\/p>\nWithin a constant intertextual play, the airbrush art of the 1980s was not only informed by older styles, but also kept in view what was actually happening in popular and youth culture through the negotiation of its various meanings and their visualization (Barnard 83-85). Being inspired by the subcultures and fashion trends of the 1980s, the Kiss<\/em> became a synecdoche for the dreamy and colorful airbrush style that followed its release, as well as the type of the female figure it featured, following the tradition of the 1980s grand female portraits created by other graphic designers and illustrators like Nagel.<\/p>\nBrak\u2019s influence on the contemporary airbrush art of the 1980s could be traced in the work of different airbrush artists. His female prototype, as represented in Long Distance Kiss<\/em>, was widely reproduced in Verkerke\u2019s stationery imagery, while his airbrush works were also released by the Dutch publishing company, which focused its attention also on airbrush art through different artists, such as the German partners Gilda Belin and Fred-J\u00fcrgen Rogner. The pastel palette of their Palm Beach landscapes and interiors and their female minimal portraits with bold pink blush have been on magazine covers, as well as postcards, posters, and teenager\u2019s bags. During that time, Verkerke also produced stationery products and bags, which featured the work of Belin-Rogner and Alton\u2019s homage to airbrush portraits of 1950s film and music stars, which had previously been featured on Athena postcards. The illustrator \u201cGerry the Cat\u201d also conceived airbrush works in the manner of Brak, which were released as stickers, or were featured on notebooks and various accessories.<\/p>\nThe airbrush art of the 1980s played a vital role in the various fields of visual communication, including advertising, illustration, and graphic design both in the USA and Europe. Even in the era when popular music was mainly promoted by MTV, the first television channel ever to broadcast music video-clips, the album art of the vinyl record jackets still contributed to the sales of an LP. Record covers became cultural \u201cartefacts,\u201d offering consumers \u201can attractive site and sight, where the look of authenticity is actually more crucial to the collector than the effective authenticity of the object\u201d (Roy 126). As Steve Jones and Martin Sorgen observe, \u201cgenres of popular music are not entirely musical but also visual, and \u2026 music listeners typically bring with them a good knowledge of visual styles\u201d (84). These visual styles are often associated with other merchandising (t-shirts, bags, posters, and so on) featuring graphic design(s) replicated across a number of products.<\/p>\n
Many popular record sleeves of the 1980s were designed by airbrush artists, some of whom tried to reproduce the Brak prototype and featured characteristic female airbrush figures.12<\/sup><\/a> One such example stems from Canada: Lime, the HI-NRJ duet and husband-and-wife project, had their record sleeves designed by Graffiti Studio of Montreal in the characteristic airbrush style, beginning with their Lime II<\/em> (1982) and continuing with Lime III<\/em> (1983). Their record sleeves for Sensual Sensation<\/em> LP (1984) and onwards feature artwork that is reminiscent of Brak\u2019s airbrush portraits: bathed in the band\u2019s trademark color (lime), a female figure is positioned opposite a cold cocktail, one of the recurring themes of 1980s airbrush art (Image 9). Employing clear outlines with marvelous radiations and hues in green, this jacket illustration produces a simultaneously tropical and postmodern sensation.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/kassaveti-image9.jpeg\")
<\/a>Image 9: Record Sleeve for Lime\u2019s Sensual Sensation<\/em> LP, 1984 \u00a9 Graffiti Studio of Montreal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\nA Long Decline, a Fresh Revival<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
I<\/span> now want to theorize the reemergence of the 1980s airbrush art in the present, using Bakhtin\u2019s concept of the \u201cchronotope\u201d (from \u201cchronos\u201d for time and \u201ctopos\u201d for space). As Bakhtin notes, the term was first employed in the context of Einstein\u2019s Theory of Relativity; his \u201cForms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,\u201d however, seeks to redeploy it as a conceptualization of the merging of space and time \u201cartistically expressed in literature\u201d (Bakhtin 84). It is in the \u201cchronotope,\u201d Bakhtin says, that time \u201cthickens\u201d and becomes \u201cartistically visible\u201d (Bakhtin 84). Here, space responds to \u201cmovements of time, plot and history\u201d and, in so doing, becomes, charged with historicity (Bakhtin 84). In this sense, time interweaves with space (and vice versa) and allows us to understand the way history is represented by a text and the way images of both elements are articulated and related to one another.<\/p>\nAs \u201cno artifact of culture [including airbrush art] ever exists outside of particular moments in historical time and space\u201d (Haynes 104), the notion of chronotope could be useful as a \u201cmetaphor of society and one of the principal generators of artistic meanings in both literature and painting\u201d (Best 291). In this light, airbrush art could be interpreted as a \u201cchronotope\u201d of the 1980s\u2019 popular culture and art emerged through the decade of the Wall Street Boom, the New Conservatism of the US President Ronald Reagan, and conspicuous consumption (see Phillips-Fein; Batchelor and Stoddard 3; and Thompson 15) of hard goods, fashion, etc. Filtered through a nostalgic, Art-Deco lens and producing images of retrofuturity punctuated by tropical intervals, the airbrush chronotope, implicitly or explicitly, could be also a reference to the 1980s metropolis \u201chigh life\u201d and consumer luxuries, as well as lavish glamor.<\/p>\n
Throughout the 1990s, the airbrush art that had previously flourished in advertising, the posters and postcards of Athena and Verkerke publishing companies, and on vinyl jackets started to show signs of formal decline: the repetition of styles and themes and the recycling of ideas, which resulted in the emergence of schlock aesthetics and soulless copies of older successful artworks. In this regard, the 1980s airbrush art was instantly associated with the notion of kitsch and outdatedness, as the new developments in the 1990s graphic design, especially due to the emergence of the digital technology, posed the outlines of a fundamental change in the poster itself (Guffey, Posters: A Global History<\/em> 231). Against that background, digital design tended to concentrate attention on new forms of communication, discourse, and aesthetics, while raising questions about craftiness, form and content.<\/p>\nAt the end of the first decade of the 21st century and at the beginning of the following, the 1980s airbrush art resurfaced thanks to the Internet: Athena or Verkerke posters with airbrush illustration are now, for example, regularly sold in virtual marketplaces, such as eBay or Etsy. The rise of micro-blogging sites (like Tumblr) and image\/photo-sharing applications designed to create visual collections (like Pinterest) allowed users to upload scanned images of rare airbrush-illustration books, paper cuts, and postcards. As a result, users began creating and curating image collections under headings like \u201cairbrush,\u201d \u201c80s art,\u201d \u201chyperrealism,\u201d or \u201csyd brak,\u201d making airbrush art widely available on the World Wide Web. Using these platforms, users tried to organize their memories and to identify and share their nostalgia for the themes of the 1980s airbrush art and the memories they associated with them.<\/p>\n
Such activities bear a specific significance, that of creating a state of off modernity<\/em>. Overcoming the tradition of the \u201cpostmodern condition\u201d and its discontents\u2014the death of the subject and what Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard identified as \u201cincredulity towards metanarratives\u201d\u2014the off-modern<\/em> is instead concerned with worship of these same ruins (on the \u201cpostmodern condition,\u201d see Lyotard xxiv). As Boym argues, off-modernity<\/em> is revealed \u201cin the form of a paradoxical ruinophilia,\u201d allowing us to \u201cframe utopian projects as dialectical ruins,\u201d which are then to be incorporated back into the here and now (36). How could these scanned airbrush artworks be simply regarded as pure \u201cruin\u201d or nostalgia? This would be a rather naive approach. Cleary they bear the trace of utopian longing as well.<\/p>\nWithout any doubt, the manifold character of the 1980s airbrush art with its own representations, rhetoric, and its constant intertextual interplay evokes complex feelings of nostalgia that represent \u201cthe past with a sadness that is blended with a small measure of pleasure\u201d\u2014a yearning, in other words, for the past decades (the 1930s, the 1950s) and the era during which airbrush flourished the most (the 1980s) (Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival<\/em> 19). However, this type of utopian nostalgia emerged not only due to the interactivity between the users and the Internet through the aforementioned platforms. One crucial factor should also be located in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 in the USA and in Europe, whose devastating effects led to the reinvention of new survival tactics and the rise of vintage markets (Cassidy and Bennett). As Elena Oliete-Aldea argues,<\/p>\n\nWith the financial crash that burst the period of economic abundance, replacing the optimistic belief of a linear progression of history for the better by the idea of history as decline, leading to fragmented societies and identities, with individuals lacking autonomy and spontaneous expressivity. With not only an uncertain future, but an unstable present, 21st century societies affected by the economic crisis tend to look back nostalgically to the past. (351)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Ursula-Helen Kassaveti<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Abstract<\/strong>: Originating in the late 19th century, the airbrush spray gun was widely used in the mid-20th century as a photo retouch tool in advertising, while it contributed to the introduction of Photorealism in the early 1970s. The \u201cLA scene\u201d of the same decade popularized airbrush art through masterful illustrations. Using a variety of different representations, the 1980s airbrush art became the distinctive postmodern popular style of the decade, especially through the publication and distribution of posters and postcards, as well as in advertising. Although the 1990s saw its decline, in the late 2000s the 1980s airbrush art seems to be resurgent thanks to the Internet, providing an escapist narrative for the post-2007-2008 financial crisis landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Resume<\/strong>: Apparu \u00e0 l\u2019origine vers la fin du XIXe si\u00e8cle, l\u2019a\u00e9rographe a \u00e9t\u00e9 largement utilis\u00e9 au milieu du XXe si\u00e8cle comme un outil de retouche photo dans la publicit\u00e9, tout en contribuant \u00e0 l\u2019 introduction du Photor\u00e9alisme au d\u00e9but des ann\u00e9es 1970. Dans la m\u00eame d\u00e9cennie, la \u201csc\u00e8ne L.A.\u201d a popularis\u00e9 l\u2019art de l\u2019 a\u00e9rographie au travers d\u2019 illustrations magistrales qui ont d\u00e9ploy\u00e9 divers th\u00e8mes artistiques. \u00c0 l\u2019 aide d\u2019 une vari\u00e9t\u00e9 de repr\u00e9sentations diff\u00e9rentes, l\u2019 art a\u00e9rographe des ann\u00e9es 1980 est devenu le style populaire postmoderne distinctif de la d\u00e9cennie. Notamment, on le reconna\u00eet dans la publication et la distribution d\u2019 affiches ou de cartes postales, ainsi que dans la publicit\u00e9. Bien que les ann\u00e9es 1990 aient \u00e9t\u00e9 t\u00e9moins de son d\u00e9clin, l\u2019 art de l\u2019 a\u00e9rographie des ann\u00e9es 1980 semble maintenant resurgir de l\u2019 oubli gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 Internet, fournissant un lieu d\u2019 \u00e9vasion dans le paysage de crise financi\u00e8re post-2007-2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n Table of Contents<\/a> | Article doi: 10.17742\/IMAGE.OI.10.2.4 | PDF<\/a><\/p>\n S<\/span>hortly after the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the European debt crisis of 2008, many of us started to look back to the decades of the twentieth century, confirming, to some extent, Svetlana Boym\u2019s assertion that, \u201cnostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals\u201d (Boym 2001 14). Trying to distance ourselves from those harder times, many of us headed towards a better \u201chome,\u201d even if the latter was only available in the digital world. New online social platforms became the hotspot for nostalgia allowing users to dig through and collate photographic remnants of past aesthetic movements, and re-shape an image of a shinier past, part real and part imagined.<\/p>\n During these years of financial instability and hardship in the first and subsequent decade of the 21st century, visual imagery from the popular culture and cinema of the 1980s especially resurfaced on the internet thanks to micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr and online social networks that focus on images like Pinterest (Munteanu). Through a vast network of user accounts (most anonymous), Tumblr and Pinterest uploaded thousands of scans of books, postcards, and details from posters, which together present a clear and fascinating record of airbrush art from the 1980s.1<\/sup><\/a> New publications in art history were also encouraging a renewed interest in the longer history of airbrush art: Norman Hathaway\u2019s Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of Airbrush<\/em> (2008), for example, shed light on the life of important airbrush artists mainly from the 1970s (Charles E. White III, Peter Palombi, David Williardson, and Peter Lloyd), and deepened airbrush enthusiasts\u2019 understanding of their influential work.<\/p>\n However, the long story of airbrush art could begin even earlier in the late 1960s with the use of a spray gun, which resembled the proportions of a fountain pen and had been used in the USA since 1888 (Van Hamersveld 16). This invention, attributed to Charles Burdick, could spray \u201cpigments onto a surface without ever touching the surface itself\u201d (Van Hamersveld 16). While airbrushing with gouache or acrylic paints, artists used masking paper to create different shapes, shadows, or color effects. As Bill Jonas, a former editor of Airbrush Action<\/em> magazine, argued, the airbrush was ideal \u201cfor rendering subtle gradations (i.e., flesh tones) and shadows, and metallic surfaces\u201d (8) and for emulating \u201cmist, light, smoke, vapor \u2026 and beautiful blendings with the slightest pull of a trigger\u201d (Tennant 9).<\/p>\n From its first use in the 1880s up until the 1980s, airbrushing has been applied in various artistic fields: fine art, advertising illustration, self-promotional art, architectural design, and technical illustration. However, it was in the late 1970s and the 1980s that airbrush became a prominent, popular style, particularly in illustration and where it became interwoven with the popular culture of the era. Its imagery consisted primarily of variations on different themes: female portraits, tropical landscapes, cars, fruits, various consumer goods, and architectural interior design. Such imagery was intertextual, as it tended to adopt and blend decorative elements from earlier aesthetic movements Art Deco, Photorealism, Memphis style, and retrofuturism. The airbrush art of the 1980s was produced by artists from various countries (the USA, UK, Italy, and Japan) as a postmodern form of expression; but it should not, at the same time, be considered as a unified artistic movement, as there were many different foci and styles located around the world.<\/p>\n The global popularity of 1980s airbrush art in many ways hinged on the circulation of prints and posters as an important element of interior decoration. Describing some of the decorations of 1980s homes, Wayne Hemingway remarks that:<\/p>\n Any chrome and tech room isn\u2019t complete without an Athena print. Athena in the 1970s and early 1980s brought affordable prints to us all. No house was complete without a red-lipped beauty sucking suggestively on a cherry, or a racy siren morphing into the bonnet of a red sports car. Prints of exotic cocktails on the window ledge of a glamorous hotel room looking onto Hong Kong Harbour, or images of Parisienne ladies with wide-brimmed hats and high heels, fulfilled dreams of foreign travel\u2026. (26)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The purpose of this article is to provide a short historical overview of the kind of airbrush art described by Hemingway and to identify its characteristic elements and influences. My research was carried out by reviewing existing publications on American, European, and Japanese airbrush art and its artists from the fifteen-year period (1977-1992) that witnessed the emergence, style, and applications of airbrush art as a dominant aesthetic. I also made use of a series of postcards, posters, and LPs featuring airbrush art, which were collected by three Greek collectors. These archival objects provided me with vivid paradigms of 1980s airbrush art. It should be noted, however, that it was extremely difficult to locate and make contact with other artists, and to preserve the respective rights to publish their illustration in a paper. So, inevitably, this article\u2019s focus has been narrowed to a particular set of artists and artworks; but the hope is that the ground it covers will be expanded by those who have been granted access a wider range of archives. The article explores the diffusion and popularity airbrush art achieved through the circulation of prints by companies like Athena International, which renewed and influenced the visual imagery of this popular style through their iconic and vibrant retrofuturistic posters (such as Long Distance Kiss<\/em> by South-African illustrator Syd Brak\u2014one of the most prominent 1980s airbrush illustrators). In conclusion, I theorize the reemergence of airbrush art in the 21st century, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s concept of \u201cchronotope\u201d to argue that\u2014amid the vast image collection that comprises the Internet\u2014nostalgic and escapist presentations of airbrush art in the post-2007-2008 landscape operate as a chronotopic habitat of 1980s prosperity.<\/p>\n A<\/span>t the beginning, airbrush was an auxiliary tool for artists and photographers; it was only later that it gradually transformed into a key element in the production of a realistic visual style. In the 20th century and, especially, during the roaring 1920s decade, the airbrush was heavily used as a photo-retouching tool. According to Van Hamersveld, the premier airbrush illustration \u201cappeared in the New York Director\u2019s Annual in 1928\u201d and was created by Samuel Otis (42). In Europe, and particularly in France, the interest in the \u201cpochoir (stencil<\/em>) printing process\u201d resulted in various experiments with airbrushing in the fashion illustrations of the women\u2019s magazines of the era, such as Le Gazette du Bon Ton<\/em>, and in advertisements illustrated by artists such as A. M. Cassandre and Jean Carlu (Robinson 22-23). As Alistair Duncan observes, during this period of growing improvements in manufacturing techniques and the consequent abundance of consumer goods, advertising came to play a crucial role in developing consumer habits. In this context, minimalist posters set out on \u201ccolonnes d\u2019affiche\u201d in Paris with their \u201csharp linear compositions, floating on flat areas of background color quickly drew the eye\u201d of potential customers (Duncan 150). Meanwhile, Bauhaus artists like L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy used the tool to \u201csoften the differences between the various elements of a photomontage\u201d (Van Hamersveld 24; see also Kaplan 128-29 and Hariu 2-3). In succeeding decades, fashion and men\u2019s magazines, like Playboy<\/em> or Esquire<\/em>, started featuring airbrush illustrations by popular artists, such as pin-up illustrator George Petty and fashion illustrator Alberto Vargas.<\/p>\n After facing a short decline during the 1950s (excepting its frequent use by Push Pin Studios led by graphic designers Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, and Edward Sorel), the airbrush began to be used again in Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll posters and was legitimized as a tool and technique in the following decade, the era of Photorealism. After going through a variety of different articulations, such as \u201cSuper-Real, Sharp-Focus, Radical Real, Hyperreal (in France), Romantic Real and Magic Real,\u201d Photorealism was at last coined in 1968 by the American collector Louis K. Meisel (Meisel, Photorealism<\/em> 12).2<\/sup><\/a> The term was first used to describe the re-emergence of Realism in painting, associated with the \u201cTwenty-Two Realists\u201d exhibition at the Whitney Museum in January 1970, and artists that used the camera and other mechanical or semi-mechanical means to transfer visual information to the canvas alongside a newly refined technical capacity to give the finished work a photographic appearance.<\/p>\n The laborious techniques adopted by Photorealist artists, such as Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Ben Schonzeit, and Don Eddy, depended upon two tools: the classical bristle brush and the airbrush. The latter was used for smoothing blended surfaces, but also, as photorealist artist Chuck Close contends, for \u201creasons that involve [the artists\u2019] philosophical and conceptual approaches to painting,\u201d which he identifies as, \u201cimpersonality, system, surface\u201d (Close qtd. in Meisel, Photorealism<\/em> 15).3<\/sup><\/a> According to art historian Frederick Hartt, airbrush was used by everyone, who created artworks in the \u201csharp sybaritic realist\u201d vein, a term which was first coined by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (Hartt 948-49; Dali 4-5).<\/p>\n The re-emergence of the airbrush technique in the 1970s thus secured the popularity of the medium for the 1980s, and the enduring influence of new artistic trends associated with realistic and laborious representations. It was also in the 80s that this style began to be adopted by illustrators or advertisers, who explored its new possibilities and established its intertextual character by appropriating elements from even older styles and aesthetic movements.<\/p>\n E<\/span>xploring the formal characteristics of the 1980s airbrush art, we come across a modern revival of the older styles that were the first to influence airbrush art. In a decade that saw the rise of postmodern aesthetics in Europe and the USA, the 1980s airbrush art is also recognizable as a style that shares specific postmodern attributes (Siegel 2).4<\/sup><\/a> Airbrush art produces a highly aestheticized, nostalgic art language that is curiously devoid of \u201cgenuine historicity\u201d , and, at the same time, uses this method of pastiche in a manner that \u201csubverts dominant discourses\u201d by creatively merging of different artistic styles and popular culture elements in a way that challenges the once characteristic dichotomy between \u201chighbrow\u201d and \u201clowbrow\u201d culture (Jameson 17-19; Hutcheon 46), such as in the case of American illustrator Patrick Nagel.<\/p>\n In addition to Hyperrealism\u2019s photographic rendering of painted reality, the influence of Art Deco was central and formative for the look of 1980s airbrush art, providing it with many of its most common motifs. Art Deco, as the \u201clast truly sumptuous style, a legitimate and highly fertile chapter in the history of applied art,\u201d evolved its basic iconography from avant-garde painting (Cubism, Futurism, etc.) and a series of vernacular characteristics (such as zigzags, chevrons, flowers, high fashion) during the 1920s in Europe and in the 1930s in the USA, when the splendor of machinery and aerodynamic designs affected its various forms (Duncan 7). After its decline, Art Deco was revived many times later, as \u201can artistic amalgam\u201d (Duncan 8). According to Nancy McClelland, Art Deco not only proved to be a \u201cuseful language\u201d for the Pop Art of the late 1960s, revolving around \u201cthe flat colors and hard-edged shapes of the Deco graphics,\u201d but also achieved rebirth in different fashion trends and film in the 1970s (McClelland 251-53; Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival<\/em> 86).5<\/sup><\/a> Art Deco\u2019s revival had been one of the decisive factors in shaping the popularity of airbrush art in the 1970s in the USA, and specifically in Los Angeles. American airbrush art was incredibly popular: \u201cIt was everywhere\u2014magazines, album covers, high up on billboards; on clothing, as fine art, and in the film\u201d; and its aesthetics were based on the imagery of \u201cmetal, plastic and streamline\u201d which were reflected in the modern American city (Salisbury 7 and 10). Influenced by the pre-war nostalgic images created by Push Pin Studios, the LA scene\u2019s airbrush artists, such as Peter Palombi, Charles White III, and Dave Williardson, deployed Art Deco or Tropical Deco motifs in their airbrush art, creating stunning visual examples of imaginary and almost non-temporal still-life compositions and portraits.<\/p>\n The dawn of the 1980s saw yet another revival of the Art Deco style in Europe: the seminal design collective Memphis, based in Milan and led by Ettore Sottsass, was inspired by older Art Deco aesthetics, blending them with popular Milanese culture, the traditions of the Orient, and elements of Streamline Moderne<\/em> (Horn 20). At the same time, the rich European style was assimilated into the American culture, resulting in the birth of Tropical Deco architecture in Miami, Florida, which \u201cevolved out of a softer palette and had a different vision from \u2018Big City\u2019 or \u2018Industrial Deco\u2019\u201d (Capitman; Cerwinske 11). For Cerwinske, Tropical Deco was \u201can architecture designed to evoke feelings of delight\u201d and its soft pastels, streamlined aesthetics, glass block windows, curved angles, and geometric compositions were some of the most frequently recurring themes of the 1980s airbrush art (12).<\/p>\n In this regard, the 1980s airbrush art could be seen as a natural extension of its 1970s version. Apart from technical illustration, which stuck to the smallest representational elements, a heavy Deco influence can be traced in the attention given to the slightest details of the 1980s airbrush art, and is evident in both still-life illustrations and portraits from the era. These still-life compositions revolve around recurring themes, such as food and beverages (colorful and shiny cocktails, sundaes, and so on) (Image 1), deco buildings, palm trees, and vases with flowers. The same attention to detail, however, is evident in airbrush portraiture. Mal Watson, a British airbrush artist, produced a series of female portraits or \u201cladies,\u201d such as Oriental Lady<\/em>, Chic Lady<\/em>, and Midnight Lady<\/em>, which depicted various femmes fatales<\/em> in different urban landscapes. Echoing Art Deco and Japonisme, those female portraits were clad in high 1930s fashion, drank cocktails, wore sexy heels, and had New York\u2019s Chrysler building or the San Francisco bridge as backgrounds (Image 2). They deploy various decorative Art Deco motifs (i.e., the glamorous female sitters that could be seen in older fashion illustrations), using clear outlines, cool colors, while attention is given to the realistic depiction of a central female figure. Sometimes, in addition to its preoccupation with the \u201croaring 1920s,\u201d airbrush art would also revolve around representations of the 1930s, in which Art Deco style or Streamline Moderne<\/em> elements were prominent.<\/p>\n Pierrots were also a recurrent theme. As Duncan observes, fashion illustrators from the 1920s, such as Georges Barbier, Georges Lepape, and Andr\u00e9 \u00c9douard Marty, \u201cmixed 18th-century pierrots, columbines, powdered girls and crinolines with the depiction of young women\u201d clad in haute couture fashion, and, therefore, were the first to popularize the pierrot motif. Pierrot-inspired portraits from European illustrators, like Luigi Patrignani, show the creative accumulation of Art Deco motifs in the 1980s postmodern airbrush art (Image 3). Sad Pierrot<\/em> by Patrignani presents the viewer with a tension between clear and blurred lines tracing the outline of the figure\u2019s face and clothing. These lines merge in a tense photo-realistic style that is as vivid as it appears to be empty, devoid of underlying or \u201chidden\u201d concepts.<\/p>\n It should be noted that retrofuturism also occupied a privileged space in the airbrush art of the 1980s. Guffey and Lemay argue that retrofuturism in the culture of the 20th century identifies the future as a \u201cstyle,\u201d infused with \u201cnostalgia, irony, and time-bending dislocation\u201d (434). Retrofuturist imagery offers futuristic visions articulated in a retro style, creating a back-and-forth dialogue between the past and the future, as in the exemplary work of Japanese artists Hajime Sorayama and Pater Sato.6<\/sup><\/a> Shooting Wide<\/em> by Brak is an exemplary illustration in this vein (Image 4). Featuring cool and warm colors, three identical punkish female sitters with a gun in their hand appear in movement, manifesting their sensuality. The artist faithfully records their facial features (hair, eyes, etc.) and masters the textile form of their clothing in bright sequins and other textures. They appear against a horizontal, non-realistic, and futuristic background made of neon lights. They seem to be shooting towards a prospective era, somewhere in the near future.<\/p>\n Nostalgia for other decades, such as the 1950s and the 1960s, can be traced in the airbrush works of artists like Martin Alton, who delved into imagery of 1950s popular stars, diners, jukeboxes, ads, and so on. In the 1980s, Alton produced a series of portraits depicting 1950s film and music stars like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and James Dean. These portraits, which focus in on the slightest detail, also include a miniaturized full-body sketch of the star against a plain background placed at the bottom of the composition. The Presley portrait looks like a faded photograph, employing cool pastel tones, while Elvis\u2019s mellow gaze reveals a yearning for older and better days (Image 5).<\/p>\n A final point should be made about the similarities between airbrush works that results from recurring subjects and themes and copycat productions that try to imitate the success or popularity of other artists. While this repetition and reduplication is troubling from the standpoint of originality and authenticity, it expands the notion of airbrush art\u2019s intertextuality that reinforces the meaning of the experience, rather than undermining the aura of the work\u2019s authenticity. In the case of Barry Lepard\u2019s Reflections<\/em> (Athena International) and Patrignani\u2019s New York Reflections<\/em> (Paperclub, Arti Grafiche Ricordi), the eye area in each portrait constitutes for both illustrations the focal point\u2014covered by either a mirror hat or huge sunglasses\u2014that initiates an interplay between light and shade. The reflected images in each illustration indicate New York as the sitter\u2019s most likely location. The main subject of such illustrations is life in the modern metropolis, seen not from different, but complementary, perspectives.<\/p>\n D<\/span>espite the fact that the airbrush style shared some high-brow characteristics with Photorealism and that some airbrush artists exhibited their work at art galleries, airbrush art was nonetheless considered a popular medium and mode of artistic expression tied to the circulation of prints, posters, and postcards, featuring still life, portraits, and landscapes. As everyday commodities, these iterations of airbrush art bore the twin characteristics of most popular graphic design artifacts: they were mass reproduced and therefore affordable (Jobling and Crowley 1 and 3).<\/p>\n The American stationary company Paper Moon Graphics became one of the first stationary companies to publish postcards with various artworks by 1970s airbrush artists like Peter Palombi. However, it was graphic designer and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who gave prominence to the poster as an artistic form. As Elena G. Millie observes, \u201cNagel\u2019s posters have been in the forefront of the contemporary trend to move advertising art away from the product to other images; they also have an independent existence \u2026 tending to obliterate the line between the fine and applied arts\u201d (6-9). Nagel\u2019s line was imaginatively adopted by stationery companies, such as Arti Grafiche Ricordi from Milano in Italy, Verkerke from the Netherlands, and Athena International from the United Kingdom.7<\/sup><\/a> The latter two released a series of printed posters and postcards of airbrush art, which decorated hundreds of teenage bedrooms as well as various shops, cafeterias, and clubs in the 1980s.<\/p>\n Some of these prints and posters operated as a synecdoche for airbrush art per se. The South-African illustrator Brak, for example, admired the pin-ups by Alberto Vargas and the Palm Beach style and blended popular culture, iconic fashion elements, and nostalgia in many of his famous airbrush illustrations.8<\/sup><\/a> When Brak arrived in London, Punk was a dominant aesthetic trend, but, according to the illustrator, \u201cit lacked style,\u201d as it was \u201cslightly dirty and unfinished\u201d (Email communication). So, he re-imagined and re-designed the Punk look in \u201ca fashionable Milanese way\u201d (Email communication).9<\/sup><\/a> Seen in this light, the story behind the release of Long Distance Kiss<\/em> in print\u2014one of the most iconic Athena posters created by Brak\u2014was, in fact, a narrative of what was happening in the popular culture of the era (Image 8). As Brak recalls:<\/p>\n A company called Athena produced and sold art prints derived from famous artists like Monet, Degas etc. This was a limited market and they were in financial difficulties. They approached me to produce a series of posters, which would appeal to a wider market. I suspected that any expansion would come from a younger market so this took my interest back to the punk look. The task I set myself was to produce aspirational images for teenagers. I conceived emotional messages but using a punk approach to identify with the teenager. As I said I found the Punk look slightly dirty and unfinished. I, therefore, imagined the Punk look applied in a fashionable Milanese way. The result was the \u201cKiss\u201d series of which \u201cThe Long Distance Kiss\u201d became the world\u2019s bestselling poster for two years running and revived the fortunes of Athena. The success of this look led to The New Romantics era.<\/em> (Email communication) 10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Long Distance Kiss<\/em> took everyone by surprise, as it actually represented a departure from the classic airbrush style and an initiation into the stunning world of fashion, music, and youth. It features an interchange of harder and softer lines, bright and shiny reds in the photorealistic vein. It exemplifies Brak\u2019s choice of depicting heads in profile, while attention is drawn to the melting telephone, a medium of communication and, apparently, a love confession. Brak\u2019s female portraits may resemble the high fashion queens of the 1920s in terms of grace and style, but they also appeared as an extraordinary example of the successful integration of older and newer visual codes. It should be stressed that fashion illustration was also enjoying its heyday at this time, with artists like Antonio Lopez and Nagel, whose art was published in Playboy<\/em> magazine, allegedly defining the female portrait of the decade (see Caranicas).11<\/sup><\/a> Brak\u2019s airbrush works, including the well-known Long Distance Kiss<\/em> and Lost Love<\/em>, are designed with the same technique: hyper-exposed faces emerge from the illustration\u2019s background and are confined to some basic facial features. The bright reds on the lips or cheeks of the sitters of Brak\u2019s designs provide a youthful tone, while their eyes stand in for the total absence of hair, ears, neck, and body. In the meantime, no time and space are suggested, forms float in an imaginary \u201ctime space,\u201d which can partially be indicated thanks to the vibrant fashion details that echo the trends and the subcultures of the decade.<\/p>\n Within a constant intertextual play, the airbrush art of the 1980s was not only informed by older styles, but also kept in view what was actually happening in popular and youth culture through the negotiation of its various meanings and their visualization (Barnard 83-85). Being inspired by the subcultures and fashion trends of the 1980s, the Kiss<\/em> became a synecdoche for the dreamy and colorful airbrush style that followed its release, as well as the type of the female figure it featured, following the tradition of the 1980s grand female portraits created by other graphic designers and illustrators like Nagel.<\/p>\n Brak\u2019s influence on the contemporary airbrush art of the 1980s could be traced in the work of different airbrush artists. His female prototype, as represented in Long Distance Kiss<\/em>, was widely reproduced in Verkerke\u2019s stationery imagery, while his airbrush works were also released by the Dutch publishing company, which focused its attention also on airbrush art through different artists, such as the German partners Gilda Belin and Fred-J\u00fcrgen Rogner. The pastel palette of their Palm Beach landscapes and interiors and their female minimal portraits with bold pink blush have been on magazine covers, as well as postcards, posters, and teenager\u2019s bags. During that time, Verkerke also produced stationery products and bags, which featured the work of Belin-Rogner and Alton\u2019s homage to airbrush portraits of 1950s film and music stars, which had previously been featured on Athena postcards. The illustrator \u201cGerry the Cat\u201d also conceived airbrush works in the manner of Brak, which were released as stickers, or were featured on notebooks and various accessories.<\/p>\n The airbrush art of the 1980s played a vital role in the various fields of visual communication, including advertising, illustration, and graphic design both in the USA and Europe. Even in the era when popular music was mainly promoted by MTV, the first television channel ever to broadcast music video-clips, the album art of the vinyl record jackets still contributed to the sales of an LP. Record covers became cultural \u201cartefacts,\u201d offering consumers \u201can attractive site and sight, where the look of authenticity is actually more crucial to the collector than the effective authenticity of the object\u201d (Roy 126). As Steve Jones and Martin Sorgen observe, \u201cgenres of popular music are not entirely musical but also visual, and \u2026 music listeners typically bring with them a good knowledge of visual styles\u201d (84). These visual styles are often associated with other merchandising (t-shirts, bags, posters, and so on) featuring graphic design(s) replicated across a number of products.<\/p>\n Many popular record sleeves of the 1980s were designed by airbrush artists, some of whom tried to reproduce the Brak prototype and featured characteristic female airbrush figures.12<\/sup><\/a> One such example stems from Canada: Lime, the HI-NRJ duet and husband-and-wife project, had their record sleeves designed by Graffiti Studio of Montreal in the characteristic airbrush style, beginning with their Lime II<\/em> (1982) and continuing with Lime III<\/em> (1983). Their record sleeves for Sensual Sensation<\/em> LP (1984) and onwards feature artwork that is reminiscent of Brak\u2019s airbrush portraits: bathed in the band\u2019s trademark color (lime), a female figure is positioned opposite a cold cocktail, one of the recurring themes of 1980s airbrush art (Image 9). Employing clear outlines with marvelous radiations and hues in green, this jacket illustration produces a simultaneously tropical and postmodern sensation.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n I<\/span> now want to theorize the reemergence of the 1980s airbrush art in the present, using Bakhtin\u2019s concept of the \u201cchronotope\u201d (from \u201cchronos\u201d for time and \u201ctopos\u201d for space). As Bakhtin notes, the term was first employed in the context of Einstein\u2019s Theory of Relativity; his \u201cForms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,\u201d however, seeks to redeploy it as a conceptualization of the merging of space and time \u201cartistically expressed in literature\u201d (Bakhtin 84). It is in the \u201cchronotope,\u201d Bakhtin says, that time \u201cthickens\u201d and becomes \u201cartistically visible\u201d (Bakhtin 84). Here, space responds to \u201cmovements of time, plot and history\u201d and, in so doing, becomes, charged with historicity (Bakhtin 84). In this sense, time interweaves with space (and vice versa) and allows us to understand the way history is represented by a text and the way images of both elements are articulated and related to one another.<\/p>\n As \u201cno artifact of culture [including airbrush art] ever exists outside of particular moments in historical time and space\u201d (Haynes 104), the notion of chronotope could be useful as a \u201cmetaphor of society and one of the principal generators of artistic meanings in both literature and painting\u201d (Best 291). In this light, airbrush art could be interpreted as a \u201cchronotope\u201d of the 1980s\u2019 popular culture and art emerged through the decade of the Wall Street Boom, the New Conservatism of the US President Ronald Reagan, and conspicuous consumption (see Phillips-Fein; Batchelor and Stoddard 3; and Thompson 15) of hard goods, fashion, etc. Filtered through a nostalgic, Art-Deco lens and producing images of retrofuturity punctuated by tropical intervals, the airbrush chronotope, implicitly or explicitly, could be also a reference to the 1980s metropolis \u201chigh life\u201d and consumer luxuries, as well as lavish glamor.<\/p>\n Throughout the 1990s, the airbrush art that had previously flourished in advertising, the posters and postcards of Athena and Verkerke publishing companies, and on vinyl jackets started to show signs of formal decline: the repetition of styles and themes and the recycling of ideas, which resulted in the emergence of schlock aesthetics and soulless copies of older successful artworks. In this regard, the 1980s airbrush art was instantly associated with the notion of kitsch and outdatedness, as the new developments in the 1990s graphic design, especially due to the emergence of the digital technology, posed the outlines of a fundamental change in the poster itself (Guffey, Posters: A Global History<\/em> 231). Against that background, digital design tended to concentrate attention on new forms of communication, discourse, and aesthetics, while raising questions about craftiness, form and content.<\/p>\n At the end of the first decade of the 21st century and at the beginning of the following, the 1980s airbrush art resurfaced thanks to the Internet: Athena or Verkerke posters with airbrush illustration are now, for example, regularly sold in virtual marketplaces, such as eBay or Etsy. The rise of micro-blogging sites (like Tumblr) and image\/photo-sharing applications designed to create visual collections (like Pinterest) allowed users to upload scanned images of rare airbrush-illustration books, paper cuts, and postcards. As a result, users began creating and curating image collections under headings like \u201cairbrush,\u201d \u201c80s art,\u201d \u201chyperrealism,\u201d or \u201csyd brak,\u201d making airbrush art widely available on the World Wide Web. Using these platforms, users tried to organize their memories and to identify and share their nostalgia for the themes of the 1980s airbrush art and the memories they associated with them.<\/p>\n Such activities bear a specific significance, that of creating a state of off modernity<\/em>. Overcoming the tradition of the \u201cpostmodern condition\u201d and its discontents\u2014the death of the subject and what Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard identified as \u201cincredulity towards metanarratives\u201d\u2014the off-modern<\/em> is instead concerned with worship of these same ruins (on the \u201cpostmodern condition,\u201d see Lyotard xxiv). As Boym argues, off-modernity<\/em> is revealed \u201cin the form of a paradoxical ruinophilia,\u201d allowing us to \u201cframe utopian projects as dialectical ruins,\u201d which are then to be incorporated back into the here and now (36). How could these scanned airbrush artworks be simply regarded as pure \u201cruin\u201d or nostalgia? This would be a rather naive approach. Cleary they bear the trace of utopian longing as well.<\/p>\n Without any doubt, the manifold character of the 1980s airbrush art with its own representations, rhetoric, and its constant intertextual interplay evokes complex feelings of nostalgia that represent \u201cthe past with a sadness that is blended with a small measure of pleasure\u201d\u2014a yearning, in other words, for the past decades (the 1930s, the 1950s) and the era during which airbrush flourished the most (the 1980s) (Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival<\/em> 19). However, this type of utopian nostalgia emerged not only due to the interactivity between the users and the Internet through the aforementioned platforms. One crucial factor should also be located in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 in the USA and in Europe, whose devastating effects led to the reinvention of new survival tactics and the rise of vintage markets (Cassidy and Bennett). As Elena Oliete-Aldea argues,<\/p>\n With the financial crash that burst the period of economic abundance, replacing the optimistic belief of a linear progression of history for the better by the idea of history as decline, leading to fragmented societies and identities, with individuals lacking autonomy and spontaneous expressivity. With not only an uncertain future, but an unstable present, 21st century societies affected by the economic crisis tend to look back nostalgically to the past. (351)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Airbrushing as a Technique: From the 1920s to Photorealism<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
Shaping the 1980s Airbrush Art Style: Influences and Themes<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Achieving Popularity: Airbrush Art on Postcards, Posters, Album Covers, and Stationary<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a><\/a>A Long Decline, a Fresh Revival<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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