Walter Everett: Two Works in Progress

Walter H. Everett (1880-1946), a student of the great Howard Pyle, was an exceptionally good illustrator who had a couple of character flaws. One was an inability to meet deadlines, a trait that surely impeded his career. Another problem emerged late in life when he destroyed many of his works. Some assert that he got rid of what he considered lesser stuff, and there might be something to that idea because a number of fine paintings of his still exist.

I wrote about Everett here and here. The Kelly Collection holds an important Everett: a link is here. Armand Cabrera provides some biographical information here.

Cabrera's post is illustrated using examples mostly from an early phase of his career, before he developed his mature style. It is Everett's mature illustrations that astonish me. Fortunately, there are at least two examples of his work that seem to be unfinished because of their appearance and the lack of a signature. They therefore provide interesting clues as to how Everett went about building up his classic images.

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This is one of Everett's finest works to set the scene. Click on it and the others to enlarge.

For comparison, here is a finished (or nearly so) illustration with similar colors to the unfinished examples below. Some internet sites displaying this image state that the man is a soldier. From what I can tell, the setting is the American Southwest, most likely northern New Mexico. The man is dressed in riding or work clothes, not an army uniform.

Everett blocks in the image using lines and flatly painted areas laid over an undertone wash or scumble. He then works on background detail before tackling the foreground.

Faces and other key details are painted in the round, most of the rest being larger and smaller areas of flat paint.

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UPDATE (9 January 2016):
I'm wondering if the three illustrations immediately above were all part of the same project that got canceled. The subjects and color schemes are related. The illustration that seems finished has not been signed (unless a signature got cropped). Does any reader know exactly what we have here?

Guilty Pleasures: Noir Art of Glen Orbik

Glen Orbik (1963-2015) died of cancer all too soon. He was a talented artist who divided his time between teaching and creating superhero images and crime-noir paperback book cover illustrations (also working in some other genres). A short Wikipedia entry is here, and here is a biographical note on his Web site.

Like most of the rest of mankind's efforts, paperback book cover art falls mostly in the "competent" category, with some examples being truly lousy. And of course there are some artists whose work stands out, transcending what many might consider "trashy" subject matter. So I think it was for Orbik. The guy had a solid, painterly style along with the ability to create interesting dramatic settings and artistic compositions. I need to add that his book cover illustrations had to include space for the title, author's name and other elements, so this context needs to be taken into consideration when evaluating composition.

His web site lists the following illustrators as inspiration: "Robert McGinnis, Gil Elvgren, Dean Cornwell, Mead Schaeffer, Andrew Loomis, John Buscema... and a healthy dose of Norman Rockwell." For some reason he didn't note his teacher Fred Fixler, whose commercial work included paperback book cover illustration.

Orbik's style is characterized by strong, well-placed brushwork based on a framework of solid drawing ability -- yes, he did use photo references, as do most illustrators. Take a look.

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American Century No. 11

Automatic Detective

Azrael Annual No. 3

Batman: Shadow of the Bat - Commissioner Gordon and Poison Ivy

Broadway Nights

Chassis No. 3

Fifty-to-One

Midnight in Paris

Songs of Innocence

Wounded and the Slain

Rockwell Kent Illustrations

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was a painter and illustrator whose style varied little over his long career. But it was a spare, modernist-leaning style in synch with the Art Deco and Moderne mood from the mid-1920s through the 1930s when his career was at its peak. Today, like so many other artists of his time, he is largely forgotten by the public at large. Biographical information is here.

Perhaps due to architectural training or maybe inherently, Kent had a strong sense of design of the monumental sort. Even small illustrations such as bookplates (see below) have a lot of visual heft. This style also was in keeping with his politics, glorifying the proletariat and winning him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967 as testimony for being "useful."

The present post deals with Kent's illustration; I might post about his painting another time.

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Bookplate for Katharine Brush - 1920

Revisitation - 1928

Ahab - from Moby-Dick - 1930

"Workers of the World Unite" - 1937

And Women Must Weep - 1937

Faller - 1942

From Decameron - 1949

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.

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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

"Buck" Dunton's Evolving Style

W. Herbert Dunton (1878-1936), known as "Buck" Dunton, was an outdoors guy who happened to become a reasonably successful illustrator, then moved to arty Taos, New Mexico to take up Fine Arts painting. A useful biography can be found here.

Dunton wasn't the only illustrator-turned-Taos-painter. The link mentions that another Taos former illustrator, Ernest Blumenschein, influenced Dunton to follow his career/location-change lead.

What interests me most about Dunton was his change in style that followed his change in residence and shift in career. Dunton's illustrations were in the general mode of Frank Schoonover, N.C. Wyeth, and others who did a lot of Western scenes. In New Mexico, Dunton eased away from that into a more simplified style that was fashionable in America in the 1920s and 30s. What I don't know is how much this change was due to personal preference, any influence by other Taos artists (peer-pressure of a mild kind), or for marketing reasons (Modernism-Very-Light was selling well).

We are supposed to believe that true artists will follow their own path regardless of external factors. If that were always so, then why are there stylistic fashions in painting?

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"Crow Outlier" - cover story art, Literary Digest - April 1916
An example of Dunton's illustration work.

The Shower - 1914
Interesting, bold composition. I wonder if the original has different colors; the stormy sky should be gray, not a bright blue.

Texas of Old
This was auctioned for $881,000 at Christie's in 2003.

The Bob Cat Hunter
Auctioned at Christie's in 2010 for $662,500. I don't have dates for either of these paintings, but their style is similar, showing a hint of Modernist simplification.

The Rendezvous
No date for this one, either. I'm guessing that it was done before the two painting above it.

Cottonwood in the Indian Canyon
More Modernism. Besides simplification of forms, we now see that forms are being abstracted into somewhat geometric objects such as the Iowa trees Grant Wood was painting in the early 1930s.

My Children - 1920
This has a mural-like feel to it, yet also reminds me of the paintings of George W. Lambert.

Sunset in the Foothills
Another instance of simplification and geometry. Nice painting however, as is the one above it.

Piet van der Hem, Dutch Illustrator and Painter

Pieter van der Hem (1885-1961), called "Piet," came to my attention thanks to this Sept. 21, 2015 post on David Apatoff's Illustration Art blog. Apatoff was contrasting van der Hem's painting and conventional illustration career with his work during the Great War as a political cartoonist in neutral Amsterdam. According to his Dutch Wikipedia entry, he did further editorial cartooning after the war.

I found his wartime cartoons to be of the standard-issue anti-war kind as found in leftist publications such as The Masses. The post-war cartoons I noticed while Googling seemed to be mostly gentle in tone, such as might be found in American general-interest magazines of that time. (Though I easily could have missed harsher ones that failed to pop up during my search.)

Below are examples of van der Hem's painting and illustration. He was versatile, and had a nice touch better suited to illustration than Fine Arts painting.

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A Promenade on the Pincio, Rome
This was included in David Apatoff's blog post.

Moulin Rouge - ca. 1908-09

Spanish scene - 1914
Apparently van der Hem spent some time in Spain.

Tango

Flamenco Dancer, Madrid - 1914

Woman waiting at a restaurant table

Lezende Echtpaar - Couple reading

Exhibit poster - 1913

In het theater - In the Theatre
This might have been painted after 1930.