ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 65

Last year I wrote about the great English illustrator of wildlife, Raymond Sheppard, who spent years haunting the public zoos in London, studying and drawing the animals up close.  Despite the fact that his life was tragically cut short by cancer, he exhibited an astonishing patience when it came to capturing the details of nature, as if his time was unlimited.  His great devotion earned him a level of understanding that few artists shared.

You can't appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment until you experience his drawing up close.  The above study from one of his sketchbooks is not very large...

... but it is large enough for  Sheppard to learn the different directions, lengths and characters of the fur, which he expertly records to reveal the structure of the face.  

Compare the long, soft fur on the ears and throat with the short, bristly hair around the snout or the fur above the eyelids.  In this compact space he even teaches us about the sandpaper texture of the nose or the liquid smoothness of the eye.   Note how Sheppard uses dark accents sparingly, to create essential forms such as that mouth.

In this second attempt on the same page, see how Sheppard takes pains to capture the structure beneath the fur, rather than relying on the fur to camouflage the muscle and sinew, the way lazier artists might.  Sheppard's admiration for this creature radiates from his drawing.

Look especially at the place where fur meets antler, and see how Sheppard's pencil understands the different texture of each.

This is one preliminary drawing that really lives up to the term, "study."  There is so much honest observation and work here, it truly qualifies as one lovely drawing.

NEW BOOK ABOUT T.S. SULLIVANT

 After a delay of 100 years we can finally celebrate the arrival of a compilation of work by the brilliant T.S. Sullivant.

Sullivant was part of that blessed generation of ink worshippers that included A. B. Frost, Heinrich Kley and Charles Dana Gibson, and he was as good as any of them.

At 400 pages, this book provides a large, juicy selection of Sullivant's work.  Here Sullivant shows us how the very first cartoonist got his inspiration:

And note how beautifully Sullivant portrays the kaiser dangling from the devil's pitchfork

One of the many delights of Sullivant is how he played with weight.  He could make a pig as heavy as a sack of concrete or as light as a football:

He specialized in drawing massive dinosaurs, elephants and hippos that tripped lightly along:

I was thinking about writing an appreciation of Sullivant's work for this post, but the new book contains such excellent and insightful essays that they'd put my humble observations to shame.  Working artists such as John Cuneo, Peter de Seve and Steve Brodner write loving tributes that demonstrate they are as adept with words as they are with pictures.  

Cuneo writes: 

It takes a second to figure out what's going on.... There's an extra beat of discovery as the viewer is compelled to pause a moment and look a little harder to earn the reward of recognition.  A lesser exaggeration would offer a much quicker "read" but Sullivant will have none of that.  In an age where every image on every page or online platform competes with a trillion others to catch even the most fleeting of glances, I find great pleasure in the drawings of an artist who trusted his skill enough to know that the viewer would accord his work the extra scrutiny it demanded.      

What a wealth of talent and imagination are on display in the pictures and essays of this book.  

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

 

THE JOURNALIST ILLUSTRATORS: HARVEY DINNERSTEIN

 Harvey Dinnerstein had some interesting things to say about the relationship between art and journalistic illustration.

Like his friend Burt Silverman,  Dinnerstein was a "fine" artist who earned money on the side drawing reportorial assignments for news magazines.  Like Silverman, Dinnerstein specialized in portraits:

Dinnerstein's paintings were more overtly allegorical than Silverman's.  Here is Dinnerstein working on his magnum opus, "Parade," inspired by seeing Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus at the Louvre.

Detail from Parade

Detail from Parade

Like Silverman, Dinnerstein had an active social conscience and was interested in capturing the political events of his day.  After reading about the young Martin Luther King in 1956, Dinnerstein accompanied Silverman to Montgomery Alabama to draw the bus boycott at the start of the civil rights movement.

The drawings were historically important but looking back, Dinnerstein found them artistically lacking.  "The drawings were frankly reportorial, concerned with the individuals involved, church meetings, courtroom scenes, and the general locales.  In retrospect, the drawings seem limited and anecdotal...." 

Over the years Dinnerstein reflected on the balance between reporting the facts of an event and serving the timeless values of art.  He wrote about the tension between the "specific and universal aspects of the subject:"

A major element in developing a pictorial image is the integration of particular information with a generalized concept.  This is a most difficult question to resolve. If the artist is only concerned with incidental information the image will lack significant form.  However, if the generalization is a mannered abstraction, it will become an empty stylization that will lack the organic quality of life.

As he developed as a journalistic illustrator, his approach evolved:

A decade later, in the wake of the assassination of King, and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, a protest movement containing many different elements swept across the country.  I was commissioned by Esquire magazine to cover these events, and in depicting the demonstrations of the sixties I tried to get beyond the incidental nature of various events, and grasp a larger context of the movement and its implications. 

Dinnerstein said he drew his inspiration from Kathe Kollwitz's drawings of the revolt of Silesian weavers in 1524:

Kathe Kollwitz

Dinnerstein wrote, 

There were amazing events in that period.... Candlelight procession at night, outside of St. Patrick's Cathedral.... Moratorium vigil, that presents aspecys of ritual and reminds me of paintings by Georges de La Tour.... Fort Dix, New Jersey: A protest march onto the military post, past barbed wire barricade, calling on G.I.'s to refuse to obey the orders of their officers.  The march is dispersed with gas.... Chicago: An explosion of terrorist violence leaves a tail of shattered glass along the elegant streets of the city's gold coast.... after  the killings of students at Jackson and Kent State there is a massive demonstration in Washington.... Communication seems impossible.  Suddenly a group of  demonstrators remove their clothes and charge nude into the reflecting pool before the Lincoln Memorial.  As they are joined by others , an old black woman on the embankment sings the spiritual, "Wade in the Water."  It happened! I saw it, and though I did not comprehend everything that was going on, these were remarkable events.... 

 

Burning shack in the Poor People's Encampment near the Washington monument 

Candlelight vigil for casualties of the Vietnam war

Dinnerstein conflates a death at a riot with his memory of a Roman sarcophagus

Protestors at St. Patrick's Cathedral remind Dinnerstein of a de La Tour painting

Dinnerstein's journalistic pictures tended to be less literal than those of many other illustrators who were eyewitnesses to history.  He took less pride in capturing specific details because he felt that he captured more of the spirit of these events by staging pictures more consciously with reference to older artistic traditions.

THE JOURNALIST ILLUSTRATORS: PAUL HOGARTH

The best journalistic illustrations seem to combine an enthusiasm for facts, a love of drawing, and a third element-- a personality or character which presents the subject matter in an interesting manner that a photograph could not.

Noted illustrator Paul Hogarth (1917-2001) described the third element this way: "The problem is how to make an image compelling, even in an aesthetic way – not just to sit down and make a record."

Hogarth grew up poor and his father, a butcher, tried everything to dissuade his son from becoming an artist.  He cursed the art school where Hogarth earned a scholarship and he refused to even enter the art gallery where his son had his first exhibition. 

A fiery young communist,  Hogarth went off to fight Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 17.  His close friend Ronald Searle described him as "the original angry young man." 

Following World War II, Hogarth started his career traveling and illustrating different locations.  The communist party invited Hogarth to travel to  Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to document the improvements made under communism.  With Ronald Searle, Laurence Scarfe and Percy Horton he traveled to a remote part of Bosnia to draw the building of a new railway.  In the 1950s he became the first British artist to go to China after the war.  He wrote and illustrated a book, Looking at China, as a report to the rest of the world.

Traveling and drawing on the spot, Hogarth developed his personal style: "I developed a very strong sense of composition and design and the ability to extract elements of significance. Editing and exaggeration are also important." 

Hogarth's view of a Las Vegas casino

Detail

Hogarth populated his travelogues with light, whimsical drawings of local people:

Hogarth teamed with many of the leading writers of his day to prepare his reports from around the world.  He illustrated Alistair Cooke's writings about America, Robert Graves' writings about Majorca,  Laurence Durrell's writings about Corfu,  Brendan Behan's writings about Ireland.  Most famously, his long partnership with Graham Greene took Hogarth to more than 20 countries. 

Hogarth was elected to the Royal Academy in 1984 and in 1989 was appointed to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire-- rare honors for an illustrator.  

THE JOURNALIST ILLUSTRATORS: DANIEL SCHWARTZ

 

Daniel Bennett Schwartz had a dual career as a fine artist and an "artist-reporter." 

As a fine artist, he had over fifteen solo exhibitions at galleries and museums in New York, and his work resides in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and several other important institutions. As an artist-reporter, he was given journalistic projects of national significance, such as covering the My Lai massacre trial for Life Magazine and the "New Wave" in Paris for Esquire Magazine.  

He lived with Mississippi river pilots for an article chronicling their lives.   

 

He was also assigned to chronicle the production of a television drama for CBS.

 

But much of what he did as an "artist-reporter" was to imagine and reconstruct crime scenes or political events for which there was no camera present.  The following are illustrations for a series about flawed drug busts in New York City:

Schwartz's illustrations about the Watergate scandal helped readers visualize and understand the complex web of events. 

He had a realistic drawing style in the tradition of Silverman and Dinerstein but his fine art orientation added an interesting extra flourish to even the most technical subjects. 

THE JOURNALIST ILLUSTRATORS: HANK VIRGONA

Most of the illustrators called upon to do reportorial pictures had the technical skills to capture many of the details that a photographer might have captured.  That was the whole point-- to help readers visualize a situation.  But Hank Virgona was different.  Many of his pictures were impressionistic clouds of nondescript businessmen in dark suits.

He illustrated articles about a jury's deliberations or about cocktail receptions where business executives discussed illegal price fixing schemes-- situations where a camera could not go, but where readers might benefit from images.  Virgona's images conveyed a tone or a mood, and broke up the text with designs, but no one would look to these illustrations for details of what occurred.

Detail

 

 

Virgona didn't need to interview witnesses and reconstruct the scene the way Burt Silverman, Harvey Dinnerstein and others in the this series did.  He could do many of these mood drawings without leaving his drawing board.  Still, they complemented the words in important ways and Virgona was employed by many of the important publications of his day.

His example highlights the range of roles that a reportorial illustrator might play.

In both subject matter and tone, many of Virgona's pictures seem to me to follow in the tradition of Daumier.

Daumier

Virgona was fortunate among illustrators because at age 87, long after he retired, his grand nephew Matthew Kaplowitz made a prize winning documentary about Virgona's life and work, now available for viewing on Amazon Prime. The documentary interviews Virgona and his neighbors shortly before his death and shows how, without fame, fortune or good health, Virgona continued to commute to his studio in Manhattan to draw six days a week.