Amazon.co.uk Review
"Today I sent my first post cards--they are capital things, simple, useful, and handy. A happy invention". This prescient diary entry for 4 October, 1870 came three days after the Post Office Act legalised the sale of the first postcards, a form that would survive even the advent of email more than a century later. It would remain reliably constant, while in its small, rectangular way illustrating a century of human achievement. Occasionally enigmatic, sometimes passionate and frequently banal messages collectively narrate an intimate social history, usually expressed through a faithful, haiku-like formula--greeting, weather, health of writer, inquiry as to health of correspondent, and goodbye. While aviation, advertising, cars, wars, fashion, politics and ethnicity provide
leitmotifs, Royal Academician Tom Phillips, whose own prolific art has recurrently embraced quintessential English mores, astutely celebrates the marriage of the democratic language of mundanity and the imagery of the monumental. From cards sent during the Blitz by senders more preoccupied by the rain than by the falling bombs, to Donald McGill's timelessly saucy ribaldry, the medium spans and connects a century it seems unlikely to outlast for too long.
Each year has four pages, the first of which shows a full-size reproduction, plus a brace of cards depicting Piccadilly Circus and New York (unconsciously echoing the publisher's name). The passage of time sees cards come from further afield, passing into gaudy Technicolor, and then the modern photographic image, but while the emblematic New York skyline glitters with an increasingly towering swagger, by 1999 its London counterpart is still a red Routemaster bus, perhaps a suitable reflection of respective self-worth. Phillips curates with a keen eye, on and within the card, ensuring no scrap of detail goes unnoticed in his pleasurably digressive notations, and, like photographer Martin Parr (a fellow collector who also relishes grubbing around at dusty fairs), he is compelled by a complicated affection. In the same vein as Parr's Boring Postcards, it re-affirms an underrated, rich medium of the vernacular, as well as Phillips' position as one of Britain's most versatile artists. --David Vincent
Product Description
This work tells the story of the 20th century using images and messages from 2000 picture postcards. The postcards depict the day-to-day life of people and what mattered to them, pleased them, shocked or amused them via the cards they chose to send. Year-by-year the book presents everyone from the high and mighty to the low and the worthy talking about the characters, events and hot spots of the century. Saucy seaside jokes, the disasters of the war, the hazards of travel, the caprices of life in work and leisure - all are pictured and discussed. Each year begins with postcard views of the New York skyline and of Piccadily Circus. Though centred on Britain and the USA, cards come from every corner of the world, from Los Angeles to Beijing, from Antarctica to Alaska. Themes which evolved with the century emerge including: transportation (aviation takes us from the Wright Brothers to the moon); cinema; the role of women; fashion; and holidays. Each postcard is accompanied by a caption which places its message in context.
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