Art & Statues
L'Illustration, Complete Year 1936, Six Bound Volumes
L'Illustration, Complete Year 1936, Six Bound Volumes
A complete run of the French weekly L'Illustration for the year 1936, bound into six hardcover volumes covering every two month period from January through December. This run captures a pivotal year in French history, including the arrival of the Popular Front government, alongside the magazine's continued coverage of art, fashion, and design as Art Deco's influence gave way to newer visual trends. These volumes are former Pasadena Public Library copies, identified by the library stamps on the spines.
L'Illustration entered 1936 as an established institution in French publishing, and the events of that year gave it plenty to cover. The Popular Front's election victory and the wave of labor strikes that followed reshaped French politics and society, and issues from this run document that upheaval alongside the magazine's usual coverage of art exhibitions, fashion, and cultural life. For researchers interested in how visual culture responded to political change during the mid-1930s, this run offers detailed weekly coverage from a publication with a wide readership and considerable editorial reach.
Each volume gathers two months of weekly issues into a single bound book, matching the format used across this library's other L'Illustration holdings. The six volumes here, numbered 193 through 195 with two parts each, run consecutively from January through December, giving a complete year of the publication in one set. Fashion plates, advertising, and society coverage throughout the issues continue to reflect design trends carrying forward from the Art Deco period, even as the visual language of French commercial art began shifting toward new directions by the mid-1930s.
As former library volumes, these carry the Pasadena Public Library stamp on their spines, the same provenance found across this collection's other bound years of the magazine. Complete, intact year sets like this one are increasingly uncommon, since individual issues are more often broken apart and sold separately for their illustrations. For collectors and researchers, this set offers a full year of primary source material documenting both French politics and design during a transitional moment in the 1930s.
