Paul Rand, Graphic Designer

A very cursory web search didn't point to the actual source of the above quotation, but the agreement is that it indeed came from graphic designer Paul Rand (1914-96), a dominant player in that field for decades.

Of course, there were some who used it as a departure point for other ideas such as "Don't try to be good, just original" and "Try to be both original and good." Me? I'm with Rand. The modernist emphasis on creativity (= originality) has led to some bad side-effects including the nearly invisible amount of true instruction I received as an undergraduate art student (apparently they thought training would kill creativity). If one tries to be good doing art, a useful dab of creativity has a decent chance of creeping in.

Back to Rand. A website dealing with him is here. It contains a biography, a large collection of photos of Rand and many examples of his work, some of which are shown below.

Gallery

Some logotypes Rand designed

Direction magazine cover - March, 1939

Direction magazine cover - Spring, 1943

Book cover - 1958

Unused logotype for Ford - c.1960

My take on Rand is that he was indeed a master of his trade. That said, I think his strongest work was in the field of logotypes and graphic corporate identity.

A good deal of the rest of his work was in the odd, spotty graphics that were most popular from the late 1930s into the mid-1950s. Other designers followed Rand's lead, and a fair amount of it was found in page designs and advertisements that were intended to look "sophisticated." This style is evident above in the images of magazine and book covers. I find it for the most part too unstructured and insubstantial for my visual comfort.

In contrast, Rand's corporate symbology was usually solidly structured incorporating strong design elements. It was highly influential: I recall a student project where I tried to come up with a simple, modernist logo for Miller Beer that of course was a design failure.

Speaking of design failures, Rand's attempt at redesigning the classic "Ford oval" falls into that category. Ford was wise to shelve his proposal. Even the best designers have their off-days, it seems.

Illustrators and World War 2

Once upon a time there was a war on, and nearly everyone pitched in to fight or provide support for those who did.

This was true for illustrators and the clients they worked for. World War 2 illustrations and photos in American advertisements (along with some stray government promotional works, editorial content and even comic strip panels) are the subject of a book by the Frenchman Georges Grod who came to love American aircraft and related advertising as a boy at the time of the Liberation. The cover with a fine J.C. Leyendecker illustration for Goodyear Aircraft (yes, the tire company built planes too) is shown above and a link to Amazon is here.

Although illustrations are scattered throughout the book, one chapter is devoted to illustrators organized alphabetically. Each illustrator is given a short biographical note and examples of his work in war advertising are shown nearby. Featured illustrators include Melbourne Brindle, Reynolds Brown, John Gannam, Clayton Knight, Jo Kotula, Fred Ludekens, Paul Rabut, Noel Sickles, Thornton Utz and even Coby Whitmore.

Some advertisers used ads to push their products, but did this in the framework of wartime. Others such as automobile companies no longer had products to sell, but advertised their war manufacturing in part to remind people that they were still in business and (perhaps) to keep their name in mind for after the war. In many cases advertisers were able to make a strong link to the war effort, but others sometimes had a large stretch to do so. Below are a few examples I located on the Web.

By Dean Cornwell

By Saul Tepper

By Ray Prohaska

When Eduardo Benito Was in Vogue

Eduardo Benito (1891-1981) was an icon of the Art Deco era. When I was young I enjoyed seeing his work while flipping through library copies of old issues of the Art Directors Annual, a publication that taught me more than any other about the history of commercial art from the late 1920s into the 1950s.

Here is the best biographical information I could find about Benito on the Internet. It seems that magazine publishing magnate Condé Nast kept Benito busy doing covers for Vanity Fair when he wasn't producing Vogue covers for him. Not a bad gig for an illustrator from Spain.

Gallery

Vogue cover - April 1927

Vanity Fair cover - August 1931

Vogue cover - August 1929

Vanity Fair cover - March 1929

Illustration - 1928

1920s Paris Fashion Illustration

Fashion illustration is not dead. My evidence for this is the presence on Barnes & Noble bookstore shelves of several how-to and historical compilation books dealing with the subject.

But it might be on life-support. I just did quick flick-throughs of the Paris Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and did not notice a single human-rendered illustration: it was all photography. Not to mention those large-scale videos of fashion show runway models one can see as background clutter in shops.

I don't subscribe to the New York edition of The New York Times any more. So I don't know if the department stores in town still do much advertising there and, if they do, illustrate their ads with drawings rather than photographs.

Several decades ago the paper was packed with fashion advertisements illustrated with ink wash drawings by Dorothy Hood and other well-known artists. Photography was not used, I suspect, because of reproduction quality (lack of) on newsprint paper. Slick-paper magazines didn't have reproduction quality problems and had shifted to photography by then.

Back in the 1920s fashion photography was rare. Paris boasted fashion magazines that appeared weekly, featuring artwork by a corps of hardworking illustrators.

Those illustrations were a form of news reporting. Nothing very flashy and glamorous: that was the role of advertisements of the couturier houses. Drawings were straightforward, featuring the clothing. Poses were simple and faces were depicted as being attractive but not so much as to steal the show from the garments.

I find it all rather charming. Too bad it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see much in the way of these likes again.

Gallery

This is a weekly fashion magazine from 1929.

And here is a spread from a 1928 issue of L'Art et la Mode.

This is something fancier: it's printed in color.

More color. Note the geometric shapes in the background: Modernism rules!!

Click on images to enlarge.

Sic Transit Borders

I'm drafting this on 20 July while contemplating this morning's Wall Street Journal report that the Borders bookstore chain is to be liquidated.

My thoughts and emotions regarding this are mixed. On the one hand, the marketplace is a cruel place that benefits us enormously, the price of those benefits being the loss of some businesses or even industries or fields that we truly liked. Now, I love bookstores. So I don't like it when one folds and like it even less when the loss is of an entire chain.

Borders and I go back a long ways. I used to consult for General Motors and would fly to Detroit a couple of times a year to meet with its Economics Staff. Since there was plenty of dead time during those visits, I'd drive around the metropolitan area to amuse myself. One of the places I'd go was Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. Michigan is a rare university that doesn't have its own student bookstore, relying instead on stores located near campus. And sometime in the mid-1980s I discovered the original, pre-chain, Borders store on State Street near the top of Liberty Street.

At the time, Borders occupied what seemed to be two stores with the adjoining wall knocked out (though I might easily be mis-remembering). Not a lot of sales space by later big-box store standards, but large for the time. Best of all was the selection. Many books that I hadn't seen before even in bookstore-rich Seattle.

Naturally, I was pleased when Borders was transformed into a chain of large bookstores; there was even a Borders on Charing Cross Road in London. And for ten years or so I preferred Borders to its main competitor, Barnes & Noble, though that might have been due to the Tacoma store that had a fine collection of history and military books that attracted customers from the major military facilities in the area.

Eventually Borders began to slip in my esteem. The process was gradual, so it's hard to put a finger on this or that reason why. The cumulative result was that Borders stores seemed to have skimpier book collections than nearby Barnes & Noble outlets serving the same community. (Savvy bookstore chains make allowance for local preferences. I noted the military factor for the Tacoma Borders and I'll mention that the B&N in Seattle near the University of Washington and some highly upscale neighborhoods has a selection of art book surpassing most other B&N stores -- though their store in Santa Monica has a comparable art section.)

Eventually Borders stores seemed to be devoting half their floor space for non-book items, so I'd find myself in a Borders if there was no other bookstore to browse or if I wanted a Seattle's Best coffee rather than a Starbucks. (Yes, I know Starbucks owns Seattle's Best and will take a hit with Borders' demise, but I like its coffee better than Starbucks.)

Now that Borders is essentially gone, I can't say that I really miss it in the concrete even though I do miss it in the abstract.

Review: Masters of American Illustration

Amazon says it won't be out until mid-August, but my copy arrived a few days ago. That's Fred Taraba's book "Masters of American Illustration: 41 Illustrators & How They Worked" from the publisher of Illustration Magazine (link here).

I'm pretty cheap, but bought the book directly from the publisher instead of Amazon because I want them to stay in the business of providing junkies such as me biographies of illustrators and examples of their work; direct orders provide a better profit cut.

In his introduction Taraba tells us that the book originated as 41 articles in a magazine called "Step-by-Step-Graphics" in the 1990s. At the time he was working at the Society of Illustrators, so had access to both written material and people who could supply information and insights regarding the artists, all of whom were dead by 1989 when the project started.

The book contains the text of those articles with the minor changes that 20 years of new information and author insights inevitably bring. Also new were "more than 50" images.

Taraba's magazine articles did not cover Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and a few other titans of the field because accounts of their lives and work had been the subject articles and books and therefore not worth repeating.

I'm pleased that Taraba did include some of my favorites such as Mead Schaeffer, Saul Tepper and John LaGatta. Also in the book are some illustrators I'm not familiar with such as F.O.C. Darley. Then there a few whose inclusion I question such as Margaret Brundage whose ability to depict human anatomy was well under par for a professional illustrator of her era. But she did sci-fi/horror magazine covers, and the quality her work met the lower expectations for that genre in those days.

The illustrations in the book are nicely reproduced. Each artist's section begins with a two-page spread where one page is devoted to a single illustration, and there are other large illustrations that help the reader get a feeling for the artist's technique.

Speaking of technique (a factor of the book's "How They Worked" subtitle), depth of information varies from artist to artist. No doubt this was largely driven by material available to Taraba, so I can't fault him. Still, there were cases when the topic was barely touched on. Others such as Harry Beckhoff's writeup had significant detail.

There were informational gems including the fact that several illustrators made frequent use of mixed media. Given my woeful art training in college, I had blithely assumed that oil was oil, watercolor was watercolor, casein was casein, gouache was gouache and so on. It is only recently that I've been discovering (poor, ignorant me!) that illustrators would use whatever tool it took to get the job done, be it a touch of pastel in a highlight or some pencil on bits requiring detailed work. After all, their work was reproduced, so discrepancy between original art and what magazine readers saw was both expected and exploited by a canny illustrator.

Biographical information is also patchy depending on the subject, so there were cases where I wished there was a little more detail regarding an artist's training and personal life. But detailed information is where Illustration magazine steps in; much or all of an issue can be devoted a single illustrator.

Despite the small criticisms presented above, my reaction to the book is very favorable. It's far better than the generally shallow, chatty (but by no means useless) 1951 "Illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post" by Ashley Halsey, Jr. which covers 62 artists who contributed to the magazine during the late 1940s. Taraba's text is indeed informative as are the illustrations. The book takes a proud place on the shelf I reserve for illustration.

Art News from The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has been evolving its Saturday/Sunday edition. A few months ago some morphing yielded two new sections. One is titled "Off Duty" and it deals with fashion and lifestyle matters. The other is "Revue," dealing with everything from longer pieces related to recent news events, to science developments, the arts and books.

* * * * *
I noticed a lot of good stuff in the 7/8 May edition. Off Duty had a cover piece devoted to fashion magnate Ralph Lauren's car collection, part of which is on show at the Louvre in Paris. Well, not the Louvre Louvre, but instead the Musée des Arts Décoratifs part -- you know, way out there at the western end of the north wing along the rue de Rivoli.

Anyway, Dan Neil, the WJS's pit bull automobile reviewer interviewed Lauren in Paris, trying to make him confess there might be a tennsy bit of synergy in play between the exhibit and Lauren's commercial empire. Lauren pretty much sidestepped the issue, but Neill did allow in conclusion that Lauren was indeed an actual "car guy."

Gee, I could have told him that. I've been to two Pebble Beach Concours d'Élegance and saw Lauren up close both times. One year he was standing by his Bugatti Atlantique, the other he was helping a bunch of guys pushing his 1939 Alfa Romeo around the 18th Hole site; rolls up his sleeves when need be, he does.

* * * * *
Over in Reviews it was reported that Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's "The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 B.C." was auctioned at Sotheby's for $29.2 million. Forty years ago one could hardly give his paintings away. We're making progress, realism fans!

* * * * *
Art writer Karen Wilkin reviewed the book "Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter" by Patricia Albers. It seems that Mitchell was a piece of work, whatever her Abstract Expressionist abilities might have been. But the part of the review that caught my attention was this paragraph:

Ms. Albert's book is not the place to turn for an understanding of art. It is punctuated with extended, over-written and yet imprecise descriptions of paintings that fail to evoke particular images despite the self-consciously "vivid" prose and lists of colors. A discussion of "the gorgeous Canadian paintings" made in 1974 is typical. "The diptych Canada V beguiles with the bosky masses, its incantatory lights and darks, its use of white around the cut between the two panels, and its oddly right colors (pale mint, white claret, and the color of night)."

Agreed, that is pretty turgid. My personal problem is that I have an aversion to just about any written description of a painting. Ditto descriptions of music. Music must be heard and paintings (or their reproductions) viewed if they are to be comprehended at all. A few apt remarks and a decent amount of background information are usually okay, but otherwise my eyes glaze even if there's a reproduction right above all that text.

* * * * *
As a final note, the section also had a short piece about Modernist collector Peter Brant. Among other quotes from him is this: "The thing is, when you look at a great work of art, it has to evoke in you something that's troublesome. If you hate it, it's probably a better indicator than if you just think it's OK. An artist is supposed to be telling you something that's not obvious or something you've not thought about in that way before."

Shh. Please don't mention this to Monet, Renoir, the Hudson River School or even poor, ignored Alma-Tadema.

Winnowing Art Books

Their time has nearly come. They lay stacked atop chairs and book cases, even tucked away in corners on the floor. Soon they will be gone. For my wife is making grumbling noises and even I can see that the book buildup in the small bedroom I use as a library / painting studio is too large even for my taste in messiness.

I know what to do; the important matter is how. Which books stay and which head for Powell's in Portland?

Keepers include references such as general art histories, potted artists' biographies and short takes on art movements. I'll hang on to most monographs about artists, particularly those I really like. Ditto similar books about architecture and industrial design.

Then there are some gray-area books. These are books I can't make up my mind about; more time is needed before I can make a stronger save / sell decision.

Books I'm discarding? Those dealing with periods of less interest are prime candidates; that means before the mid-1800s. There are exceptions, of course: Tiepolo, Velázquez and British portrait painters starting with Reynolds come to mind.

Then there are redundant books about given subjects. For instance, I have more then one book about Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Impressionism, skyscraper architecture, Alphonse Mucha, Tamara de Lempicka, Gustav Klimt, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Joseph Urban, Raymond Loewy, Maxfield Parrish, Tiepolo, Velázquez, Norman Rockwell, John Singer Sargent and several other people and topics. Assuming overlap in illustration subject-matter, my inclination here is to discard older works because the quality of color reproduction usually isn't as good as it has been more recently.

I'm also getting rid of books that I'm not likely to re-read. Examples here include group biographies of Surrealists and Paris Bohemians as well as those about individuals such as N.C. Wyeth and Harvey Dinnerstein.

How-to books about painting that I seldom refer to are due for the axe too.

It's somewhat easier to discard books than it was 20 years and more ago. That was when there was no Internet and getting to a library to find reference material was a hassle. I found it easier to maintain my own library where what I might need would be at hand. Nowadays I find myself downloading images and using Google and Bing to track down information about artists and movements, so even those general reference books might disappear the next time I do housecleaning.

All well and good, I suppose. But the best solution (from my perspective) is to have enough space that I don't need to get rid of so many books so often. Or at all.

Covering the Famous: Ernest Hamlin Baker

Once upon a time there was an important weekly news magazine named Time. It was the leading magazine in its category from the beginning (it being the first of its kind in the U.S.), and for years its cover would feature an illustration-portrait of a newsmaker. Artwork prevailed (though not exclusively) through the 1960s and beyond, though photography slowly began taking over as the 1970s wore on.

A prolific cover artist during the 1940s and 50s was Ernest Hamlin Baker (1889-1975). He attended Colgate, where he was a track and field athlete and was active in student publications. As an artist, he was largely self-taught, but had the ability to work his way into the illustration field. This website has some biographical information and examples of his work.

Baker's mature style was strongly realistic. No modernist simplification for him: Baker seemed to glory in depicting every wrinkle and blemish on the faces assigned to him by Harry Luce and the editors who selected cover subjects.

Baker's art is probably unfashionable in many art-elitist circles. However, I tend to think that his covers represent valuable documentation of his times and Time's heyday.

Below are examples of Baker's work.

Gallery

American Legion poster - ca. 1920

Cover of January, 1934 Fortune magazine

The Activities of the Narragansett Planters - Wakefield, Rhode Island Post Office mural - 1939
This was a New Deal (but not a WPA) project, as this link attests.

Time magazine Man of the Year cover, Jan. 6, 1942
Features President Franklin Roosevelt; his new wartime allies Stalin and Churchill are in the background. Baker seems to have Winston eying Uncle Joe warily, a reflection of his true view of the Communist dictator.

Time magazine cover for Nov. 23, 1942
The subject is James Doolittle, leader of the famous Tokyo raid earlier that year and now commander of Twelfth Air Force in the newly-opened North Africa front. The olive drab color and white-on blue star represent the paint-job found on U.S. Army aircraft at that time.

Time magazine Man of the Year cover, Jan. 1, 1945
He is Dwight Eisenhower, commander of Allied forces that invaded France in June and at year's end were on a front near the German border.

Via this website, a spread from Ernest W. Watson's 1946 book "40 Illustrators and How They Work." Discussed is a mid-1930s portrait illustration of CIO labor leader John L. Lewis, a powerful figure in those days. Try clicking on the image for a much larger view. If your computer screen is large, you might be able to make out the text. To me the key item of interest is that Baker used thinned oil paints rather than watercolor, tempera or some other medium to get the effects seen in works such as the Time covers shown above.

Frank R. Paul: Bad Art That Spawned a Genre

Yes, there existed what might be called science-fiction art before Frank R. Paul (1884-1963) appeared on the pulp magazine scene, but many believe Paul is the guy who counts as the effective inventor of the genre. And that "many" includes illustrator Frank Wu who posted this strong endorsement of Paul that includes a gallery of his magazine covers. So if the examples shown below aren't enough Paul, be sure to explore the link to Wu.

Paul was born in Vienna, trained as an architect, studied in Paris and migrated to the United States before the Great War. He came to the attention of Hugo Gernsback, who published science-hobbyist magazines. Science-related fiction was part of the content, and by the 1920s Gernsback had spun off a new magazine -- Amazing Stories -- that dealt with what we now call science-fiction. Frank Paul did the cover art.

Paul's strength was his imagination. He conjured up space ships, space suits, flying saucers and other items central to visualizing ultra-high-tech futures.

Paul's weakness, in my opinion, was that he was at best a journeyman artist. His magazine cover paintings strike me as being little more than elaborated cartoons. While I'm happy to give him his proper due as a pioneer, I also cannot deny that I almost wince whenever I see almost any example of his work.

Here are a few of Paul's magazine covers. As usual, try clicking on the images for larger, crisper views.

Gallery

Amazing Stories - April, 1926

Amazing Stories - July, 1926

Amazing Stories - November, 1926

Science Wonder Stories - October, 1929

Amazing Stories - August, 1930

Wonder Stories - December, 1935

Science Fiction - no date

Disappearing Car Marque Books

I suppose it's yet another generational thing.

Up until maybe five or ten years ago I used to see quite a few books dealing with automobile brands on bookstore shelves. Now, not very many.

I bought a lot of those histories of brands (Ford) and models (Mustang). Of course, once I'd gotten a pretty good grip regarding a subject, I'd have little need for another book. After a number of years I found that I was buying few car books. Most of my recent purchases were made while traveling in Europe and had to do with English, French and German brands.

This business about the trend toward fewer car history titles (shop manuals and similar books excluded) came to my attention over the last few months. In November I stopped by the Blackhawk museum in Danville, California and noticed that there were hardly any books on the shelves of its store. Instead I saw mostly model cars of different sizes and prices. A few weeks ago I was in the shop of the "National Automobile Museum" in Reno, Nevada (I added quote-marks because I find the name pretentious). Car books had all but disappeared. New car books, that is; what they had was lots of used books and magazines.

The conclusion that makes most sense to me is that younger people aren't as car-nutty, on average, as previous generations. When I was a kid, getting a car was a huge deal. Perhaps nowadays the Huge Deal is having an iPad.

Any thoughts and commiserations are appreciated by this confused, blind-sided blogger.