Volume 53, Number 1 · January 12, 2006
Baker's 'World'
By Russell Baker
The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898–1911)
by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano
Bulfinch, 131 pp., $50.00
The last third of the nineteenth century produced a brilliant outpouring of what Nicholson Baker calls 'vernacular art,' which is to say the kind of art that the academy does not invite to dinner. Technological advances in color lithography made it possible to mass-produce posters of a brilliance previously obtainable only by artists working on stone, as Toulouse-Lautrec did. Europe and America suddenly blazed with spectacular posters advertising theaters and restaurants and depicting the marvels of shows like Buffalo Bill's Wild West and the Barnum & Bailey circus.
Review, 3377 words
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