Frank Xavier, the Other Leyendecker

Frank (Franz) Xavier Leyendecker (late 1870s-1924), better known as F.X. Leyendecker, was a good illustrator whose work was not as distinctive or appealing as that of his famous brother, J.C. Leyendecker.

Biographical information on F.X. is sparse. Even his year of birth is unclear: I have seen it given as 1876, 1877 and 1879. His Wikipedia entry is here and this site contains a paragraph of information and images of a number of his illustrations. The most information I could find is in this book dealing with the life and work of J.C. What follows was gleaned from it.

F.X. was born in Germany, the youngest of four siblings who moved to the United States in 1882. J.C. and F.X. traveled to Paris in 1896 for a year to study at the Académie Julian, where J.C. studied diligently while F.X. tended to focus more on drinking, drugs and carousing with other art students. After moving to New York City, F.X. was able to begin a long series of cover illustrations for Collier's magazine and also did advertising illustration. Unfortunately, his addiction problems continued and he also developed a bad attitude regarding doing commercial, rather than fine art painting. This attitude problem evolved into a kind of depression which affected his productivity which snowballed into loss of clients and commissions. In 1923 F.X. and his sister Mary moved out of J.C.'s New Rochelle mansion after a series of arguments with J.C. The next year F.X. was dead, done in one way or another due to his addictions.

Here are a few examples of his work.

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Book illustration for "With the Night Mail" - 1909

Vanity Fair cover - December, 1915

Illustration, "The Fortune Hunter" - c.1915

Navy recruiting poster - c.1918

Life magazine cover - 1 September 1921

John Holmgren: Chameleon Illustrator?

When an artistic style becomes fashionable, wannabes swarm in. I'm not quite sure that I can truly label R. John Holmgren (1897-1963) a "wannabe" or "Chameleon" (as the title of this post has it). That's because there is little of Holmgren's work to be found on the Internet.

Yet Holmgren seems to have been a fairly well known illustrator in his day. Walt Reed in "The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000" notes: "His illustrations appeared in most of the national magazines and for many advertisers, including Chevrolet, Ford, Alcoa, White Rock and Cunard Lines. A long-time member of the Society of Illustrators, Holmgren was its president from 1941 to 1944."

The White Rock illustrations included the "Psyche" girl in various settings done in 1940s wash-style. But I want to focus here on the work he was producing in the late 1920s and into the mid-1930s. There were some illustrators in those days with strong styles that were popular with viewers. These included Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Mead Schaeffer, Henry Raleigh and Walter Biggs -- none of whose work could be confused with that of the others.

And then there were McClelland Barclay and John LaGatta, two other major illustrators back then. Barclay favored oil paints and used a form of Cloisonnism, outlining to emphasize his subjects. LaGatta usually drew images in charcoal and then applied oil washes to add color; he also favored outlining.

The point of this post is that Holmgren tended to mimic Barclay and, to a lesser extent, LaGatta in those days. I'm not sure what medium he painted in, though he seems to have made use of line and washes of some kind. Aside from seeming derivative, his illustrations were nicely done. Take a look:

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Life cover - 18 January, 1929

Life cover - 24 May, 1929

Judge cover - July, 1934

By McClelland Barclay: Fisher Body advertisement, 1928

By John LaGatta - 1930s

Walter Biggs: Impressionist Illustrator

During the 1920s and 1930s, American mass-circulation magazine and advertising illustration tended to be cautious where the matter of incorporating modernist techniques was concerned. This was probably in line with the tastes of the majority of readers, or at least of the perception of readers' tastes held by art directors and editors. Given the need by illustrators to produce results in a timely fashion, highly "finished" paintings of the nineteenth century academic variety were rare (a major exception was Maxfield Parrish). So "painterly" (featuring the brushwork) illustrations and simplified, poster-inspired illustrations with a modernist tinge were acceptable. Even a tame form of modernism, such as Impressionism was by 1920, was fairly rare. So I find it interesting that Walter Biggs (1886-1968), who usually painted in a free, brushy, somewhat Impressionist style, was an important illustrator during those decades.

Background information on Biggs can be found here and here. An interesting memoir by a man who knew Biggs is here.

Biggs was a courtly Virginian through and through even though, for professional reasons, he had to spend much of his time in what has been described as an incredibly messy New York City studio where Lincoln Center is now located.

Here are examples of his work.

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Advertisement Illustration - before 1920

From Woman's Home Companion magazine - 1922

From American Magazine - October, 1933

From Ladies Home Journal magazine - December, 1936

Illustration for International Silver Company advertisement - 1924 or 1925

I am in the process of writing what will likely be an e-book about modernism in painting and illustration with the focus on the period 1920-1940. I'm not quite done with the first draft, so haven't given the matter of how it might be illustrated much thought other than to opt for writing it as if there were no pictures in it at all. Below is an excerpt from a chapter draft dealing with non-avant-garde art in the 1920s. I attempt to describe and analyze the International Silver illustration shown immediately above. It's far more wordy than any other such item in the book, and I'd like to chop out most of it if I could include the image without copyright and fee hassles. Regardless, for what it's worth, here is the excerpt.

The following: Copyright Donald B. Pittenger 2012.

* * * * *
Walter Biggs (1886-1968) painted in a loose, busy manner wherein his subjects sometimes were portrayed almost as sketchily as their settings. These paintings were traditional only in the sense that they might have resembled quick color studies made by the Masters of centuries past, though in Biggs’ case they were completed works. Biggs mostly used watercolors, watercolors with a dash of white tempera added, or occasionally a combination of watercolor and gouache. He did paint in oils when necessary, though the final effect was similar to what he normally achieved with water-based media.

Consider an oil painting he made for an International Silver Company advertisement in the mid-1920s. The subject is three women walking towards us, apparently heading to a building featuring a round, white column visible at the left edge of the image. One woman is in the lead, having already climbed the few steps from the sidewalk. Behind her another woman is slightly turned, talking to yet another young woman slightly more to the rear whose image is also partly obscured by the first woman. Together, they combine as a compositional element. Behind them in profile is the car they apparently arrived in, but all we can see of it is the spare tire mounted on the front fender and a fragment of a rear tire and fender. To the right is another car heading towards us and, behind the middle woman, is the trunk of a tree. These are all sketchily painted, and are nearly all the objects in the busy image that can be positively identified, though there are hints of gabled roofs and a chimney in the background. Aside from the sketchy tree trunk and hints of houses, the background comes close to being an abstract painting filled with bits of pale colors and overlapping brushwork. The women are painted in the same manner, though their coats, cloche hats, purses, gloved hands and so forth can be distinguished though the busy brushwork. Biggs does give their faces slightly more attention so that features and expressions can be read by the viewer.

Modernism comes into play here in that the scene is only suggested rather than clearly defined. The overall feeling is Impressionistic even though the application of paint is not Divisionist, as in a Monet painting. Think of it as a very loose watercolor sketch, but done in oils.

Gil Cohen: Populating Aviation Art

I chanced upon the above book recently, for some reason never having heard of Gil Cohen even though I'm aware of quite a few other artists of the Aviation Art genre. That might be because Cohen normally doesn't paint aircraft that are airborne. Moreover, his focus is on people associated with aircraft, not the planes themselves. (The only other artist who quickly comes to mind for following the same path is James Dietz.)

The most detailed Internet biographical information that I could locate on Cohen is here. In brief, he was born and raised in Philadelphia (on South Street, for those of you who know the town). His art training was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art School, now the University of Arts, where he later taught part-time for 20 years while carrying on with his career as a professional illustrator. Much of his illustration work was for men's magazines, though he also did book covers for romance novels and some general-interest titles.

This is spelled out in the book, which I found interesting. Besides outlining his career and describing (and showing) the steps he takes when doing his aviation paintings, he discussed the origins of each of the paintings in the book along with accounts relating to his thought process when planning the depictions. My main gripe regarding the book is that, because his paintings tend to be panoramas, they are spread across the inter-page gutter and sometimes important details are lost.

Below are examples of Cohen's work; click to enlarge (some will and others won't).

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Magazine cover: Male - May 1967
Most of the male mag illustrations he did strike me as being rushed. But then the pay probably didn't justify all-out efforts. This one is more finished than many of the others.

Photo of Cohen and Robert Rosenthal with painting
The painting is titled "Rosie's Crew / Thorpe Abbotts, 1943" (2001), showing Rosenthal and his flight crew gathered just before a bombing mission over Germany. For more information on Rosenthal's outstanding Army Air Forces career, click here.

"Coming Home / England, 1943" - 1990
A surviving aircrew at the end of a mission.

"After the Mission" - 1993
Even though aircrews were exhausted and perhaps more then a little shaken after a bombing mission, they had to go through a debriefing process for the benefit of intelligence officers who were looking for any changes in German air defenses as well as potential flaws in Eighth Air Force practices.

"Requiem for Torpedo Eight" - 2004
The scene is the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8) on 4 June 1942, the crisis point of the Battle of Midway. The torpedo bombers of Squadron 8 attacked the Japanese fleet at low level and were all shot down. Only one man survived, Ensign George H. Gay shown piloting the TBD Devastator beginning its takeoff run.

Exploratory-Line Illustrators

This is an expansion of a topic I wrote about last year in this post about David Stone Martin. Martin is best known for a kind of scratchy, exploratory pen-stroke illustration style that was popular in the 1950s and for a while thereafter. Read the post linked above for my take on him.

But Martin wasn't the only one employing exploratory lines. Nor can it be said that he invented the style.

Take a look at some examples while I continue this narrative.

Gallery

By David Stone Martin
To set the stage, here is a drawing by Martin. He illustrated many covers for jazz albums, but I'm not sure whether or not this drawing was one that became part of a cover.

Ben Shahn - Scotts Run, West Virginia, 1937

Ben Shahn - illustration, 1957
Ben Shahn worked as a painter and illustrator during his career. The 1937 work is fairly typical of what he was doing at that time, combining paint with thinly drawn linework. It is likely that Martin was aware of Shahn's style while his own was evolving. The 1957 piece shows that Shahn was still using that style of line. And why not? It was trendy in 1957.

By Robert Weaver
Robert Weaver also made use of a Shahn-inspired technique during the 1950s and later. Like Shahn, he didn't mind putting a political twist in his choice of subject matter.

By Tracy Sugarman
I am not familiar with Tracy Sugarman, only having come across examples of his work while researching this post. Again, the style is similar.

Harvey Schmidt - book cover

By Harvey Schmidt (probably)
Harvey Schmidt is best known as the composer of the off-Broadway show "The Fantasticks" that ran for decades. However, Schmidt began his career as a commercial artist using a style similar to those of the men mentioned above. Unfortunately, I could find almost nothing of his on the Web other than what you see above. That might be because he mostly or entirely dropped commercial art once The Fantasticks became a big hit.

LeRoy Neiman: Post-Career Thoughts

LeRoy Neiman died 20 June 2012. I really haven't thought of him in years except when I happen to notice one of his prints for sale in an art gallery. I suppose I would have been more aware if I'd kept up with Playboy magazine where his work appeared for literally decades. Alas for Playboy, I lost interest at some point in my twenties when it finally sank in that a girl in person is far better than a retouched photo of one in a centerfold.

The Wikipedia entry for Neiman is here and his own web page is here.

As Wikipedia indicates, Neiman had solid art training and the work he produced following his Playboy breakthrough had many fans. His original works and reproduction sell well and at good prices. Fortunate is the artist who can earn a good living from his toil.

A large share of Neiman's work had to do with sports, so I'll show a few examples here.

Gallery

Sandy Koufax

Orlando Magic

Scramble
What do I think of his work? I never liked it.

My reaction to any art is personal to the point where I can't pin down from where my prejudices emerged. For what it's worth, in a nutshell, I find Neiman's work too colorful and the application of paint too random (or sloppy?) for my taste.

This is despite underlying drawing being essentially correct. I've stated before and will surely state again that, given good drawing, an artist can get away with quite a lot so far as other aspects of a painting or illustrations are concerned. But for me, Neiman pushed those "other aspects" too far.

Who was Frank H. Desch?

I'm not an exhaustive researcher, but I do make an effort to come up with at least a little background information regarding painters, illustrators, cars, planes and whatever else I write about here.

But this post is one instance where I came up virtually dry.

The subject is a man named Frank H. Desch. He was born in Philadelphia in 1873 and died in 1934 and was an illustrator who apparently worked in fine art painting on the side.

The two Internet sources about him (I only drilled through the first couple of Google pages, I confess) are here and here. Both seem to be sites oriented towards collectors. The first one offers a book or catalog of Desch's known works. But the price is $40, which greatly exceeds my research budget for an artist who doesn't greatly interest me. So his career will remain a mystery unless a seriously knowledgeable reader is able to help us out in a comment.

That said, Desch had talent, as his fine arts work indicates.

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These are examples of his illustration work before 1920. It is pretty generic of the era.

The four paintings above are painted in what might be called "American Impressionist" style. The one at the top looks like a Richard E. Miller painting from the same period. Coloration is influenced by classic French Impressionism, but the subjects are clearly defined. This was something American painters preferred to do rather than create an overall effect á la Monet and those he influenced.

The two final paintings are non-Impressionist. The garden scene has the appearance of an illustration, but it's probably not magazine cover art because the woman's head is where the publication's name would usually appear. The bottom work by its style appears to be a commissioned portrait. The upper part of the subject is carefully rendered, though her hand and the lower part of her dress are more casually done.

Alajalov: Illustrator or Cartoonist?

When Constantin Alajalov (1900-1987) painted the 22 June 1935 cover for The New Yorker magazine, employment prospects for college graduates were uncertain. I'm drafting this post mid-June, at the tail end of this year's graduation ceremony season, and a similar situation holds. In both cases, there was serious economic under-performance. But in 1935 college graduates were a much smaller share of the 22-year-old or thereabouts population, so supply-demand factors were more in their favor back then even though times were tough.

Alajalov (name accented on the third syllable) was a popular illustrator from the late 1920s into the 1960s, best known for magazine cover illustrations he created for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. Biographical information on the internet is sparse. And even inaccurate: his Wikipedia entry states that the Russian Revolution happened in 1916 -- 1917 was the actual year. The most useful link that I could find is here. There are some books from the 1940s dealing with illustrators containing sections about Alajalov, but this recent, similar kind of book by Fred Taraba might be easier to locate.

Taraba mentions that Alajalov was a fine-art painter and muralist as well as an illustrator. He and other sources stress that Alajalov would take a good deal of time and trouble to make the settings of his illustrations as accurate as possible. I think this care was essential because his signature work seems more cartoon-like than straight illustration. Yet the cartoonishness lies mostly in the way he depicted the faces of his subjects. And like a good cartoon, those faces reveal the character and current thought or emotion of those subjects. Further, the settings and situations he depicts match or come close to matching the experience of his viewers. Taraba notes that Alajalov tailored these elements to fit the average readership of The New Yorker (big-city, supposed sophisticates) and the Post (Middle America).

A final thought before turning to more examples of Alajalov's work. In his heyday, aside from The New Yorker and some 1920s publications such as Life and Judge, most mass-circulation magazine illustration for stories and non-fiction articles was naturalistic. So during much of his career, Alajalov's approach was largely unique (I have a major exception in mind, and will write about him at another time). Today, to dredge up a cliché, the shoe is on the other foot: comparatively little magazine illustration is naturalistic, the bulk being cartoon-like in one way or another.

Gallery

The New Yorker - 28 October, 1939

The New Yorker - 1 March, 1941

The Saturday Evening Post - 2 May, 1959

The Saturday Evening Post - 31 December, 1949

Illustration Features Coby

The illustration above (click to enlarge) is by Coby Whitmore (1913-88) whose career flourished in the years before television began killing off the big general-interest magazines.

Whitmore could be classed as one of the "big head" school of illustration, where backgrounds disappeared and the focus was on a gorgeous women who sometimes had a handsome man in the scene as a supporting cast member. And there might be a few stage setting details such as an end table, doorway or chair sketched in. That "big head" phrase was derision from a slightly earlier generation of illustrators who included detailed backgrounds in their work, the implication being that the new breed was lazy.

Me? I think Whitmore's work is terrific.

And if you are a Whitmore fan or are curious about my enthusiasm, grab a copy of issue number 37 of Illustration Magazine. It contains a long, well-illustrated article on Whitmore that features many quotations from the artist. Such quotes are rare in Illustration because in many cases their subjects died many years earlier and left little trace other than fading pictures in crumbling magazines.

Be warned that Illustration can be hard to find on news stands (try Barnes & Noble bookstores first) and the publisher often sells off his on-line order supply fairly fast. I got to the point where I subscribed to the magazine to ensure that I could get a copy.

Russell Patterson's Advertising Art

Russell Patterson (1893-1977), as his Wikipedia entry indicates, was more than just a cartoonist. Yet his witty and well-drawn Roaring Twenties flappers exemplified the era as much as the cartoons of John Held, Jr. and, to my mind, they were better than Held's (whose cartoon work I admire).

Moreover, Patterson's career didn't fade during the Great Depression. He tweaked his style, switching from pen to the more fashionable (in the 1930s) brush, and his popularity continued on its merry way.

Patterson also did advertising art. I located examples in the Art Directors Club of New York issues of the Annual of Advertising Art for 1929 and 1930. These were done for the New York Central Railroad and are shown below dated circa the year before the publication of the annual in which they appeared. Those images are spruced up photos rather than scans because I found the annuals in the stacks of a college library and it was most convenient to grab the images via digital camera; apologies for the less-than-perfect quality.

Here they are along with other examples of Patterson's work of that vintage to set the scene.

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Life cover - 28 September 1928
One of Patterson's better-known covers.

Life cover - 26 April 1929
The eyes on the flapper on the left remind me of the way Kees van Dongen did female eyes.

Cartoon - n.d.

Art for New York Central Railroad advertisement - c.1927
This illustration is similar to his cartoon style, but more dignified.

Art for New York Central Railroad advertisement - c.1928
No trace of cartoon here; a nice interior view of New York's Grand Central Terminal.