New Illustration Readings

Here are two items of interest to readers who like pre-1970s illustration.

First is issue No. 39 of Illustration magazine. I'm citing it because its cover and lead article deal with Pete Hawley, famous for the illustrations he made for Jantzen back in the 1950s. I really need to write a post about him. Another article in that issue you might enjoy concerns the somewhat enigmatic Heinrich Kley who also deserves a post.

The next item worth your while is the new book about Albert Dorne with text by primo illustration maven David Apatoff who mentions it in this post on his Illustration Art blog. The huge news in this post is that he is working on a book about the great Bernie Fuchs. If there's anyone more qualified to do a biography about Fuchs, I'll be stunned to know who it might be. I can hardly wait for the Fuchs book.

As for the book about Dorne, I'm not so sure. It isn't Apatoff's problem, but instead mine. That's because, while I respect Dorne for his work and career, I could never get excited about his illustrations, competently done though they were. So I'll mull over buying the book for a while. Oh: I ought to do a Dorne post too.

Herbert La Thangue: The Rural Life

Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859 – 1929), according to this Wikipedia entry, was associated with the Newlyn school of British rural genre painting. But that entry does not indicate that he painted in Cornwall. Rather, his British base of operations was mostly in Sussex, though he also painted on the continent.

La Thangue studied both in England and France (under Gér&oacic;me), but failed admission to the Royal Academy and went on to help found the New English Art Club, a rival organization.

Influences have been credited to the Barbizon school and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Most of his paintings dealt with farm life, if a Google search is any criterion. Images of some of his works are below.

Gallery

The Return of the Reapers - 1886

The Sawing Horse

Winter in Liguria

An Autumn Morning - 1897

Packing Grapes

In the Orchards, Haylands, Graffham

Lhermitte: Rural Realist

Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925) was a "realist" painter in more than one sense. In the first place, his style was traditionally representational, to which the everyday usage of realist applies. He also was a Realist in the art history sense of depicting everyday scenes as opposed to subjects taken from mythology, history, religion and others favored by the Academic art establishment of his day. His Wikipedia entry is here, and more detailed biographical sketches can be found here and here.

Sources indicate that Van Gogh liked Lhermitte's work, his illustrations and pastels in particular. Perhaps that had to do with their subject matter.

That said, Lhermitte is not well known today even though his La paye des moissonneurs is usually on display at Paris' Musée d'Orsay.

Below are examples of his work. As can be seen, he favored rural scenes or, failing that, proletarian ones.

Gallery

Les cordonniers de Mont-Saint-Père - 1880

La paye des moissonneurs - 1882

Moissonneurs à Mont-Saint-Père - 1883-84

Le reveil du faucheur - 1899

Le pardon de Ploumanach'h

Les Halles, study - 1889

The Gleaners - c. 1908

A.M. Cassandre, Master of the Poster ... and More

Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron (1901 - 1968), who was born of French parents in Kharkov and died by his own hand in Paris, is known to the commercial art world by his professional pseudonym, A.M. Cassandre. His Wikipedia entry is here, and a more detailed description of his professional work is here.

Cassandre's heyday was from the mid-1920s through the 1930s. His poster and magazine cover illustration style was Moderne with occasional touches of surrealism; it was highly regarded at the time and respected today. Little question that he was one of the best at his trade. Besides that, he designed types faces and later in his career was involved in theater work.

Gallery

Étoile du Nord - 1927

Nord Express - 1927

Normandie - 1935
Above are three of his most famous travel posters.

Poster for Dubonnet
He did a long series of posters for Dubonnet.

Bifur typeface - 1929

Peignot typeface - 1937
Examples of two of his typeface designs.

Harper's Bazaar cover - September 1937

Harper's Bazaar cover - November, 1937
Some fashion magazine covers.

1930s Automobile Front-End Styling Detailing

Modernist design purists during the first half of the twentieth century made avoiding decoration a central part of their design religion: Thou Shalt Not Decorate!

Easier said than done, once one moves away from architecture and perhaps furniture and dining-wear design. That's because it's possible to take functional elements of the object and arrange them in a pleasing and, yes, decorative manner ("function" was another religious tenet, especially for architects and industrial designers). Actually, one can do that for architectural objects as well.

During the mid-1920s, once automobiles became reliable to operate, it began to dawn on manufacturers that a car's appearance could become a selling point if customers no longer felt it necessary to shop with reliability in mind. So styling operations began to emerge in the larger companies as well as in firms specializing in providing car bodies.

Speaking of "function," an important function for any consumer-goods product is saleability, and a good designer needs to keep this in mind. Even if car stylists were of the modernist-purist school of thought, design proposals for production cars had to face approval by corporate officers whose fields included engineering and sales as well as general management. Which is why automobiles have almost always included styling elements that might be considered decorative.

The 1930s were years when automobile styling was becoming established along with the new field of industrial design. Those years also marked the transition in decorative fashion from what we now call Art Deco to "Moderne," a simpler style incorporating elements related to streamlining.

Below are some examples of front-end or "face" styling elements from that period. I took those photos during visits to various automobile museums over the past few years.

Gallery

Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow - 1933
Phil Wright's sensational (for its time) Silver Arrow is noted for his predictive design for the main body of the car: it includes a number of features that did not appear on mass-production cars until around the 1948 model year. The front end is not heavily decorated, this in keeping with early 1930s practices on the luxury end of the automobile spectrum.

Studebaker - 1933
Studebaker (which at the time owned Pierce-Arrow) presented a transitional front end, also typical of 1933. Decorative elements include the radiator cap "mascot," the crest on the grille V-divider and those curious, sad-looking oval headlamps.

Chrysler Airflow - 1934
Chrysler's radical, but ill-fated (sales-wise) Airflow used several Deco/Moderne elements. The front seats featured chromed tubing as frames. Above the radiator intake opening are extensions of the vertical grille-bars over the hood's sheet metal as a decorative element that are shown here. Also note the winged mascot coupled with the Chrysler blue ribbon symbol.

Hudson - 1936
Hudson came out with a completely new body for 1936 and for a reason I cannot fathom, Frank Spring's styling crew planted a bizarre grille design on it. "Fencer's mask" (noticeably convex) grilles were the rage across the industry that year, but they took the form of uniform bar or mesh patterns. Instead, Hudson opted for a central section featuring vertical bars that was flanked by areas of thick mesh created by perforating some sheet metal. Note the baroque curve along the top end of the grillework that transitions to the centerline of the hood. The oddest detail is that winged, aerodynamically-shaped amber-like plastic mascot. It resembles a winged cigar. Hudson used a different mascot for its 1937 cars for some strange reason.

Hispano-Suiza - 1937
Shown is one of the last of the famed Hispano-Suiza line of luxury cars built in France. Very conservative in terms of decoration, though the shapes of the hood, grille and headlamp-fender ensemble has a decorative cast. Pseudo-streamlining was the rage by the mid-30s, so we see teardrop-shaped front fenders and blended headlamp housings offsetting a hood-grille combination more appropriate for 1931.

Lagonda - 1939
lagonda was a British luxury automobile, and British styling at all price levels was conservative well beyond World War 2. The Lagonda grille-hood grouping is rounded as a bow to aerodynamics, as are the fenders. But the headlamps, fog lights and exterior-mounted horns make for an interesting older-fashion decorative counterpoint.

Plymouth - 1939
The 1939 Plymouth's front end is in line with American Streamlined Moderne styling of that year. Note that the headlamps are buried in the front fenders and the grille in in the process of transitioning from a vertical to a horizontal shape. The mascot is a streamlined version of the good ship Mayflower that deposited the Pilgrim Fathers and their families at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620; Plymouth used similar mascot designs for many years. The most decorative bits are the thin chromed strips that define the grille openings -- flutings, speed lines and similar touches being the height of fashion in those days.

Mark Tobey: "Local" Boy Made Good

When I was a lad, Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was Seattle's claim to artistic fame. Tobey was born in Wisconsin and died in Switzerland, living only parts of his life in or near Seattle, as his Wikipedia entry indicates. He was associated with a school of Pacific Northwest painters that I wrote about here.

Tobey seems to hold a marginal place in standard histories of modernist painting despite the honors and showings of his work in major museums during his lifetime (see the Wikipedia link above for details). He isn't completely ignored, yet he isn't featured with the likes of de Kooning, Rothko, Kline or even Pollock whose famous "drip" paintings look similar to the careful calligraphic abstractions Tobey was creating a few years earlier.

Tobey's signature "white writing" style of abstract or almost-abstract painting gelled in the early 1940s and, so far as I can tell, he never really transcended it during the remaining 30 years of his career. Here are examples of his work.

Gallery

Self-Portrait - 1953

Man with Closed Eyes - c.1925
These two portraits indicate that Tobey was perfectly capable of producing representational art.

Farmer's Market - 1941

From farmer's market series
In the 1930s and 40s when Tobey used what now is known as the Pike Place Market for subject matter. Seattle was hardly the sleek, world-class city it is today. The market back then was perched above a long row of working piers topped by warehouses and on its uphill side was First Avenue, in those days a street lined with taverns, pawn shops, girlie show theaters, third-run movie houses, flop houses and missions. Such grittiness seems to appeal to many artists, Tobey among them.

Image containing people - 1945

The New Day - c.1945
Tobey had been doing "white writing" for a few years, but still was willing to include more recognizable human figures and other colors in some of his works.

Meditative Series VIII - 1954
An example of the visually dense works he made as his preferred technique evolved a little.

Lovers of Light - 1961
This small "white writing" tempera measures 4.5 x 6.5 inches (11 x 16.5 cm).

Edwin Holgate's Apogee and Fall

Edwin Holgate (1892-1977), Wikipedia entry here, was part of Canada's legendary Group of Seven painters. But he wasn't one of the original Seven, having joined in 1930 during one of the membership turnovers.

Group of Seven artists had their similarities and differences. I posted on Frederick Varley here and Lawren Harris here, discussing their styles and subject preferences. Like Varley and Harris, Holgate painted landscapes (the one thing common to Group of Seven members), but otherwise went his own way, as did the others.

At his peak, Holgate painted strong images, particularly of people. I like them in general, though this source is less enthusiastic.

Many artists of his vintage, perhaps for career reasons, eventually compromised more than they should have (in my judgment) to modernism, and Holgate was no exception. Below are presented examples of his work over nearly 50 years of his career. Missing are images of his earliest paintings, so I'm not sure what he was doing while in his early 20s. At any rate, so far as I am concerned, he started strongly, but was losing his grip by the mid-1940s. For example, about 1946 he painted "Lady by the Window" a flabby, dabby work at odds with what he was doing ten or 20 years before. I couldn't find the image on the Web, but it's on page 102 of this book, if you are curious.

Gallery

Near Amiens - c.1917
Holgate was a war artist during the Great War; I'm guessing as to the date this was painted.

Suzy - 1921
A strong image in the spirit of his later work. He seems to have attained his artistic maturity by age 30.

Evening, Baie-Saint-Paul - 1922
Though not yet a Group of Seven member, Holgate was painting in their landscape style and in the kind of setting favored by other Canadian artists.

Ludivine - 1930

Marie Hinde Huestis - 1930

Nude in Landscape - 1930
The three paintings above are credited as being completed in 1930. There are stylistic differences, the least typical being the portrait of Marie Heustis probably because Holgate was painting on commission rather than for himself. He painted a series of nudes about this time. The image shown at the bottom is perhaps the best of that lot. Nudes in landscape settings can be difficult to pull off due to matters of color. Holgate's painting is successful thanks to his treatment of values (light and dark); note that the shading around the woman's head is linked to the darker part of the background.

Stephen Leacock - 1943
Leacock was a popular essayist both in his native Canada and elsewhere.

Laurentian Cemetery - c.1948
An example of his post-World War 2 painting style. Like the Baie-Saint-Paul painting above, it is less crisp than his stronger works. Moreover, it strikes me as being too sketchy as well as too soft. Some people are fond of this style, but not me.

Ski Patroller - 1949
A portrait from the same period. Again, Holgate is showing comparative flabbiness in part due to a limited value range on the face and clothing.

Pastures Under Gabriel - 1952
Like the painting mentioned in the main text, I consider this a low point for Holgate; a weak piece of work.

The Pool - 1965
He redeems himself somewhat in this painting done in his early 70s.