From femme fatale to love goddess: Nineteenth-century images of women in sixties San Francisco psychedelic rock posters

Abstract

This essay sheds new light on the adoption and adaptation by Sixties San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of images of women from nineteenth-century Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Neoclassic sources. Nineteenth-century stereotypes of women found new relevance when transformed into the visual rhetoric of west coast psychedelic dance-concert posters from 1966 to 1970. The legacy of these nineteenth-century images of women is traced in psychedelic posters designed by Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Raphael (Bob) Schnepf, and Tom Wilkes who primarily targeted male hippiedom at the same moment when Sixties second-wave feminism was beginning to emerge.