Austin Briggs was perhaps the leading proponent of the "new realism" in illustration-- unposed figures in unguarded moments, with all the awkwardness and spontaneity of real life.
We can find the emergence of this approach in Briggs' archives. Briggs began his career drawing idealized figures in traditionally staged pictures. Like other illustrators of his day, he sought to find the peak moment, the heightened leap, the most dramatic expression.
By the end of the 1930s he was starved for more authenticity. We see him beginning to paint figures with their faces turned away from the viewer. He moved the focal point of the picture from center stage to off screen.
In the 1940s his compositions were chopping off important body parts altogether. Scenes were tilted, as if a photograph had been snapped with a hand held camera during a melee:
Briggs also stopped using attractive models, insisting on putting "real people" in his pictures. On several occasions he was criticized by art directors who pointed out that they were paying him enough so that he could afford real models. Briggs refused.
By the late 1950s, we find Briggs' approach in full flower in a distinctive series of drawings.
In the middle of the 20th century, artists began to rebel against the formal, academic staging of art. They felt that the posing of idealized figures in carefully structured environments was too artificial and distant from reality as we experience it. Film makers tried to narrow the gap between art and reality with approaches such as cinéma vérité, catching more of spontaneous unfiltered truth of life. In literature, authors such as William Burroughs tried to shake off the historical structure of the novel with nonlinear books. Burroughs noted that when we walk down the street talking with a friend, the experience is nothing like the experience is conveyed in a traditional novel; our thoughts are interrupted by a barking dog or a honking horn and by the sights we see as they go by, and by our own thoughts about whether our laundry is ready to be picked up.
Briggs loved avant garde art-- he became a charter member of the Museum of Modern Art when it opened. So it should not be surprising that he strayed from the academy to experiment with a movement that reexamined realism. The surprising thing is that, after initial resistance from art directors, he made such a success of it.
In his award winning series of drawings for TV Guide, he drew executives in all kinds of odd and informal positions, scratching themselves, nodding off, smoking, or looking away from the viewer. He said,
I am attempting to be very truthful about them. I have not idealized them in any way....John Updike recognized what I was trying to do when he said that in my drawings, "Madison Avenue personnel were captured in all their dapper fatigue."
4 comments:
Briggs certainly was making an effort to come up with different pictorial solutions. Good luck with the book.
Are the tearsheets going to NRM?
As for the drowning boy, we notice him because those two thatched roofs point directly at him.
JSL
Kev-- No more luck is needed with the Briggs book, it quickly sold out and is now out of print, but thanks for your good wishes anyway.
The Briggs family decided to send the tearsheets, along with some originals and other materials, to the Washington University collection, where Al Parker's and Bernie Fuchs' collections reside.
JSL-- Good point. No matter how innovative Briggs wanted to be, he still respected the laws of optics. That picture seems oddly dissipated for such a dramatic subject: a father is heedlessly lolling on the beach while his son is perishing offshore. But those two roofs form arrows that point at the narrow space between them and positively screech, "Hey! Pay attention!"
That picture seems oddly dissipated for such a dramatic subject:
That's my favorite aspect of it. Tells of the banality of this kind of tragedy.
As for the drowning boy, we notice him because those two thatched roofs point directly at him.
He is also centralized, framed, isolated, and a visual anomaly (warm color, jutting vertically) in the placid cyan water.
Not sure what that floating blue staircase is in that picture. Or why it has no reflection on the water. That's a bothersome question of no narrative value that attracts attention.
Also bothersome: The drowning boy's forearms measure about 1/3 the size of his sleeping father's. And the father looks about 20 feet from us. Which means the boy is about 60 feet from us. Yet the father is lying on a sand ridge that Briggs seems to suggest is at least 20 feet away from the actual surf. (And that accords with the kinds of beaches one sees in Tahiti.) By that measurement, that sets the boy only 20 feet out from the surf. (Doubtful he would drown that close to shore. He should be able to walk to safety.) Yet the way the bay is portrayed, Briggs seems to be indicating a lot more distance between the boy and the shore. That would make the boy a giant. So there's some kind of screw up in the perspective.
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