My mom, Susan, a swell person (who incidentally has funded several of my low-budget art projects), was featured on Season 23, Episode 5 of Antiques Roadshow on PBS yesterday. She shared an intriguing archive of more than two dozen early-20th-century newspaper illustrations with collectibles appraiser Philip Weiss.
To quote the PBS site:
Done in gouache, many of the camera-ready illustrations were published around 1915 — in the early days of aviation — as part of a publication entitled “How Man Learned to Fly.” They depict assorted visions — fanciful, ambitious, hazardous, or tragic — of human air travel in all its imagined possibilities, from wearable parachute-like wings, to a flying steam-powered bus. […] Almost every picture vividly captures some concept of the future, but as conceived in the past, to our modern eye. As such, Weiss notes, the images hold a strong appeal both for aviation collectors and science-fiction enthusiasts alike.
These prints, which my mom inherited from my grandpa, remind me a bit of a famous Czech adventure film, Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction, which I saw not too long ago and would recommend for its creative production values alone!
Anyway, hats off to my mom for getting on TV. This episode of Antiques Roadshow is now available for streaming on the PBS Roku channel.
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