Boris Chaliapin: Time Magazine Cover Artist

Boris Chaliapin (1904–1979) was a son of famed Russian opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin. But being a post-revolution emigré, he had to forge his own career and did it very well. Over 1942-1970 he painted 414 covers for Time, America's leading weekly news magazine in those days.

Chaliapin seems to have been a fast worker -- hard to believe, given the amount of detail he normally placed on portraits and backgrounds. But over his 28-year grind with Time, he produced at the rate of slightly more than one cover illustration per month. And some were done on short notice such as the one of Queen Elizabeth, below, that appeared shortly after the death of her father, King George VI.

For a reason I find hard to understand, there is little in the way of biographical information on the Internet regarding Chaliapin. So allow me to offer as a link this post by David Apatoff who, like me, appreciates Chaliapin's wok.

Gallery

Olga Spessivtseva - 1932

Olga Spessivtseva - 1934
Two portraits of the Russian ballet dancer who was living in Paris in the early 1930s, as apparently was Chaliapin. They are included to show what he was capable of in his pre-Time days.

Queen Elizabeth - Time, 18 February 1952

John Wayne - Time, 3 March 1952
Magazine editors chose the subjects he painted. The cover subject was the basis for a long "cover story" inside that issue.

Rosalind Russell - Time, 30 March 1953
She was a Broadway and Hollywood star.

Walt Disney - Time, 27 December 1954
Disneyland was to open the following summer.

Marilyn Monroe - 14 May 1956
Still famous.

Le Corbusier - Time, 5 May 1961
The controversial modernist architect.

Charles de Gaulle - Time, 8 February 1963
France, personified.

Hubert Rogers: Sci-Fi Pulps and Much More

Hubert Rogers (1898-1982) was a Canadian illustrator/painter perhaps best known today for cover paintings for Astounding Science Fiction, generally considered the cream of the pulp Sci-Fi crop, thanks to its (1937-1971) editor John W. Campbell.

Regarding Rogers, this source mentions:

"In 1925 he moved to New York City to study with Dean Cornwell at the Art Students League."

"In 1931 the financial hardship of the Great Depression lead him to abandon city life. He drove an Indian motorcycle to Taos, New Mexico, where he worked within a community of artists that were as passionate about modern landscape painting as the Canadian 'Group of Seven.'"

But he returned to New York in 1936 after he got an increasing number of assignments. Rogers moved back to Canada in 1942 where he did illustrations to help the war effort. He moved to Vermont in 1947.

More on Rogers is here, and a source presenting letters to Rogers from leading science-fiction writers Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp is here.

Rogers was a competent illustrator who has to drop into working for "pulp" (cheap, low-quality paper) magazines to help get through the Great Depression. This is a slightly different career path than that for some slightly younger illustrators who had to start their career in pulps and then tried to claw their way to more respectable and better paying clients.

As can be seen below, Rogers' covers for Astounding were decently done, a cut well above the common 1940-vintage bug-eyed-monster-clutching-scantily-clad-blonde genre found on covers of some other sci-fi mags.

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Astounding Science Fiction cover - October 1939
One of Rogers' best-known Astounding covers.

Astounding Science Fiction cover - February 1940
The tank is a futuristic version of the Great War British Mark IV tank.

Astounding Science Fiction cover - August 1940
Streamlined space ship, though its tiny wings don't seem very functional.

Astounding Science Fiction cover - August 1941

Astounding Science Fiction cover - May 1947
Some sources consider this to be Rogers' best Astounding cover.

Preliminary sketch, Astounding Science Fiction cover - May 1947

Canadian World War 2 poster

Canadian World War 2 poster "Men of Valor" - final

Canadian World War 2 poster "Men of Valor" - preliminary

Canadian World War 2 poster "Men of Valor" - image for printer

The 1943 Quebec Conference - image copyright Canadian War Museum
Rogers was fully capable of doing paintings as well as illustrations.

Some Artzybasheff Early-1950s Time Covers

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965), was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire, and in 1919 left Russia for the United States in the wake of the Communist Revolution. I have no information regarding art training, but he did make illustration his profession, usually as a book illustrator during the first part of his career. Biographical information via the Society of Illustrators can be found here, and an appreciation by Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. is here.

Artzybasheff began illustrating for Time, Inc. in 1940, making more than 200 magazine cover illustrations over the next quarter century when Time magazine was at its peak as a serious, influential publication. The images below are from the early 1950s when he was at his most productive and inventive.

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Time cover - 2 July 1951
The Korean War had been on for a year and the USA was in the process of rearming for the Cold War. At the nerve center of these activities was the Pentagon, subject of this Time cover showing all that red tape.

Time cover - 20 August 1951
Lt. General Vasily Stalin (1921-1962), son of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Vasily began to get into trouble the following year, even before his father died. After that, his career collapsed.

Time cover - 8 December 1952
The Space Age was still in gestation, but Artzybasheff considers the use of unmanned probes for exploration.

Time cover - 2 February 1953
Harold S. Vance, President of Studebaker shown with the sensational new Starliner styled by Raymond Loewy's team.

Time cover - 16 March 1953
Joseph Stalin (1878 - 5 March, 1953). Given the lead time for publications in those days, I suspect that Artzybasheff's illustration had been completed before Stalin's death, perhaps intended for a cover story still in the planning stage. By the way, news that he was ill came out only two or three days before his death. Before that, there was little inkling that Stalin might die, so Time editors had no strong reason to set up an issue dealing with it in advance -- though it's possible that they might have anyway, in newspaper obituary-writing fashion.

Time cover - 8 June 1953
3-D movies were a big, but brief, sensation in 1953. Here Artzybasheff switches from machines and portraits to a cartoon style.

Time cover - 29 June 1953
James H. (Dutch) Kindelberger, Chairman of North American Aviation, builder of the F-86 Sabre shown here battling a Russian MiG-15. Compare to the MiG-15 he pictures for the Vasily Stalin cover, above.

Al Parker's Mother-Daughter Ladies' Home Journal Covers

Al Parker (1906–1985) was the top dog in "slick" (smooth, good quality paper) magazines during the 1940s and 50s according to many fellow-illustrators, men who themselves were at the top of their game.

Biographical information on Parker can be found here and here. David Apatoff deals with a recent book about Parker here.

Today, he is not nearly as well known to the general public as Norman Rockwell. But that could be said as well for successful contemporaries such as Coby Whitmore, Jon Whitcomb and Edwin Georgi whose work appeared in many of the same slick magazines as Parker's. Beside being very good at what he did, Rockwell's fame is based on the fact that he painted cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, America's leading general-interest magazine in its day, and those illustrations were self-contained stories. On the other hand, Whitmore, Whitcomb, Georgi and Parker mostly illustrated fiction pieces in magazines, the illustrations themselves often evoking the story subject, but not in themselves being self-contained visual narratives.

Worse for Parker from an historical standpoint was his strongest professional attribute, an ability to change his style, sometimes in the form of creating new illustration style fashions. This is in contrast to some other illustrators who had strong, easily-recognized styles that provided fame and fortune ... until fashions changed and they wound up having trouble getting work. Parker's career was long and successful, but it can be difficult to immediately identify many of his illustrations without looking for his signature.

There is one major exception to the previous statement. Below are examples from his long-running series of mother-daughter matching outfit covers for Ladies' Home Journal, the leading women's magazine in American for many years.

Gallery

October, 1940

February, 1949
These images are the largest I could find for those covers. They are included because they clearly demonstrate Parker's ability to alter his style.

February, 1939

December, 1939

October, 1939

March, 1942

September, 1947

March, 1948

June, 1948

September, 1950

February, 1951

Jugendstil's Jugend Magazine's Style Varied

Die Jugend or simply Jugend, meaning "Youth," was a German magazine published 1896-1940 and best known today for its name being lent to Jugendstil, as Art Nouveau was called in that country.

Links dealing with the magazine are here and here. The latter is to the German Wikipedia site, but you can click on a button for a rough translation to English. It is useful for a listing of contributors to the publication.

A brief discussion of Jugendstil is here, and the Wikepedia entry on Art Nouveau, with a section on Jugendstil, is here.

Below are some Jugend covers, the earliest from the time they embodied Jugendstil, and one from later on when Art Nouveau was passé and Weimar culture reigned. One detail that interests me is that the magazine's covers in the early years differed dramatically, depending on the style and taste of the artist doing the cover illustration. Moreover, there seems to have been no set Jugend logotype; the cover artist supplied his own typography.

Gallery

30 May 1896

27 March 1897 - Heinrich Kley illustration

Nr. 28, 1897 - Franz Stuck illustration

September 1899

Nr. 19, 1903 - Eugen Spiro illustration

No. 21, 1913

Nr. 5. 1928

John Berkey Paints a Cadillac

A few years ago on this blog I wondered if John Berkey was the best illustrator of space ships. Along with science-fiction book covers, Berkey also did more conventional illustration. A skimpy Wikipedia entry is here and a website devoted to his art is here.

Not long ago I was mousing through the web and came across two studies by Berkey that were up for sale. They looked oddly familiar, and then I realized that they were preliminary art for the cover of a 1976 book I've owned for nearly 40 years. Since the cover art wasn't of a space ship, I never connected it with Berkey. But I flipped to the back flap and, sure enough, John Berkey was listed as the artist.

The subject is a 1930 or 1931 Cadillac V-16 Town Brougham by Fleetwood shown sitting in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

Below are Berkey's studies along with a scan I made of the cover. To enlarge, click on the images.

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This seems to be an earlier study. It's fairly sketchy.

This study is closer to the final version. The car has reversed its direction and now includes a chauffeur as well as greater detail of other elements.

Scan of the book cover.

New Robert McGinnis Book

This is the cover of a recently published book about illustrator Robert McGinnis (1926- ) and his works.

And this is another book dealing with McGinnis by the same author that was published in 2001. I happen to happen a copy of each, so they will be dealt with in this post. A brief Wikipedia entry on McGinnis is here, and his Web site is here.

McGinnis is what is called an "all-rounder" in that he can depict almost anything well -- landscapes, cars, sailing ships. Also, by the way, lanky, sensuous, intelligent and fascinating women -- usually lacking in clothing. He painted hundreds of the latter because the major part of his career was doing cover art for paperback books, and a "good" cover from the standpoint of a publisher was a cover that could attract potential readers and entice them to buy the book. Since many paperback books deal with murder mysteries, romance, and such, McGinnis' subjects were usually women. He was very, very good at it.

McGinnis' women almost always are tall, long-legged and well endowed where it counts. They also have distinct personalities. None of the usual cookie-cutter generic pretty girl solutions for McGinnis: his women often had unconventional faces (for instance, Shere Hite was a frequent model early in his career). As the recent book mentions, in many respects McGinnis was doing portraits.

He generally used gouache or tempera on smooth-surface supports for the book illustrations and worked comparatively small -- about twice the size of the printed version, which is not large where paperback books are concerned.

The recent book has a large format, allowing readers to get a reasonably good feeling for McGinnis' painting style. It also had a Q&A with McGinnis that is brief, but interesting. He reveals what illustrator most influenced him when he was getting started doing book covers and tells who his favorite painter is.

One defect of the new book is that reference photos are nearly absent. Another is that nothing is said regarding his technique or approach when making book cover illustrations, though some study sketches are included. Moreover, McGinnis is a skilled colorist, and his thoughts on that would be very useful to learn. Admittedly, these matters are mostly of interest to fellow artists, and perhaps the book was intended for for non-artist McGinnis fans.

The earlier book has a few more reference photos, but they are tiny. And many illustrations and book cover images are small. Again, nothing much on how McGinnis worked. Still, the earlier book is interesting and useful for the likes of artistic McGinnis fans such as me.

Gallery

Never Kill a Client - cover art - 1963
Strange, interesting background here.  Did he draw it in pen and ink and then paint a wash over it?

Murder Me for Nickels - cover art (cropped at the bottom) - 1960
Again, plenty of interesting textural effects.

Girl on the Tower - Saturday Evening Post - 24 September 1960
At this point, even the Post was allowing a casual, partly unfinished style for story illustrations.

Slab Happy - cover art - 1973
A subject without a conventionally pretty face.  The new book includes a reference photo showing that McGinnis did indeed portray his model's face -- but enhanced her elsewhere.

Some Like It Cool - cover art - 1962
Did I just mention that McGinnis was a skilled colorist?

John Wayne in "The Searchers"
He didn't always paint pretty girls, even when doing movie industry work.

Guideposts magazine illustration
This hints at his landscape style.

The Return - cover art
A rather unusual McGinnis here.  Aside from the treatment of the church and hills in the background, it looks like he was suffering from Bernie Fuchs envy.