BRIGGS DRAWS LITTLE GIRLS

[The forthcoming book about the art of Austin Briggs, from Auad Publishing, is now at the printer.  Unfortunately, there was not enough room in the book for many great images.  Rather than return them to obscurity, I've decided to show several outtakes on this blog between now and the publication date.]

I love Austin Briggs' preliminary drawing of five girls marching in a line through a bar. 

Drawing courtesy of Roger Reed at Illustration House

Note how Briggs uses  the angles of their hats to show their individual characters.  The eldest girl is prim and decorous but by the time we get to the pile up at the end, all decorum is gone:

Briggs adopted a similar approach for the little girls greeting their daddy in the following ad for Douglas Airliners.  Even with his rough, sketchy technique and their backs turned to the viewer, each of these girls has a distinctive personality:

The shy one hides behind her mother, the excitable one leaps in the air, and the middle one wobbles indecisively. 

The drawing is intended to look spontaneous but Briggs did at least a dozen preliminary sketches, trying to tie a hair ribbon on a bouncing ping pong ball. 

This large sketch (19" x 25") and others were tossed on the floor of Briggs' studio as he worked.  That's Briggs' shoe print in the upper right corner.

When Briggs captured touches he liked, he incorporated them in the final drawing.

Briggs' experience shows up in that hand

Before he turned to his charcoal illustrations, Briggs made his reputation doing fully painted illustrations.  Here he paints frisky children in an ad for dog food

He employed a lively brush technique to keep his painting active:

Still, at some point in his career he seems to have realized that the medium of paint unavoidably civilized his pictures.  If he wanted to convey the indecorum of little girls, a crayon or vine charcoal was a more suitable medium.

Despite the seeming crudeness of this line, note how sensitively Briggs depicts the curiosity and lack of coordination in those young fingers.

In an era of slick, full color illustration Briggs was a pioneer in making these basic drawing tools fashionable again.

A LAST LOOK AT THE AUSTIN BRIGGS ARCHIVES part one

One of the joys of writing the biography of illustrator Austin Briggs was getting to know and interview his son, Austin Briggs Jr.,  a retired professor of literature and a nationally renowned expert on James Joyce.  Austin Jr. generously shared his father's personal collection of tear sheets and memorabilia containing thousands of images that wouldn't fit in the book.

Now the time has come for me to relinquish that collection.  Once I pass it along to the museum selected by the Briggs family, this amazing stash of images will be well protected but I'm not sure the larger public will ever get a chance to view them.  Many of them are unsigned.  So before I let them go, I'm going to post a large batch of Briggs' forgotten works here for posterity. 

The following images, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, are not all masterpieces, but they do show the development of a major talent responding to changing times and changing media. 

Briggs drew his first published work at age 18:

 

Like other young and ambitious illustrators of that era, he worked for pulp magazines and tabloids that once crowded the newsstands but are now long forgotten.  

By 1930, Briggs (now using the name "Bud") was illustrating stories like this lurid tale about the wife of gangster Baby Face Nelson ("His heart was so black with malice that he shot wantonly and with strange pleasure"). 

 

"She helped wrap his nude body in a horse blanket and dropped it in a ditch.  He was the father of her children but she couldn't get far with a body on her hands."  

From a Harper's Bazar story, The Girl Who Was The Moon (June 1929):

By the mid 1930s, Briggs was supplementing his work for pulp magazines by assisting Alex Raymond on his epic comic strip, Flash Gordon.  We can see how Briggs' work for Bluebook and other pulp magazines paralleled his work on Flash Gordon, and how Briggs' drybrush technique influenced the look of Flash Gordon.  

As I post more of these forgotten works tomorrow, I think you'll see how Briggs inched out of the ranks of a typical pulp artist to become one of the premier illustrators in America.

After Briggs' died, his friend Tom Holloway gave the following memorial tribute:

 

In my many years of association with him I remember few jobs that came easy for him... if they did, his intuition told him something must be wrong, or that he was getting in a rut, and he would do something hard-- not always a success either in the product or the acceptance by client-- but he was slugging most of the time.  

THE SKETCHBOOKS OF AUSTIN BRIGGS

In keeping with our current theme of posting working sketches by the great illustrators, today let's look at some unpublished drawings by Austin Briggs.  It is a shame that Briggs does not get much attention today; for decades he was one of the most highly regarded illustrators in the country.  An excellent painter, Briggs was especially known for the great subtlety and sensitivity of his drawing with a lithography crayon, charcoal or similar tools.

Despite the free and spontaneous look to his drawings, Briggs' sketches and preliminary drawings show that he was a disciplined and skilled draftsman.  He drew numerous preparatory sketches...

 

...sometimes with great precision (especially earlier in his career, when his style was tighter):

To plan his more complex illustrations, Briggs would do numerous preliminary sketches:

Briggs wrote a note to an art director in the margin of one of these sketches, saying "If you don't like this one, I've got a dozen others on the floor of my studio."

The following drawing is not a sketch, but a finished, published illustration.

Drawing with corrective patch

However, the original version was never published:

Drawing without corrective patch

We forget today that Briggs was at the forefront of artists introducing a more realistic informality into illustration. Previous illustrators focused on the one key moment or reaction shot, where the subject's eyes were widest or their expression was the broadest or their leap was at its height.

Norman Rockwell

Briggs took a different approach and began focusing on moments that looked less staged.  His sketches reveal a deliberate search for offbeat moments, where a subject might be looking away or checking their watch or other things more integrated into daily life.   It may seem crazy to us today, but in the 1950s art directors sometimes choked on this radical approach.  In the two drawings compared above, the art director instructed Briggs to change his drawing to make the man sit up straight.  Briggs glued the correction on with rubber cement, causing the stain.

Today's illustrators should be grateful to Briggs as a bold and principled pioneer who left the field with more artistic freedom than it had when he began.

AUSTIN BRIGGS RETURNS TO WHERE HE STARTED

Austin Briggs was 19 and still in art school when he sold his first drawing to Collier's magazine. 

Briggs soon decided he didn't need more school.  He was making good money from Collier's imitating the popular artists of the day.  But after a couple of years Briggs realized that he was faking it.  Many of his lines were just random squiggles with little understanding of what went on beneath the surface.  He was borrowing solutions he hadn't earned, and his shortcuts began to betray him.

His assignments started to dry up.  He'd never learned to paint.  Desperate for money, he quit the field of illustration.  He took other jobs, but all the while he was determined to go back and do it right: "I set about learning to draw, which I never could do before."

Briggs' son described this turning point in his father's life:

I see how correct he was in his mature assessment of his early work: he could not really draw, but with sheer vitality he faked his way to renderings that conveyed power and authority.  When the new demand for color illustration left my father in the Depression virtually without work and with a wife and two small children to support, he would not quit.  Taking his easel and sketch pad out of the studio, he began to look at the world-- to really see it.  Over God knows how many long hours of work, he taught himself until he eventually developed great skill as a colorist and as a draftsman....

Looking back, Briggs recalled:

These were experimental years; I explored new compositional approaches, new techniques or variations of old techniques and new manners of working with limited means. The fees I received from my drawings were largely plowed back into my work.... This was my chance to learn, and I worked over drawings until they were as good as I thought I could make them.  

Briggs learned to draw and to paint with great skill:

Then his art got looser...

And even looser:

Briggs became a dominant force in American illustration of the 20th century.  His strong, opinionated work covered the full gamut of the illustration field, from pulps and comic strips to the movie industry to the covers of books, records and top magazines.  

But the thing that interests me most about this story was that, at the height of his powers, having invested years in mastering painting and color theory, Briggs returned to simple drawing where he started.  As he became more fearless, he no longer needed fancy paints or even inks.  He simplified down to a pencil or a litho crayon.  Art directors for prestigious magazines were happy to accept a drawing from Briggs where once a full color oil painting would've been expected.  Briggs became famous in the industry for a remarkable series of drawings that he did for TV Guide, which were cited when he was inducted into the Illustration Hall of Fame:

Image courtesy of Taraba Illustration Art

If you compare Briggs' later drawings with his early random squiggles, you get a sense for how much he learned.   In the words of T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration.  And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

A LAST LOOK AT THE BRIGGS ARCHIVES, part 5: painting in retirement

In the 1940s, Austin Briggs was desperately trying to break away from the comic strip field and win illustration assignments, which he believed would be more challenging.

Look magazine featured a monthly illustrated series called "American Heroes." Each episode told the story of an American soldier in World War II.  When Briggs was assigned an episodes, he was delighted.  However, when the Art Director suggested that Briggs mimic the style of a popular illustrator of the day, Al Dorne,  Briggs flatly refused:

[The Art Director] told Austin to look over the jobs from the same series Al Dorne had done and for him to get a little of Dorne's stuff in his pictures.  Austin's answer to this was simple and direct, that [the Art Director] had Dorne's telephone number. 

 

Briggs' illustrations for Look magazine, done without regard for Al Dorne's style 

Despite his stubborn attitude, or perhaps because of it, Briggs became one of the preeminent illustrators in America.

Briggs' wife (left) discusses one of his award winning illustrations with the wife of Al Dorne and the wife of Robert Fawcett at a reception at the Society of Illustrators

Living the lifestyle of a famous illustrator of the time, Briggs built himself a mansion in the hills of Connecticut, with a separate art studio and guest house.

Toward the end of a long and successful career, Briggs was diagnosed with leukemia.  He sold his house and his studio and went to spend his final days living and working in Paris.  

There he married Agnes Fawcett, the widow of illustrator Robert Fawcett (in the picture at the Society of Illustrators, above).

He shared some good moments with local Parisian tradesmen.  Like them, he prided himself in earning a living with his hands.

Most of all, this last period of his life set him free to create pictures any way he liked, with no editors or art directors.

Briggs' new wife, Agnes, at breakfast with flowers

Briggs passed away in 1973.