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 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?