Vintage 1960s postcards - kitsch kitten and daisies!

 

Remember when I used to scan stuff I’d found in antique shops? Let me remind you.

Anyway I’m up to it again, starting with this kitsch gem ‘Kitten in the Rose Bower’ photo above by Guy Withers! It’s a J. Arthur Dixon postcard and I think it’s from around 1965 (based on the one below I found with a dated stamp).

Fluffy animal and fake tree branches - what’s not to love?!

 

And another colourful and kitsch J. Arthur Dixon postcard I found in the same antique shop (I know, my hobbies are thrilling)! This one had a stamp on the back from 1965 along with the message:

 

"Thank you so much for sending us Contact. It is most interesting as usual. We are getting straight. With difficulty I at last got rid of some of the furniture and the Bristol furniture looks very nice in its place."

 

Other people’s mail woohoo. The flowers are Barberton Daisies, a wild South African species famed for their varied and attractive colours. Very bright, very 60s…

A quote about kitsch.

"The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) said, 'What is so intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure in being displeased.' The satisfying and exciting thing about liking things because 'they're so bad, they're good' is the brief euphoric ego swell that occurs while being so aristocratically irked. A connoisseur of kitsch unconsciously applauds his or her own cleverness at being able to appreciate qualities inherent in objects that are undetectable to simpler folk. A feeling of superiority creeps over us, derived from the knowledge that some people genuinely draw comfort from these tasteless objects; this lofty delight is equal to importance to the kitsch lover as the physical tawdriness of the object."

P. Ward, Kitsch IN SYNC - A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste