Style combination · Pairs well

Bezalel School × Mir iskusstva Book Art

In the same years both used Art Nouveau's ornamental frame to build a national book art from older ornament; set Bilibin's folk borders beside Raban's filigree frames to compare two revivals, or combine their framed, lettered pages.

From the research on Mir iskusstva Book Art

Mix them and make something Bezalel School Mir iskusstva Book Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Bezalel School, their arrangement from Bezalel School, the finish from Mir iskusstva Book Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Bezalel School Mir iskusstva Book Art

Type from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Bezalel School: Jewel & metallic
Full polychrome
Form from Bezalel School: Abundant decoration
Borders & frames
Composition from Bezalel School: Central symmetry
Framed panels
Surface from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Mir iskusstva Book Art

Daydream

Federant; Mir iskusstva Book Art used Ivan Bilibin's hand-drawn cover titles and illuminated initials in an Old Russian manner, drawn as part of the page and Typeset Cyrillic text in a single block inside an ornamental border, opened by an illuminated initial and closed by a tailpiece

Text · Bezalel School

The house style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1906 with E. M. Lilien and given its definitive form by Ze'ev Raban. It joined Jugendstil and Symbolism to Persian, Syrian and Islamic ornament, Yemenite silverwork and ancient Jewish coins to make a Jewish national art: biblical and Zionist scenes in symmetrical, ornament-packed frames, hand-drawn Hebrew letters as decoration, and jewel colours heightened with gold, on books, posters, carpets, metalwork and tiles until the school closed in 1929 (its designs lingered on objects into the 1950s).

Jost; Bezalel School used Bezalel workshop Hebrew display lettering, which combined Arabic-script forms with German Jugendstil writing and Ze'ev Raban's hand-drawn Hebrew letters, rendered in gold at the centre of an illustrated page

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Bezalel School, with a counter-accent from Mir iskusstva Book Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Bezalel School Mir iskusstva Book Art

#f0e4c6 ground · 36%
#1d4e89 ink · 14%
#c9a03a accent · 18%
#a8322d accent · 14%
#2f8a8c accent · 10%
#4f5d2f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e4c6;
  --ink: #1d4e89;
  --accent-1: #c9a03a;
  --accent-2: #a8322d;
  --accent-3: #2f8a8c;
  --accent-4: #4f5d2f;
  --font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Bezalel School: Bezalel works quote Hebrew scripture and decorate ritual objects: do not crop, distort, mirror or print biblical verses, and above all the names of God, on throwaway items (such pages are customarily buried rather than discarded), and have any Hebrew read by a fluent reader. The style's figures cast Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews, who modelled for its students and worked as its silversmiths and stone carvers, as picturesque biblical types, and its programme was Zionist in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine; credit the artisans, avoid exoticising living communities, and do not present it as a neutral 'Holy Land' or regional style. It also built a Jewish national art in part from Arab and Islamic sources (Persian and Syrian metalwork, Damascene inlay, Moorish pattern, and Hebrew lettering that drew on Arabic script) in a land it shared with Palestinian Arabs, whom, like Yemenite Jews, its artists took as models for biblical figures: name those sources rather than presenting the motifs as purely Jewish, and treat pieces such as 'Come to Palestine' and the Zionist insignia as political documents, not neutral travel imagery.

Mir iskusstva Book Art: This 'Russian' folk look is a refined, partly state-commissioned idiom of the imperial capital, assembled by professional artists from northern peasant crafts, lubki and icons: do not present it as timeless ethnic Russian folk art or as a neutral emblem of the Russian state, and keep icon-derived holy figures out of trivial uses. Its makers were not all Russian: Heorhiy Narbut, for example, became rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and designed the Ukrainian People's Republic's banknotes and stamps, so credit artists by their own identities. Benois (d. 1960) and Dobuzhinsky (d. 1957) remain in copyright in the EU and Russia (life plus 70 years, so at least until 2031 and 2028), while Bilibin (d. 1942), Somov (d. 1939) and Narbut (d. 1920) are in the public domain there: draw new borders, figures and lettering rather than reproducing their pages. Somov's Le Livre de la Marquise is explicitly erotic, above all the 1918 edition, so keep its plates out of children's or general-audience pastiche.

The two styles

1906–1929 · Middle East & North Africa Bezalel School The house style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1906 with E. M. Lilien and given its definitive form by Ze'ev Raban. It joined Jugendstil and Symbolism to Persian, Syrian and Islamic ornament, Yemenite silverwork and ancient Jewish coins to make a Jewish national art: biblical and Zionist scenes in symmetrical, ornament-packed frames, hand-drawn Hebrew letters as decoration, and jewel colours heightened with gold, on books, posters, carpets, metalwork and tiles until the school closed in 1929 (its designs lingered on objects into the 1950s).

An ornate illustrated poster titled “SILVER LAKE” shows a long-haired woman in embroidered robes sitting beneath birch trees beside a lake, with two swans and a distant castle. A decorative border contains mirrored peacocks, squirrels, deer, flowers and curling foliage.

1898–1927 · Eastern Europe Mir iskusstva Book Art The graphic idiom of the St Petersburg World of Art circle (journal 1898–1904, exhibitions until Paris 1927) and the book artists around it. Ivan Bilibin's state-printed, lithographed fairy tales set firmly outlined, flat-washed pictures and text inside folk-ornament borders drawn from lubki, crafts and icons; Benois and Somov revived the eighteenth century of Versailles and old Petersburg in vignettes and rococo scenes. Both branches made the book one ensemble of cover, headpiece, initial, plate and tailpiece, in watercolour, gouache or black ink rather than oil.