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.