Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Le Sacre du Printemps

Flora created the Columbia Records new release monthly Coda in early 1943 and illustrated most issues thru 1945 (after which the journal morphed into Disc Digest). The March 1944 issue is one of Flora's most satisfying on an artistic level. The cover (above) illustrates a Columbia Masterworks four-disc album (price: $4.50) of Igor Stravinsky conducting his own Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), described in Coda as "a ballet based on the paganistic rituals of prehistoric Russia." The 1913 work's tumultuous history (it sparked riots) is chronicled in the release notes.

Many of the interior illos of this Coda issue were reproduced in our third anthology, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora.

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