BIEN-AIMEE

The French poster artist Hukel was a master, and for that matter so was this other guy named Hurel.

Another day, another unknown talent. The above promo poster was painted by a French artist who signed his work “Hukel.” We’ve found references to him online, but no details unfortunately—not even a full name. However, we know he was active for at least four decades, because he painted the poster for 1981’s Cannonball Run, as well as this quirky 1960 advertising poster. The masterpiece above is the Yugoslavian poster for the French prison drama Tous peuvent me tuer, which was released in English as Anyone Can Kill. The movie starred Anouk Aimée, she of the renowned hawk eyebrows, which are lovingly reproduced by the artist. We will try to dig up more Hukel pieces, or at least a bit of info, and if we find anything you can be sure we’ll share.  

Update: While we did see some websites that referred to this person as “Hukel” (such as the link we provided above), we now see that he is actually Clément Hurel. We’ve located a small selection of his work here, and he even has a French Wikipedia page that tells us he was born in 1927 and died in 2008 after a career designing scores of movie posters. Once again, this highlights a problem with the internet—i.e., nobody knows what the hell they’re actually talking about. You’d think Carter’s Price Guide to Antiques (where we got the “Hukel” info) would have their shit straight, but we guess that’s too much to expect in this day and age. The lesson? Check, double-check, triple-check, and don’t assume that someone with a fancy title is automatically more informed than you. After all the errors we’ve found online, we really should know better than to fall into that trap. Anyway, we now know who Clément Hurel is, and we’ll have more art from him soon.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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