Hi again Peeps ! I've found another treasure trove. This one does not contain any of the work of PCS, so far as I can tell, but it is an important survey of the art world she inhabited. A german magazine called
Jugend (meaning 'youth'). This magazine gave it's name to the German word used for what we call
'Art Nouveau - 'jugendstil'.
Heidelberug U. has digitized almost every issue and put it on their site.
http://diglit.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend
Here are some instructions - On the page linked to above, you will see a list of issues. Click on one. This will open a page for that issue with a list of text links for each page of the issue. On that page, click on the largish cover illo at upper right. This will open a webpage of thumbnails for every page of the issue on one webpage. It takes a little time to load, but not too long. Some of the thumbnails are currently not showing ( In safari I get a blue box with a question mark, meaning the image has not loaded). But if you click on them, they will open onto the full digital facsimile of the page anyway, just like the thumbnails that you can see do.
Now, to the upper left directly over the image is a row of tiny icons. The one that is a plus sign can be clicked 3 times, giving you an image that is much bigger than the opening resolution. In your browser bar, at the end of the URL you will see a number 4, like this
http://diglit.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/digl ... oomlevel=4
Each issue is also available as a pdf from a link in the box at the far upper left of each image page, and on the main page for each issue. In the rectangle in the center toward the top of the page, you will see the button for the pdf ( It says 'download' on it). It is at the right side of the rectangle and just next to the cover illo which I told you to click on to get to the page full of thumbnails. You can click on each pages link from this list on the main page, but clicking the cover illo and using the thumbnail links is better because there are quite a few advertisement pages (These too are interesting, but repetitious)
I love looking at this stuff. One can really see the
Fin De Siecle style in these endless pages of paintings and illustrations. I love
Art Nouveau anyway. But I see constant reminders of the style of the
Waite-Smith Tarot deck. The collection starts in the year 1896, which, as it turns out, was a very good year for art. This is the magic number for Art Nouveau in magazines, as far as I can tell. Looking at many other publications from the same era, It seems that before that year, things were not so
Psychedelic, and harkend back more to
Beaux Arts. After about 1900, things start to look less like that of
Alphonse Mucha, and more like the works of
Toulouse Lautrec. Called
'Post-Impressionism' on Wikipedia. Pamela Colman Smith's art seems to me to be somewhere in the middle of all this.
From this page
http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisc ... lcome.html
You can also get to digitasl facsimiles of
another similar mag called 'Pan" (though not as many issues). Clicking on the box with the illo in it will open an intermediary page with alot of text about the magazine. In that text you will find a text link that opens a page with a list of each issue in the same format as described above for Jugend. I recently spent an entire weekend downloading and perusing these beautiful treasures. I hope you will too.
The Tarot has a modern history as well as an antique one. These magazines serve to illuminate it's
international 'Bohemian' milieu. and do it quite beautifully.