Resumen de Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures
The American illustrator Coles Phillips (1880-1927), who began his career in advertising, developed a remarkably successful commercial lure with his so-called fade-away girl, whose contours disappear into flat planes of colour, merging with the image ground, typically appearing on the cover of a magazine. Situated, in the magazine context, at the nexus of stilled visual form and kinetic mobility, and emphasizing, in particular, the centrality of touch to the costumer's immersive engagement with and conceptual production of the visual image, Phillips's work demonstrates how much mass-market illustration has to tell us about the period's understanding of perceptual practices and their operations in a commercial marketplace, while also revealing the importance of advertising theory to the popular periodicals' self-presentation during the magazine boom of the early twentieth century. Because it was not designed to appeal to vision alone, Philips's imagery invites us to expand the methods we use to historicize the operations of popular illustration, a flexible medium designed to register not simply as 'picture' but as a material substance making impressions on the move.
