COVE

This gallery shows something of the range of art featured in the little magazines of the fin de siècle. The most famous magazine art was Aubrey Beardsley's pen-and-ink work, which he designed specifically for reproduction by line-block engraving, a photomechanical process. These art-nouveau designs, featuring the bold use of line and negative/positive space, gave their signature to the period, along with the posters  and commercial art that they inspired and were inspired by. Some magazine artwork took the form of limited edition original prints--that is, etchings, lithographs, and wood engravings designed and produced by manual means over which the artist had control.  Most, but by no means all, of these were reproduced in black and white. Some magazine artwork was reproduced in halftone (grayscale) using photomechanical processes to resize and recolour large original paintings. The principal reproductions firms serving little magazines include C. Hare,  Hentschel, Naumann, Swan, andWalker and Boutall. The little magazine editors tended to be scrupulous about acknowledging the form(s) of reproduction used in each issue.