Boris Artzybasheff's Machinalia illustrations

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has just posted a gallery of terrific illustrations from the 1950s by illustrator Boris Artzybasheff.

In his introduction to the section titled "Machinalia" in his book As I See, Boris Artzybasheff says, "I am thrilled by machinery's force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines."

Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Art and Design

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Takuan

thanks Jed! You put a name to some of the images I’d stored and lost. Artzybasheff! In my mind, I’d ascribed a few to Escher. Thanks again.
Charlie

He also did a great series of ads for the Lycoming corporation in the 1950′s. I’ve posted them on my site:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/tag/boris-artzybasheff/
mokudan

Other posters have mentioned both Escher and Woodring…those are exactly the two who came to mind when I saw this! Very cool.
Avram

And, as I see from following Mark’s Amazon link, Artzybasheff’s As I See is coming back into print! Talk about burying the lede!
jonom

The book coming from Titan is the Ken’s Publishing version but properly printed instead of on-demand (colour laser).

I reset the type for Ken before he shipped it off to Titan.
Takuan

Thanks Charlie, great stuff!
Stefan Jones

This is great stuff. The machines are like . . . golems, maybe? Domestic animals?

I particularly like the faces of the soaking pit covers, shown above.
reallyexcellentdude

reminds me of woodring
Enochrewt

Ok, wtf. Who wouldn’t want to see machines do the work instead of slaves?

That being said, slick stuff.
Jed Alexander

Artzybasheff is a much overlooked treasure. He left a legacy of amazing illustration. He’s also done a number of beautiful Time covers—More stuff here:

http://www.eisnermuseum.org/_artzybashoff/main.html

Also “As I See” has fallen into the public domain, and before Titan brought it back, this guy was keeping it alive:

http://www.kenspublishing.com/show.php?authorID=166

he charges a little more, but his operation is worth supporting. He’s trying to keep a lot of long out of print illustration books available on an print-on-demand basis.
Takuan

any place I’ve worked or seen, there isn’t much anthro-animistic machine art. You go painting eyes on the excavator and one day you start thinking it’ll run itself or not hit you like a friendly draft animal. Or you start making sacrifices to it.
Ships is different, them you want to take care of you.