Читать книгу Will Bradley, His Chap Book. An account, in the words of the dean of American typographers, of his graphic arts adventures онлайн

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Across the Atlantic, the Nineteenth Century was bursting its seams: Morris failing to revive medievalism but startling his world with a revival of fine craftsmanship; Beardsley, the Yellow Book and their avant garde galaxy startling their world in quite a different way; Toulouse-Lautrec spreading modern art in the kiosks of Paris when only a handful knew anything about Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat; barriers being demolished everywhere.

In America, these goings-on were known to a few connoisseurs amid a vast indifference. It was Bradley in the Nineties who made the American public stir in its sleep and at least crack an eye. In the next decade he and the many who followed him were well advanced in the lively morning of a day that isn’t over yet.

There were derivative traces in Bradley’s early work—and whose hasn’t?—but when he hit his stride it wasn’t Europe’s leadership he followed. He discovered American colonial typography, bold and free, and from that springboard he took off into a career of non-archaic, non-repetitive, exuberant and exhilarating design. In its way it was as American as the Declaration of Independence. In this field we have never had any more indigenous art than Bradley’s.