BRIGGS DRAWS LITTLE GIRLS

[The forthcoming book about the art of Austin Briggs, from Auad Publishing, is now at the printer.  Unfortunately, there was not enough room in the book for many great images.  Rather than return them to obscurity, I've decided to show several outtakes on this blog between now and the publication date.]

I love Austin Briggs' preliminary drawing of five girls marching in a line through a bar. 

Drawing courtesy of Roger Reed at Illustration House

Note how Briggs uses  the angles of their hats to show their individual characters.  The eldest girl is prim and decorous but by the time we get to the pile up at the end, all decorum is gone:

Briggs adopted a similar approach for the little girls greeting their daddy in the following ad for Douglas Airliners.  Even with his rough, sketchy technique and their backs turned to the viewer, each of these girls has a distinctive personality:

The shy one hides behind her mother, the excitable one leaps in the air, and the middle one wobbles indecisively. 

The drawing is intended to look spontaneous but Briggs did at least a dozen preliminary sketches, trying to tie a hair ribbon on a bouncing ping pong ball. 

This large sketch (19" x 25") and others were tossed on the floor of Briggs' studio as he worked.  That's Briggs' shoe print in the upper right corner.

When Briggs captured touches he liked, he incorporated them in the final drawing.

Briggs' experience shows up in that hand

Before he turned to his charcoal illustrations, Briggs made his reputation doing fully painted illustrations.  Here he paints frisky children in an ad for dog food

He employed a lively brush technique to keep his painting active:

Still, at some point in his career he seems to have realized that the medium of paint unavoidably civilized his pictures.  If he wanted to convey the indecorum of little girls, a crayon or vine charcoal was a more suitable medium.

Despite the seeming crudeness of this line, note how sensitively Briggs depicts the curiosity and lack of coordination in those young fingers.

In an era of slick, full color illustration Briggs was a pioneer in making these basic drawing tools fashionable again.

AUSTIN BRIGGS RETURNS TO WHERE HE STARTED

Austin Briggs was 19 and still in art school when he sold his first drawing to Collier's magazine. 

Briggs soon decided he didn't need more school.  He was making good money from Collier's imitating the popular artists of the day.  But after a couple of years Briggs realized that he was faking it.  Many of his lines were just random squiggles with little understanding of what went on beneath the surface.  He was borrowing solutions he hadn't earned, and his shortcuts began to betray him.

His assignments started to dry up.  He'd never learned to paint.  Desperate for money, he quit the field of illustration.  He took other jobs, but all the while he was determined to go back and do it right: "I set about learning to draw, which I never could do before."

Briggs' son described this turning point in his father's life:

I see how correct he was in his mature assessment of his early work: he could not really draw, but with sheer vitality he faked his way to renderings that conveyed power and authority.  When the new demand for color illustration left my father in the Depression virtually without work and with a wife and two small children to support, he would not quit.  Taking his easel and sketch pad out of the studio, he began to look at the world-- to really see it.  Over God knows how many long hours of work, he taught himself until he eventually developed great skill as a colorist and as a draftsman....

Looking back, Briggs recalled:

These were experimental years; I explored new compositional approaches, new techniques or variations of old techniques and new manners of working with limited means. The fees I received from my drawings were largely plowed back into my work.... This was my chance to learn, and I worked over drawings until they were as good as I thought I could make them.  

Briggs learned to draw and to paint with great skill:

Then his art got looser...

And even looser:

Briggs became a dominant force in American illustration of the 20th century.  His strong, opinionated work covered the full gamut of the illustration field, from pulps and comic strips to the movie industry to the covers of books, records and top magazines.  

But the thing that interests me most about this story was that, at the height of his powers, having invested years in mastering painting and color theory, Briggs returned to simple drawing where he started.  As he became more fearless, he no longer needed fancy paints or even inks.  He simplified down to a pencil or a litho crayon.  Art directors for prestigious magazines were happy to accept a drawing from Briggs where once a full color oil painting would've been expected.  Briggs became famous in the industry for a remarkable series of drawings that he did for TV Guide, which were cited when he was inducted into the Illustration Hall of Fame:

Image courtesy of Taraba Illustration Art

If you compare Briggs' later drawings with his early random squiggles, you get a sense for how much he learned.   In the words of T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration.  And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

THE SKETCHBOOKS OF AUSTIN BRIGGS

In keeping with our current theme of posting working sketches by the great illustrators, today let's look at some unpublished drawings by Austin Briggs.  It is a shame that Briggs does not get much attention today; for decades he was one of the most highly regarded illustrators in the country.  An excellent painter, Briggs was especially known for the great subtlety and sensitivity of his drawing with a lithography crayon, charcoal or similar tools.

Despite the free and spontaneous look to his drawings, Briggs' sketches and preliminary drawings show that he was a disciplined and skilled draftsman.  He drew numerous preparatory sketches...

 

...sometimes with great precision (especially earlier in his career, when his style was tighter):

To plan his more complex illustrations, Briggs would do numerous preliminary sketches:

Briggs wrote a note to an art director in the margin of one of these sketches, saying "If you don't like this one, I've got a dozen others on the floor of my studio."

The following drawing is not a sketch, but a finished, published illustration.

Drawing with corrective patch

However, the original version was never published:

Drawing without corrective patch

We forget today that Briggs was at the forefront of artists introducing a more realistic informality into illustration. Previous illustrators focused on the one key moment or reaction shot, where the subject's eyes were widest or their expression was the broadest or their leap was at its height.

Norman Rockwell

Briggs took a different approach and began focusing on moments that looked less staged.  His sketches reveal a deliberate search for offbeat moments, where a subject might be looking away or checking their watch or other things more integrated into daily life.   It may seem crazy to us today, but in the 1950s art directors sometimes choked on this radical approach.  In the two drawings compared above, the art director instructed Briggs to change his drawing to make the man sit up straight.  Briggs glued the correction on with rubber cement, causing the stain.

Today's illustrators should be grateful to Briggs as a bold and principled pioneer who left the field with more artistic freedom than it had when he began.

WARRING WITH TROLLS, part 4

"To live is to war with trolls." --Ibsen 

Talented illustrator Austin Briggs painted a NY Giants baseball game for the April 22, 1950 cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

This is not that painting:

Briggs' cover included  an African American woman in the crowd.  When he delivered the painting to The Post,  the editors ordered him to remove her.  Infuriated, Briggs refused.  He broke the painting in half over his knee and stormed out.

As reported in the Westport blog 06880, Briggs' model for the woman was Fanny Drain, a long time employee of the Briggs family.   Briggs' son recalled:

When the Giants were playing she and my father-- whose studio was at home-- would follow the radio broadcasts avidly and vocally; her pride and pleasure in being included in the cover painting were deep.

The Post quickly found another illustrator, Steven Dohanos, to repaint Briggs' cover, replacing the African American woman with a white male (the one with a handkerchief on his head).  That is the final version you see above.

The Post loved the result so much, they even released the all white version as a jigsaw puzzle for wholesome families to play.

Briggs' gesture of defiance was expensive for his family, but once the cover was destroyed, there was no going back.  Briggs never regretted his decision.

It is difficult to imagine such an impetuous act of conscience occurring today.  If he was painting today, Briggs would no longer be able to break his picture over his knee because the digital art would've been emailed to the magazine, with multiple copies on his hard drive at home.  The Saturday Evening Post would not have to ask Briggs to paint out the African American woman; they would Photoshop a white complexion on her without the artist's permission in 30 seconds. 

The wonderful efficiencies of Photoshop help eliminate some of the nasty moral choices that once confronted an artist.  We live in a much more efficient world today.  But in the words of Epicetus, "It is difficulties that show what men are."

NEW BOOK ABOUT AUSTIN BRIGGS

The very first book about the great illustrator Austin Briggs has just been published by Auad Publishing (previous publisher of books about Robert Fawcett, Albert Dorne, Henry Raleigh and other classic illustrators).

I had the great pleasure of writing the text for the book.  

Briggs was one of the true greats of 20th century illustration.  I've often written about him on this blog, especially about his drawing which I greatly admire.   But Briggs worked in every kind of medium and played a significant role in every type of illustration from comic strips (Flash Gordon) to pulp magazines to the early movies to magazines, books and records. He ended his life painting landscapes and gallery paintings in Paris.

I was able to delve into his fascinating life with the cooperation of the Briggs family.

The Briggs book is  9 x12, 160 pages, $34.95, available from the Auad web site.

In the days ahead, I'll be posting additional images by Briggs that I particularly like, to supplement the new book.  

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 59

I love this drawing by the great Austin Briggs:

I love its marvelous, fresh take on the running figure, partially obscured by the design of the flapping coat.

Notice how Briggs was not enslaved by the coiled telephone wire; notice the way he added vigor to what could have been the boring color of the policeman's uniform.  Briggs seized these elements and boldly made them into what he needed for the picture:

Does it look like Briggs had trouble with the anatomy of hands?  Guess again.  Briggs spent decades painting highly realistic figures for advertisements for companies such as American Airlines, Bell Telephone and Chevrolet before he became brave enough to draw pictures like this.  

You might get further insight into the special qualities of this drawing by looking at a few other drawings from the same article about the gangster, John Dillinger.

Briggs could not draw in this simple way if he didn't already fully understand the role of the extensor muscles or the radius bone at the wrist or the structure of the human face.

Great stuff from an era when Look magazine would commission four illustrations by a talent such as  Briggs for an internal article.

AUSTIN BRIGGS' OPINIONS

We're always hearing that artists require freedom to express their opinions. 

Artists need freedom to express political opinions, or to show explicit content.  Artistic opinions might offer a social conscience, or point out ironies in our culture.   The outrageous perspectives of underground cartoonists unsettle the status quo.

This focus on the artist's opinions is why advertising art is held in such low regard: the corporate advertiser, not the artist, controls the content.

But making art involves all kinds of opinions, not just opinions about content.  It involves opinions about  how to describe form, opinions about abstraction,  opinions about design.  Visual opinions such as these are equally present in advertising art and museum art.

Here is an advertisement drawing by Austin Briggs with a real point of view:

It has no political or social content but man, what an opinion!   To me, it makes much of today's "social commentary" art look spineless.

 Here is a series of drawings by Briggs for newspaper ads in the 1950s. The social commentary is nonexistent but look at his powerful choices and robust lines describing form:

 

Briggs had opinions about where to apply emphasis.  He had opinions on how to convey vitality.  He had opinions on how to depict folds in heavy cloth:

I like Briggs' opinion on how to abstract a little girl's dress:

Here is a sample of one of Briggs' original sketches for this series of ads so you can see how he worked:

We've come to believe, for reasons that escape me, that an artist's political and social opinions are more significant than their visual opinions.  Starting at least as early as the pop artists,  unremarkable ads, labels or comic books were transformed by artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein into fine art.  The physical image might be almost identical, but what mattered was the artist's commentary on mass media, commercial printing and the ironies of modern culture.

I agree that in some cases, this type of commentary can be a higher form of art than the visual choices in a good drawing.  But I've also listened patiently to lectures by artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in which they discuss the opinions underlying their art.  They may be eloquent,  but I often find their social commentary simple minded and their politics juvenile.

When I decide where to spend my time,  I weigh those social opinions against the opinions about form manifest in really good drawing.  Often, I find that plain good drawing--  even with no ironic content-- is more enriching.  Of course, that's just an opinion. 

ONE LOVELY DRAWING

While it is great fun to talk about the larger landscape of art, sometimes you can see more by looking through a microscope than by looking out the window of an airplane.

That's especially true when you are talking about the intimate art of drawing. As I have noted elsewhere, I think art critic Roberta Smith got it exactly right when she wrote about the special quality of drawing:

Drawings are the most overtly delectable of all art forms...Drawings in general are like love letters. Personal in touch and feelng, physically delicate, they reflect the artist's gifts, goals and influences in the most intimate terms... [They are] a direct extension of an artists's signature and very nervous system.

So I think it makes sense to take time out from bloviating about the art world to reflect on an individual drawing. I will be doing this on a regular basis, to bring attention to selected examples of long forgotten treasure and to give my detractors a better understanding of what I mean when I write about the great potential of drawing.

The illustrator Austin Briggs was featured this week in Leif Peng's excellent Today's Inspiration blog (http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/) which I heartily recommend to you. I am posting here a drawing by Briggs which has hung outside my bedroom door for ten years. This drawing of a World War II monument in Paris was executed with a dull crayon, yet it conveys astonishing subtlety and sensitivity. The virtuoso Briggs could've threaded a needle while wearing boxing gloves.



Notice in the detail above how Briggs has captured the man's stooped posture, his raised shoulder encircling his companion, his neck projecting from his collar, the bald crown of his head, and how efectively the simple indication of an ear conveys the man's reverse profile. With a crude tool and a primitive line, Briggs conveys more wisdom and insight about his subject than a thousand other artists might have conveyed using modern, precise tools and the most labored approach. Now that's drawing!



The statue, too, is rendered in a marvelous, vigorous way. Using nothing but talent and the simplest of tools-- a single black stick of wax-- Briggs created a symphonic range of effects to convey great power: shading, smearing, applying different pressure for different values, all applied with a confidence that reinforces the power of his subject. I hung this simple drawing outside my door ten years ago and I still learn something new from it almost every day.