Check out these wonderful postcards that went for auction on eBay recently. I'm not absolutely certain, but I think they're the work of cartoonist Friedrich Schiff, an Austrian Jew who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s and 40s.Born in 1908 into an artistic family (his father was a painter, his mother an actress), Schiff studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
In 1930, at the invitation of his cousin, Schiff visited Shanghai and fell in love with the city and its people. He ended up living there for 14 years, until 1947 when he moved to Buenos Aires.
Schiff had worked as a newspaper cartoonist in Vienna and continued this line of work in Shanghai. Soon he became famous for his amusing caricatures of the city's inhabitants, from beggars and expats to sailors and sing-song girls.
In 1934, he began a fruitful collaboration with photojournalist Ellen Thorbecke (who was the wife of the Dutch ambassador to China). Like Schiff, Thorbecke was also a Sinophile. Together they created a series of illustrated travel books about China's major cities: Peking Studies (1934), Shanghai (1938), and Hong Kong (1938). From what I've read (see the link below), the books are quite charming. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to peruse them, since they apparently fetch a pretty steep price in the rare book marketplace.However, there is a compilation of Schiff's Shanghai sketches called Vicissitude of Old Shanghai (老上海浮世绘), which I am dying to get my hands on. I found it for sale at a Chinese online bookseller only to discover, after I had successfully managed (with the help of Google Translate) to set up an account, that the book is currently out of stock. Boo-hoo for me... but I'll track it down. I don't give up easily once I'm on the hunt!
Further Reading
- Images from Maskee: A Shanghai Sketchbook by Schiff (ca. 1938)
- "Records of Hong Kong: Arthur Hacker profiles two out-of-the-box 1930s Hong Kong artists"
11 comments:
Thanks once again for helping people know more about interesting people from the past and their creative efforts! :)
Those are really wonderful sketches!
Thanks, Dave.
Glad you liked these! :)
those cartoons are wonderful. he's captured a moment in time with felt pen and gouache.
I don't give up easily once I'm on the hunt!
Truer words were never spoken--or written. Your perseverance in tracking down images like these--even to the point of trawling the endless trivialities of ebay-- makes this blog such a delight.
Friedrich Schiff's work is like much of the fashion illustration of the time with the impossibly elongated figures but he was able to catch the telling detail with just pen stroke. In the first one the man seated at the table looks like an enlisted sailor and from the way he is sitiing most likely an American. He is entranced not only with the lovely singer in front of him but the entire world of Shanghai nightlife--the treaty ports were a long way from whereever he came from.
The Chinese woman is as casual as casual can be holding a cigarette with a hand and arm so relaxed she is about to drop it and with her back turned to her admirer. Her other arm, though, points right at him or at least leads the eye of the viewer to his kind of goofy looking face. Great stuff.
She also makes an appearance dancing with her taller friend in the last of the three pictures.
That is quite a story about Schiff--leaving Austrian in 1930 and getting established in Shanghai sounds like an incredible stroke of luck since Shanghai became the last possible open city for Jewish refugees from Gemany, Austria and Central Europe in the late 1930s. It must have been a lot better to be a Jew in Shanghai than in Vienna after 1933 and especially after Kristallnacht in 1938.
Interesting!
Thanks everybody for your comments! And Ed, I loved the way you broke down that first drawing.
If you didn't do so already, do check out the link I posted above, which features 15 more of Schiff's Shanghai sketches.
I think I have a book featuring Schiff's work, it is published in Chinese language too.
The cover is green in colour.
Let me go back home and check that out.
Schiff actually gave his ownself a Chinese name 许福 (means Making a Good Wish), which sounds very much like the pronounciation of his name.
That's a great Chinese name! I need to get one for myself some day.
Let me know about that book. Maybe I can track down a copy in KL. ;)
I purchased 3 old framed Friedrich Schiff cartoon drawings at an estate sale back in the 1980's...does anyone know who I might contact for selling? All 3 have the SCHIFF signature.
Many Thanks!
ShValleyGuy@aol.com
or
LMJguy@aol.com
Don't know really. You can always try selling them on eBay.
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