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Nicholas Remisoff, cover for Vanity Fair, 1923
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One of the most exciting and edifying exhibitions of illustration art this year is currently on display at the
Delaware Art Museum. The show,
Jazz Age Illustration, surveys illustration from a period of American history that was crackling with energy-- an era of music and dance, of flappers and prohibition, of the new freedom and permissiveness that came with the automobile, of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary and visual stylings of
Vanity Fair.
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| From the "Club Hot-Cha" to the "Radium Club," cartoonist E. Simms Campbell's guide to the jazz hot spots of Harlem gives us a great snapshot of the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance |
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| McClelland Barclay |
The show is an eye opener because it features not just the "usual suspects" of illustration-- the Leyendecker / Rockwell / Wyeth / Parrish crew that has already been accepted by the fine art world-- instead, it casts the net more widely, revealing a bounty of lesser known artists who were doing vibrant, creative, socially relevant work from 1919 through 1942 and who deserve our attention today.
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| James Harley Minter |
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| Jay Jackson |
I was especially pleased to see work by under-appreciated artists such as the evocative Douglas Duer...
...or the talented
Winold Reiss, whose work is usually hidden away in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington:
I loved the art deco silhouettes of John Bennett, a new name to me:
For me, some of the most powerful work was not from the glossy pages of popular magazines such as Vogue or The Saturday Evening Post; it was unheralded art that the Museum discovered on pamphlets and other "low" printed matter that revealed the throbbing pulse of the jazz age:
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| Aaron Douglas, detail from book cover |
The Delaware show is a robust reminder of the potency of illustration. So many recent fine art trends have ended up as withered limbs on the evolutionary tree of art-- self-indulgent, self-conscious, with little relevance to everyday life.
Beginning with Warhol and Lichtenstein and continuing through the larcenous Richard Prince, we see fine artists repeatedly borrowing from illustration, comics and other popular arts in an effort to rejuvenate the desiccated landscape of fine art. Art critics have been forced to invent an entire new vocabulary to justify this new"appropriation art." They label it "re-contextualizing" or "sampling" or "augmentation." Lawyers, too, were forced to come up with a new vocabulary to apply the copyright laws based on whether an imitative work has been sufficiently "transformative" of an original. But this jargon can't conceal the underlying envy for the vitality of the popular arts.
That's one reason why the Jazz Age Illustration exhibition is so refreshing. It reminds us of a primal, creative period when musicians were inventing jazz and highly original artists dominated the world of illustration. Jazz was the soundtrack to art with more authenticity, energy and relevance than you're likely to find in the Museum of Modern Art today.
7 comments:
Awesome!
That Minton piece is spectacular.
So much graphic creativity coupled with good drawing in this period. Whatever "naivete" is found in these works was arrived at through serious consideration and graphic understanding. It wasn't actually ignorance at play. These are well-trained talents, even when cartooning/expressionizing. Pyle told his students that to be an illustrator of any merit one had to be an artist first. A tall order to do both. The fraudulent aesthetic philosophizing, de-skilling, and trick-based techniques/marketing that followed in The Golden Age's wake has led to mass devolution across the board. At some point - somewhere between 1928 and 1947 - pretentious Bohemian and Beatnik art teachers everywhere began teaching that the ersatz primitivism of the Golden Age artist-designers was actually primitive - in the sense of barbaric and ignorant - thus nobody needed to know anything. How easy for everybody involved.
The Winton Gordon silhouettes are also excellent. There seems to be no other Gordon works of similar style. At least not on the net. That's too bad. All these pieces show the joy of creative visual communication, and its executive support through technical prowess.
(Although the Barclay girl has a stiff neck, which pains me as if it were my own.)
The "Negro Wage Earner" poster is a wow. It dominates every other picture on this post. Kudos to the museum for its guts.
JSL
Kev Ferrara-- Perhaps the Barclay girl's neck was injured when her legs were stretched on the rack. Barclay was no John LaGatta.
Anonymous / JSL-- I take your point; in an era of extreme sensitivity, many institutions might be timorous about using such a bold, unorthodox image. The jazz age looks pretty fearless by comparison.
The pose and drapery of the first Douglas Duer vignette of the lady in green is very much thanks to Lord Leighton's 'Flaming June'. Lovely image though.
Perhaps the Barclay girl's neck was injured when her legs were stretched on the rack. Barclay was no John LaGatta."
Barclay's excellent action portrait of the USS Growler shows that he missed his calling.
JSL, that looks like a book cover / dust jacket design. Very beautiful. It's interesting, strong wood engravings are a staple of Mexican editorial world of the era, nice to see it made own in a different but related context. There's an ink artifact under the 1890, probably a clue on how it was composed.
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