Experience a journey through a transformative era in American art and culture between the 1930s through the early 1970s.

 

OnlyVintageColors was conceived by Karen Little, an artist born in 1944, who has first-hand knowledge of vintage and mid-century culture. This was a period bounded by European wars and immigration and ended in the free spirit of the 1960s, where old ways were almost completely abandoned.

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With wars in the early 1900s pressuring European populations, including Karen's grandparents, to flee to the USA, publishers struggled to report global events. Without rich imagery, however, far less information was reported than what was needed.

 

During this era, offset lithography became increasingly easier to use. By 1920, grayscale photos started to become standard newspaper fare. Colored pictures followed, but until the 1960s, these were primarily hand-drawn illustrations. Printing processes could only produce partial tones, not colored photos.

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By 1960, technology rapidly advanced to the point where true full-colored photos could be published. This led to a glut of magazines (the magazine era), with publications like Life, Look, Vogue, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and the Rolling Stone filled with colored photos. Because of imagery, these magazines greatly influenced culture, politics, and fashion until they were beaten back by the immediate power of live, colored TV, and a few decades later, by the Internet.

 

The rein of vintage colors – hazy greens, teals, golds, blues, pinks, oranges, and yellows – lasted for only 40 decades (1920 through 1950). By the end of the 1960s, some of these original colors transitioned to kitchen appliances, but were rarely seen in print again until nostalgia rekindled interest in them.