Resorts at Sea: Latest Acquisitions

The fun part of this project is the research. (Yeah, I’m a geek.)

The bad part of this project is wanting original copies of the source material. (Not that I'm due to be on an episode of Hoarders, mind you. For example, my ocean liner ephemera collection is expanding, and the wallet takes it the shorts every now and again. The importance of the ephemera is the images they contain. More often than not, I’ll get a picture of artwork in situ.

I wrote about getting a booklet on the ss Argentina artworks. Now I have the one for her sister, the ss Brasil. The newer works are by the same artists as on Argentina, but the old works are by Martin Johnson Heade, an American who was court painter to the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, in the 1860s.

Next we have the introductory brochure for the ss Atlantic. Atlantic originally sailed for American Banner Lines, then American Export, then finally as Universe Explorer. Interiors were handled by Raymond Loewy Associates. The Tourist Lounge mural, back of the room on the left, looks like a cross-between Warhol’s Elvis print and the opening title sequence to the old TV show The Wild Wild West.

I found the ns Savannah brochure as a PDF online a couple years back, but when I wanted to zoom in on details, meh, it wasn’t so great, I needed a hard copy. I’ve been trying to match the pieces on the walls of the lounge to pieces in the Whitney, per a 1964 newspaper article. But I now have an article from the ship’s debut in 1962 stating the lounge artworks came from the Rive Gauche Gallery in Darien, Connecticut. The photo in the article is the same as this one from the 1965 brochure.

In a similar vein, a connection between a famous NYC  gallery and the Alcoa Steamship Company has been found. I'll let you know what I find.