Customer Reviews

Lifestyle Illustration of the 60s

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4 star:		(2)
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Length:: 1:01 Mins

Kudos to the author for putting together this amazing collection of illustrations from the 60s. I can't imagine the amount of effort required to source and credit the thousand over pieces of art. There's a total of 576 pages so this paperback book is rather thick.

The style, well, is 60s and the variety comes from the different human subjects featured and the colours. The reproduction of the paintings are good. There's a very nice textural look to them. What strikes me immediately besides the style is the use of masterful composition. The examples on composition are good enough for me to recommend this book even to lifestyle photographers who haven't any interest in paintings -- there's plenty to learn from seeing.

This book should be very nostalgic for anyone working in the design industry during those times. It provides a very interesting glimpse into the the 60s pop culture.

How amazing to come across a book that I could never imagine would be published but here it is. Over a thousand illustrations from American and British artists used to illustrate romantic fiction in women's weekly and monthly magazines. They all come from British titles of the sixties and you might think, that inherently, the visual format is rather restrictive and it's true that much of the art is similar but these artist's compositions and paint techniques are varied enough to provide interest page after page.

Having worked in magazine publishing back then I was familiar with many of these wonderful illustrators. I was a big fan of Bernie Fuchs and David Roach mentions in his intro that Al Parker was a great influence in the forties and fifties (especially with his mother and daughter paintings for the covers of the Ladies' Home Journal) and Fuchs was a similar inspiration for many illustrators in the sixties, he gets ten works in the book with a stunning spread on pages 326-327.

I estimate the book has the work of over two hundred illustrators, and plenty from unnamed artists. Lynn Buckham has the most then good showings for Joe Bowler, Joe DeMers, Eric Earnshaw, Frank Haseler, Michael Johnson, Brian Sanders, Herb Tauss, Andy Virgil, Coby Whitmore and Walter Wyles. Oddly the great Austin Briggs only gets one. There are several illustrations from teenage weeklies that I would have left out. They are uncredited fashion and spot illustrations of no particular merit especially when compared to the artists whose work fill up most of these pages.

The book's production is excellent and very similar to the Taschen thick, chunky soft cover titles (in fact Taschen published the Fiell's Decorative Art series). The back pages have an artist index and twenty-four get short biogs. My only criticism is that a light drop shadow on two sides of all the oblong illustrations would have given them a lift on the page.

There is a companion book with the same art from the fifties and together with this sixties book a whole collection of wonderful artists can be rediscovered.

***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It's a fine collection of illustration from the 60's by some of the best artists working during that period. If this is the type of art you like, you will definitely enjoy this book. It's also a thick book giving you plenty of art for your money.

I was impressed by this book greatly and recommend it if you enjoy seeing different illustrative work from various illustrators from the 60's. From what I read the majority of these illustrations came from assorted magazines from this era like Woman, Homes and Gardens, to others. The illustrations cover a variety of subject matter like romantic, lifestyle, or illustrative done in assorted styles and media. I recall admiring these various illustrations way back when and I'm glad a collection of this work has been collected.

A wonderful book that only fault (and it's a big one) is it has so little Bob Peak artwork, the artist everyone in the book is using to set the pace for the style innovations of the day. A glaring error in an other wise fabulous collection of sixties illustration.

Wow - this is a monster of a book. Apart from the foreword by Rian Hughes, the Introduction by David Roach and a couple of pages of short artist biographies, the entire book is made up of art work. The only other text being the year, the artist name and where the art appeared underneath each picture. In a book that is 576 pages long... that's 563 pages of pure art... 1,000 images in all.

This is not a book to be lugging around to read - it weighs a ton! This is one to sit and enjoy at your leisure, dipping in and out for inspiration or just to enjoy. I do like that it is soft backed because, although the cover is prone to creasing easily - mine is thoroughly creased now, not the spine as you might think but the front cover - I do still think it was a better idea. Being heavy already, I think hardback covers might have made it cumbersome to read.

The book is truly gorgeous - I can't even begin to imagine how much time it took to compile. All of the artwork comes from publications like Woman, Woman's Own, Woman's Journal and the timeline ranges from 1960 - 1969. The Foreword and Introduction is a fascinating insight into these 'forgotten artists' and what was happening at the time. I've always loved this style of art and this book is cram packed full of nostalgia for me. Although I wasn't even born in the 60's, I remember as a child of the 80's and early 90's my mum used to be an avid reader of The People's Friend which was always full of similar style art. I remember flicking through, completely bypassing the words and just ogling the pictures, trying to recreate them.

What I particularly like is that although the art provoked such nostalgia, I was surprised also at how thoroughly modern some of it was - like it could have been submitted today and I doubt many people would know any different, would not even think that it was created 40 years or more previously.

Some of the art just seems so on-trend with what I'm seeing on blogs, on Etsy & Folksy, pinned as inspiration on Pinterest. Isn't it funny how things come around again... or, as I prefer to say - the rest of the world finally caught up with my tastes.

So - do I like this book? No, I absolutely LOVE it - it's a keeper and one that will be close to hand on my art shelves, within easy reach. It's so full of inspiration and beauty and talent. I feel lucky to own it.

I ordered this book hoping to find the authentic illustrations of the 60s and got exactly that - plus the unexpected cover to cover color pages.

The 1960's gave us a fresh new look and approach to illustration and professional advertisement art. As with the revolutionary cultural rifts of the time, the freedom of expression, dynamic compositions, raw edged brush lines, exciting colors, and dramatic story telling is all here in these evocative illustrations. In today's airbrushed, super-fantasy realism we see in the form of advertisement and illustration, it is so exciting and refreshing to see the quality and power of advertisement and illustrative artists of the past! The figurative aspect of the era is beautifully represented here showing the drama and tension aligned with beauty of the everyday situations of our culture. The often narrative illustrations of contrast, mass, light, color, and form are all here and the captivating forms of the figures and expressions are beautiful. I wish that advertising and illustration schools would appreciate these particular skill sets which seem to be vacant in many of today's educational institutions. There is freedom of line, openness of space and wonderful contrasts throughout these illustrations. They not only take me back to an era I grew up with of which I can verify these illustrations with vivid validation, but they offer me an inspiration over and over again as a professional artist.

The book is a dense heavy book, packed with full color illustrations on every page. the cover is stiff-high gloss and seems to be a hybrid between a hard cover and a soft, with an stiff gloss inside cover that lines the inside flap of the outer cover - all one piece. There is a small few-page introduction in the front and then a list of biographies in the back - no glossary or index. Aside from that, each page also has the year in which each illustration was created or originally published, and it also lists the artists wherever possible. Taking us through the 1960's from beginning to end, the book is an amazing visual time capsule of the era that is legendary. The only think I wish it had was environmental content. Since I am an artist that specializes in 1960s genre, with a professional background in visual and background development, I would have liked to see more of these illustrations that cover more ambient environments with structures and architectural elements. Most of the illustrations are closeups of the figure with some smattering of environment peeking through in the slim boarder of the background of the illustration. I feel like many of the illustrations are closeups and I wish that the complete illustration with cars, city streets, interior rooms, and other elements to complete the scene would have been more interesting. But clearly, the book makes a statement about the "lifestyle" which contains plenty of men and women in a variety of settings or small scenes cover page to page in this book. The relationships that seems instantly established by the illustrations are evident. But this is a trivial thing and is easily overlooked when embracing the beauty, the elegance, and the range of illustrative styles and designs of the times. The figures are expressive, emotional, and the loose stylization that this era brought to us as a culture, changed the way we looked at advertisement and illustration forever. You can see the style breakaway from 1960, where much of the style resembled the late 1950's with it's narrative ideals, to a more free-flowing expressiveness and highly stylized dynamic flat and geometrics interwoven with style, fashion, and the ever present figure. As an educator, I would recommend this book for figure painting, fashion design, illustration, advertisement, and so on. As an artist, the aforementioned applies.

Even if you are not a teacher or an artist, this book still ranks as number one with me among my highly favored collections of coffee table conversation books.

Rian Hughes and David Roach did the most amazing job in compiling, editing, writing, and publishing this book. Generously illustrated with tons of color pictures on every page and very little yak-yak-yak reveals that this book is a pure enjoyment of eye-candy for the viewer. It has been long over due and in need by professional artists (especially me!) to have such a great book with wonderful width and depth! Thank you for this wonderful book! I think it will make me a better artist for having found it! I can't wait for the next one!

Its a great book .. Yes.. The photographs of the illustrations; some of them full page... Great.. But.. There is a point.. The book is orginised in time structure.. It means, if I want to see illustrations of , for example, Bernie Fuchs; I have to look in very different pages of the book.. thats something, but small.. The book is great.!

this was my first book by amazon. i liked very much, and i hope to buy more of them. the prices and services were very pleasent.