MORE FIGURE STUDIES FROM DANIEL SCHWARTZ

 I previously posted a series of life drawings by illustrator Daniel Schwartz.  In addition to pencil drawings, Schwartz regularly painted from the model with watercolors.

Schwartz was a highly respected illustrator, winner of eleven gold medals from the Society of Illustrators. He already understood anatomy well and had plenty of paying jobs, yet every week he went back and spent substantial time working from the model.  

It seems clear that Schwartz wasn't doing this to learn bone and muscle structure.  He already understood anatomy.  Instead, long and close observation of the human figure can be our introduction to the greater world of natural forms.  It rewards our discipline with enhanced perceptions of wider truths.

Some of the best draftsmen I know, including Robert Fawcett, Bernie Fuchs and Pat Oliphant, underwent rigorous training drawing from the figure early in their careers, yet continued to find fresh discoveries and substantial value by continuing the process late in their careers.

I fear that the current generation of illustrators, with so many convenient shortcuts for figure drawing, may never understand the nature of the deep investment, and never reap the return on that investment. 

NEW EXHIBITION OF THE WORK OF CARTER GOODRICH

 If you like good drawing and you're in the vicinity of New York City, it would be hard to do better than the Carter Goodrich retrospective at the Philippe Labaune Gallery.  If you're not in the vicinity,  the show is worth a trip.

The exhibition includes an excellent cross section of Goodrich's art, including His New Yorker covers, his magazine and book illustrations, and his character designs for major animated films.  It's a rare opportunity to study his beautiful originals up close.

Note the vapor from the nostrils of the reindeer, the treatment of the boy's hair, the line of the tree. 

Even better from my perspective, it's a chance to view preliminary drawings and loose sketches which so often are the best way to see what an artist has.

Smart, funny, creative and beautifully crafted, Goodrich's New Yorker covers in this show remind us of a better era for the New Yorker, when its covers offered more charm, aesthetic grace and humanity.  

A prescient baby new year for the new millennium, made all the more relevant in our year of AI

The show also includes a number of proposals for New Yorker covers which, for some reason, were not accepted. If I were the art director of the New Yorker I'd show up at the gallery and see whether it's too late to retroactively accept proposals I'd rejected.  

Taking the plunge

I can't recommend this show highly enough.

The Labaune Gallery has become a gallery to watch for people with a serious interest in illustration. It has recently exhibited work by artists such as Peter de Seve, Mike Mignola, Moebius, Dave McKean and Frank Miller.

Owner Philippe Labaune has a somewhat unconventional background for the art world. He began his career in finance but had been a dedicated collector of narrative art for many years.  His formative influences included Moebius and Hergé.  He founded the gallery to fill what he perceived as a gap in American galleries presenting narrative art with seriousness and focus, emphasizing both its artistic significance and its narrative power. In the future, he says, the gallery wants to elevate the medium across borders.

ONE REASON I ADMIRED GARY KELLEY

Gary Kelley, illustrator extraordinaire, passed away yesterday.  I had the pleasure of meeting Gary in my younger years, and later interviewed him for my column about him ("The Artist Who Paints Music" in The Saturday Evening Post).

Gary was a remarkable talent, and was recognized by his peers as such.  Artist Greg Manchess said, "My own career was set afire by his influence and guidance. He is a North Star in my life as an artist." Gary was awarded 28 gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and was elected to the Society's Hall of Fame in 2007. There are tributes popping up from many people who knew him better and are better qualified to speak than I. But I wanted to share one reason (among many) why I admired him.

Gary understood when to hang on and when to keep moving. When other illustrators were relocating for their work, moving to urban areas where artists and clients congregate and dressing differently, Gary resolved to remain in small town Iowa here he enjoyed the quality of life.  He believed that he could build a thriving career living where he wanted, and he was right. 

The cool thing was that living in Cedar Falls, Iowa (not far from Wild Horse Ridge in Black Hawk County) didn't constrain Gary's ability to come up with the most sophisticated, gritty noir illustrations of urban scenes or allegorical pictures of the cosmos.  

He was not just painting folksy pictures of the corner barber shop.  His imagination was unbounded.

Gary stubbornly remained in Cedar Falls, yet when the traditional illustration field began changing, he was nimble about pulling up stakes and moving on. As illustrated magazines began drying up, Kelley created huge murals and wrote and illustrated graphic novels and painted pictures that were projected above a symphony orchestra as they played classical music.  

He was welcomed in all these venues because he was recognized everywhere as a picture maker to be taken seriously.

Gary Kelley, a man who knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff, will be sorely missed.

A VISUAL DIARY OF ILLUSTRATORS

I've previously written about my admiration for Alice and Martin Provensen, the husband and wife team responsible for some of the best illustrated children's books of the 20th century. 

Shipwrecked and battered, Odysseus encounters the princess Nausicaä and her handmaidens by the river (from The Iliad and the Odyssey) 

Married couples sometimes keep a scrapbook or a diary but the Provensens were artists so they had fun recording the day's events in sketches and cartoons, which they passed back and forth.  The result is a charming record of what went on behind the scenes in the creation of their famous books.  

For example, there were days when Martin took his portfolio and knocked on doors looking for work, only to end up sitting on a park bench.

Then there were days when he got in to see an Art Director and beg for work-- a demeaning process.  What illustrator can't identify with that?

There were cartoons of the days when Alice was supposed to be working at her drawing board but Martin searched the house and discovered her outside working in the garden she loved.  There was a sketch of the day they got new dogs.  Sometimes Martin drew Alice in bed in the morning before she got up:

Their visual diary apparently began when they were first dating, and Martin was still in the Navy:

It continued through their daily domestic life on their farm. Here is the famous day Alice couldn't cure her hiccups:

But the sketches I like the most were created when the the couple was working on books together and left little joking drawings about ideas they would never use.  For example, when Martin and Alice were working on The Iliad & The Odyssey, Martin offered an alternative version of the scene (above) with Odysseus meeting (and impressing) the maidens by the river:

The Provensens painted an illustration of the sirens singing to Odysseus, luring him to crash his ship on the rocks:

But behind the scenes Martin suggested that the sirens used a different bait to lure Odysseus:

Here's their sketch about the citizens of Troy, angry that Paris brought his new bride Helen back to their city:

Martin apparently questioned Homer's version of how enthusiastically the Greeks responded to the war cry of Achilles: 

In The Iliad, Zeus was angry at the mortals, and the Provensens painted lightning bolts crackling from his head:

But Martin entertained Alice with a private joke about the wrath of Zeus:

Of course, several of the the sketches were just little "I love you" doodles they left for each other.  

I've read plenty of books with lots of words about the techniques and working methods of illustrators but I've never seen anything like this visual record of the Provensen's career.  Some of the drawings are quite personal, drawn with a loose hand and the freedom that are a specialty of artists.  For years I've seen the Provensens' work, and now it was a delight to see them at play.

ART REVOLUTIONS ON THE STAIRS

Behold two art revolutions on a staircase:

Marcel Duchamp (1912)                                   Walt Disney Studios (1936)

Marcel Duchamp painted his revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase to convey motion in a still picture.  24 years later, Disney transformed still pictures of Snow White ascending a staircase into images that actually moved. 

Duchamp explained the era: "The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air" and the old static pictures seemed inadequate.  

In previous years, a picture stood still while the viewer's mind moved.  For example, James Avati's figures on the stairs (below) didn't move, yet viewers mentally moved up the stairs and envisioned what was about to take place in the room above the bar:

James Avati (1959)

Duchamp, like Muybridge before him and the Futurists after him, was an early, stuttering response to the way the world was changing.  Disney was equally revolutionary but more commercially successful.  

Neither Duchamp nor Disney could fully appreciate how their world was unraveling.  The old Newtonian universe was coming apart like wet tissue paper in the wake of relativity and quantum physics; longstanding political empires were imploding and geopolitical alliances were fraying; the first World War developed horrific new weapons which were only a stepping stone to worse weapons.  The sun was setting on the Age of Reason, and the arts stepped up to try to make sense of the new order.  

In times of disintegration, artists have to decide which paths offer new promise and which paths have become obsolete.  An era of experimentation and confusion was perfectly suited for Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.  The Baroness performed for audiences by rubbing a photograph of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase over her naked body while reciting a love poem to Duchamp: “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.”

The baroness was born Elsa Plotz in Germany in 1874.  Before coming to America she studied art in Dachau, future home of the infamous Nazi death camp.  She became an artist, poet, actress and model.  Elsa and her husband had many colorful adventures before they faked her husband's suicide to escape creditors and fled to the United States in 1909.  

Throwing off the chains of the old world, Elsa aggressively pushed sexual and artistic boundaries, rejecting traditional male and female gender norms.  Several affairs and marriages later, after an unsuccessful effort at becoming a farmer in Kentucky, she married Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York where she worked making sculptures out of discarded objects and writing poetry.  

She became the star of a Dada film, "Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Shaving Her Pubic Hair."  She invented new words such as "phalluspistol" to replace the old world vocabulary.  Critics agree that one of her greatest contributions to the arts was her use of the em dash (a punctuation mark longer than either the "en dash" or the minus sign) in her poetry. 

The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?

Today we find ourselves in another period of disintegration, this time driven by world-ending AI cognitive power.  Centuries ago we sharpened our focus on objective reality by the invention of the magnetic compass and the mechanical clock, which gave us a more concrete sense of space and time.  Photographs and videos became arbiters of objective, verifiable reality.  They encouraged the rise of science and rationality.  But now our grip is loosening once again as "objective truth" has become the plaything of algorithms, deepfakes and bots. 

Some of art's greatest moments, the ones that delivered the reward of enhanced perceptions, arose when society seemed to be spinning out of control.  Art helped to work out an era's conflicts and grapple for values.  But can it still serve that role?  For millennia art has been a source of excitement but today it can barely compete with algorithms that have been fine tuned to keep viewers in a constant state of excitement and agitation. 

Wherever the eye looks in the desert of fine art, one sees little more than puerile responses to this emerging world-- certainly nothing to rival the great artistic responses of the past.  Can illustration, because of its more direct nexus to the engines of change and its economic restraints on silliness, possibly do any better?

VIVACIOUS WOMEN

 

In the years before Google searches, stock images and photo banks, every illustrator compiled their own personal collection of reference pictures.  They'd clip images they found useful or inspiring from magazines, newspapers and books-- good examples of hands or childrens' faces or dry brush technique or architectural perspective. 

Old timers lovingly collected tens of thousands of these pictures. They loaned them to friends for assignments.  Sometimes they left preliminary pencil sketches in the margins, or jotted down phone numbers on the back, or used the paper to blot excess casein from a paint brush.  These hard working images often ended up tattered, yellowed and crumbling. 

These collections were already obsolete by the time I came along.  Nobody had any use for the clippings anymore.  Nobody had much use for the retired illustrators either.  

But I met illustrators who couldn't bear to throw their collections in a dumpster before moving into a hospice. Their art careers were done but they remained fond of the files they'd curated over a lifetime.  Personally, I was curious about what these artists saw in the pictures they selected and how the pictures were used.  For example, below we see how cartoonist Leonard Starr borrowed an interior from an illustration by Robert Fawcett:

These artists were grateful they could extend the useful life of their clippings by handing them off to a younger person who still cared.  

When I opened the large boxes they shipped to me, clouds of studio dust and paper chips emerged, along with the intoxicating aroma of old paper.   Skimming through the pictures, decades of art flew by-- old Saturday Evening Post covers, art deco pictures, horribly racist illustrations, World War II pictures, 1950s glamour illustrations, 1960s bursts of psychedelic colors... it was like being in a time machine:

  

I encountered all kinds of micro trends or styles reflecting the popular taste of their time.  For example,  In the 1940s and early 1950s, there seemed to be a fashion where women were portrayed with insanely animated expressions on their faces-- their eyebrows raised, their eyes popping out of their heads.

  

To modern audiences this woman might seem like a psychopath who would slip rat poison
in your butter pecan ice cream, but 1940s audiences loved this look.

Norman Rockwell said one of his favorite models during this time was Mary Whalen, who “could... raise her eyebrows until they almost jumped over her head.”  He was known to apply tape to raise the eyebrows on other models.

These women were often portrayed in the throes of ecstasy over a new product such as a girdle or a Kelvinator appliance.

The art history books are silent on why 1940s audiences found raised eyebrows so appealing.  It's part of the cultural record that might go undetected by anyone who didn't happen to be sifting through an illustrator's clipping file and suddenly encounter the geological layer where women (never the men) all had raised eyebrows.

These pictures of vivacious women are just one among dozens of stylistic eccentricities that come and go in the historical clipping files of old illustrators.  Why did people like this style?  I can't explain it.  That's a chore for future art historians.