Is this kitsch? Is it kitsch enough to make it like camp to be able to sell? Or is it an art expression about which you doctoral thesis can write if you want to become an art historian? It was in the thrift store among the remains of cleared estates and the decision to take it home was quickly made. You want a bit of winter in January anyway.
According to Wikipedia, the object is called a ‘snow globe’, but it only got that name late. Jan Wolkers described it in Turkish fruit (1969) as ‘a glass ball with whirling snow’. It was not until 1984 that the Netherlands received from Maurits Schmidt in de Volkskrant to hear that the souvenir industry is the one reversing snowball name. Henk Lagerwaard came in there in 1989 NRC Handelsblad also out when he Schneekugeln had to translate. But in 2000, Gus Afternoon in Our language see that there was still a lot of confusion. Van Dale decided to call it a shaker ball.
How long can an object last without a name? Snow globes were already there in 1878, one was on display at the world exhibition in Paris. Commissioners of the US State Department have him accurately described: a hollow, water-filled paperweight in which a man with an umbrella was arranged. A white powder in the water mimicked a snow shower when you flip the paperweight over.
Weak light bulb
It wasn’t really a paperweight. The boule a neige that Pierre Boirre of the Paris Verrerie des Lilas exhibited arose from the panorama spheres he made earlier. He had developed something new in the same atmosphere. Unfortunately, the umbrella man has never been found, but a snow globe with Eifel tower that was made around 1889 has been preserved. By others, because the idea was quickly adopted.
In 1900 Erwin Perzy fabricated a schneekugel who made it snow on the basilica of Mariazell. Grandson Perzy Still Thinks This Was The World’s First Snow Globe And Has One good story in: how Grandfather Perzy thought he could concentrate the light from a too dim incandescent bulb using a glass ball filled with water, and that he hoped things would get even better if he put crushed glass in the water. That the glass sank and that he then tried wheat semolina and that it continued to float and that he then thought: just snow, and that he then started making those snow souvenirs. The grandson still makes them, filling them with pure alpine water. He does not say what the snow consists of.
But the described water-filled glass balls were already used in the Middle Ages to concentrate the light of candles or oil lamps and an ordinary person cannot see how anyone could think that ground glass or semolina would have a beneficial effect.
They got smaller and bigger
Anyway, around 1925 the Americans also dived into the snow globes and nowadays they come by ship from China. The glass spheres of the beginning became both smaller and larger and eventually took the shape of a dome or bell jar. Glass was replaced by acrylic. The miniature to be snowed also changed. Bambi came.
For the flitter which used to consist of broken rice, bone meal or sand, came more modern materials such as polystyrene and benzoic acid. It makes little difference because you can always adjust the thickness and density of the carrier fluid in such a way that the snow settles slowly enough. Water is often mixed with glycerol or the (toxic) glycol.
The Kringloop West snow globe is at least sixty years old. It is made of heavy glass and has a plaster base. The snow that rains on the hand-painted snowman after being shaken consists of shell grit or ground horse hooves or something. Thanks to the air bubble you can see that the male is very small in real life. It is optically magnified as a goldfish in his bowl.
Atmospheric white asbestos
All things considered, the snow globe from West appears to have undergone an evolutionary setback. His snow shower cannot be compared with the beautiful snow storm in the snow globe that Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941) dropped to pieces. And check out YouTube for the convincing snowball that Ginger Rogers studies as she begins a flashback (in Kitty Foyle, 1940). Then, at the same time, take a look at the rare heavy snowfall outside her apartment. Cozy!
Hollywood, too, developed an early love for atmospheric snow. It also had to be fake snow, but different from the one from the balls. Initially they experimented with flour and cotton fluff and the like, but the Los Angeles Fire Department thought that was too dangerous. In the thirties the use of white asbestos, chrysotile, was switched over and this remained so until after the war. When Bing Crosby sings ‘White Christmas’ in 1942 (in Holiday Inn) he is, so to speak, up to his knees in asbestos. the stuff was sold under names such as Pure White, Snow Drift and White Magic. They were breathtakingly beautiful snowflakes, although they fell just a little too quickly. real snow comes down at 1 to 2 m/s, the asbestos reached 3 or 4 m/s.
#Cozy #snow #globes #semolina