How a group of artists in the late 1800s envisioned the year 2000

Retrofuturistic illustrations

It already happens with science fiction films of the 70s or 80s that put their protagonists in the years that we meet as happened very recently with Back to the Future.

Something that usually happens in the art world that they try imagine the future, as happened with a group of French artists who were asked to imagine what life would be like for humans and their scientific inventions in the year 2000 with a series of illustrations. Some illustrations that tried to go ahead in 100 years and a little more for what is present today.

The result is a series of retrofuturistic illustrations called 'En L'An 2000' (In the year 200). They were produced for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, to later be printed as cigarette packs, as well as as postcards between 1899 and 1910. What happens is that they were never distributed, until the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov discovered them on a set in 1980. This led him to publish them in 1986 for a non-fiction work: "Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000."

Retrofuturistic illustrations

These illustrations show a good variety of futuristic machines and what are many underwater scenes like many others flying machines, influenced by the invention and by the romanticism of what it meant to be able to fly at that time.

Retrofuturistic illustrations

Public Domain Review now indicates that there are still 87 designs of postcards made by Jean-Marc Coté and other artists, of which 51 can be found in Wikimedia Commons.

Retrofuturistic illustrations

Here you can see a few that show the ideas they had of the future that awaited us all with certain occurrences, at least curious and particular like that hairdresser or what would be a robot to clean the house, something that is not far from our day to day.

An artist who may have something to do with his vision of mix the old with the modern es rozalski.


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