Over the years, many people have wrestled without progress over the difference between art and illustration. The internet is riddled with silly theories on the subject:
In illustration the intent is most often the selling of a product. When something noble is put to ignoble ends, there is a deterioration of value.
The distinction lies in the fact that Art is the idea (brought to life) while an illustration is only a depiction (or explanation) of an idea.
Fine Art is art for art's sake. Even if you are doing a commission for a client, it would still be fine art. But illustration is illustrating a story or idea.
Even talented artists and illustrators have been tormented by the distinction. Illustrator Robert Weaver complained:
Until the illustrator enjoys complete independence from outside pressure and direction, complete responsibility for his own work, and complete freedom to to do whatever he deems fit-- all necessaries in the making of art-- then illustration cannot be art but only a branch of advertising.
With all due respect to Weaver, it's difficult to think of a fine artist with "complete independence from outside pressure and direction" whose work was not worse off for it.
Despite all this hand wringing about the difference between art and illustration, the question seems more concerned about social status than the quality of a picture.
The real difference between art and illustration has nothing to do with the talent of the artist, or the quality of the work, or its morality, or its intelligence. It's far too easy to identify examples of illustration that are superior to "fine" art in each of these categories, just as it is easy to identify examples of fine art that are superior to illustration. It takes no effort to puncture any categorical distinction between the two types of work.
In my view, there is no inherent difference between art and illustration except the way in which the artist is compensated. For the first 30,000 years of art, artists earned a decent living working for kings, priests, pharaohs and popes. Art was commissioned for temple walls and public spaces. It adorned palaces and royal tombs and the homes of aristocrats. Then kings began to disappear from the earth. Popes stopped commissioning new art. They were replaced by a new commercial class, fueled by the birth of capitalism and the invention of the corporation. This class became the new patrons of arts.
Art's sponsors and subject matter changed, but the quality of the work did not. The same talented artists who once painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the walls of the Great Temple at Karnak simply migrated to the new bosses in order to feed their families.
Artists adapting to the new realities found two primary paths. The first was to produce what we now call "fine" or "gallery" art for the private moneyed class and corporate art collections. The second path opened as a result of the newly invented printing press: rather than selling a picture to an individual patron, artists could now make multiple copies of a picture and sell them for much smaller amounts to large numbers of (less-wealthy) purchasers. If this option had existed during the golden age of Greece or the early Italian Renaissance, you can bet some of the greatest artists would have taken advantage of it. In fact, when this business model first began to emerge with the invention of etching, some of the greatest artists, such as Durer and Rembrandt, quickly embraced it:
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| Rembrandt turned to etchings as a way of selling multiple copies of a single image to Dutch merchants. |
The story of that technology is the true history of illustration. There would be no modern illustration without two key developments:
- The ability to create and distribute quality copies to large audiences; and
- The ability to collect small, proportional payments for that art from large audiences.
Because of these developments, the most talented artists (who most people could never afford to hire individually under the old business model for art) could now create beautiful pictures in to entertain and delight the public. The artists are paid with a tiny fraction of the price of a magazine or book or video game or movie ticket. By aggregating tiny payments from vast audiences, we paid handsome sums to great magazine illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and J.C. Leyendecker, just as we pay handsome sums to the talented creators at Pixar today. Similarly, commercial artists who illustrate products for mass markets get paid very well when a penny or two from each sale goes into the manufacturer's design or marketing budget. Michelangelo never had the option of getting paid that way.
To understand how new opportunities opened up for artists, look at this series of pirate illustrations by Howard Pyle, the father of modern illustration. As the technology for reproducing his pictures improved, the public became more excited by illustration and the demand increased dramatically:
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The earliest Pyle pictures were printed in magazines only after wood engravers carved Pyle's images into wooden printing blocks.
The engraver even signed the recreated image (see inset). |
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| Crude color was added to enhance the early images. |
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| Later, audiences grew as the invention of photo engraving captured the subtler and more sensitive aspects of Pyle's originals . |
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Improved printing technology finally reproduced the full colors and technique of the original, leading to the golden age of illustration
and a proliferation of illustrated books and magazines. |
Note how the quality of reproductions, and the newly sophisticated vehicles for delivering them to the public, transformed the economics of art and inspired new bursts of creativity. This was the Cambrian explosion of modern illustration. A handful of black and white journals with a few sparse wood engravings, such as
Scribners and
Century, evolved into dozens of splashy, well designed, full color magazines.
In sum, the twin pillars of modern illustration are 1.) quality reproduction, and 2.) the ability to collect marginal payments from large numbers of viewers. These two developments created a new economic model with robust opportunities for talented artists. They are the only categorical difference between modern illustration and "fine art."
Doesn't the method of payment affect the character of the art? Yes, but a better question is: does it affect art for the better or worse? It is undeniable that because of its wider audience, illustration often appeals to broader taste than fine art. But as Shakespeare proved, broad appeal to a popular audience is not incompatible with greatness. Even more importantly, the broadness of the illustration audience combined with the relentless scrubbing of the commercial marketplace seems to have inoculated illustration from much of the narcissism, decadence and irrelevance which has now infected the "fine" art market.
