I can tell you absolutely nothing about the life of German illustrator Martin Claus
other than he was born in 1888 and died in 1956.
And even that may not be correct as I've found other years recorded too.
So all I can do is to attempt to stitch together a
timeline of his career from the dates of the work I've gathered.
The earliest example of his illustration I found is from a 1919 edition
of the satirical magazine Meggendorfer Blätter, by which time he would have been 31 years old.
So it's a virtual certainty that there would have
been earlier work even if there's no evidence of it.
And it seems that for the best part of a decade this was the only publication his
work appeared in, so it's most likely he was employed by the magazine as a staff artist.
What I find most fascinating and remarkable about his work is the range of different
styles and techniques he used, all of them with considerable technical and creative success.
As with most others his monochrome illustration was created with pen and ink,
but where most illustrators settle for one or maybe two stylistic approaches
Claus was apparently able to hop from style to style effortlessly.
Some of the illustrations are clean and geometric, and obviously art deco influenced.
But at the other end of the spectrum there are examples of a looser, more doodled technique,
and even some work which displays the jagged styling of German expressionism.
He also had a fondness for the use of silhouettes
and he was every bit as adept and communicative with this technique.
If anything he had even more colour than monochrome illustration published
and among these images were many covers for the magazine.
And as with his monochromes he used a wide range of techniques.
Sometimes he applied the colour quite flat and let the line do the descriptive work,
and on occasion dispensed with line altogether.
But he also created images which utilised more
tonal application in washes to flesh out the characters.
Whatever his approach his work was invariably aesthetically considered and visually absorbing.
Meggendorfer Blätter ceased publication in 1927.
But within a couple of years he was taken on, probably as a staff artist again,
by what had been one of Meggendorfer's main rivals Fliegende Blätter.
And for his new employers he carried on with the same array of diverse stylistic approaches.
By 1933 German magazines had been told in no uncertain terms that the only acceptable
political stance from this point on was to support the Führer's new regime and ideology.
But although the magazine's management did as it was told Claus managed to steer clear
of political material and in the short term at least confined himself to social humour.
But this position couldn't be sustained and when war began
he too made attacks on the allied leaders and their supposed Jewish puppet-masters.
In 1944 Fliegende Blätter also threw in the towel
and that seems to be the last time any of Claus's work was published.
If the dates I've worked from are correct Claus would have been 57 years old at the end of the war
and if he didn't die until 1956 at the age of 68
it seems unlikely he would have just stopped working .
French illustrator and poster artist Henry Le Monnier was born in Paris in 1893,
and when he turned 18 he enrolled at the School for Decorative Arts in the city.
In 1920 he was published in a couple of Parisian humour magazines,
and that seems to be also when his first poster was created.
But by this point he was 27 years old, so as with Martin Claus and others
it's most likely there would have been earlier work which simply hasn't survived.
But from that point onwards and throughout the next two decades
his poster designs became ubiquitous on the walls of French towns and cities.
He worked simultaneously for most of Paris's most
prominent printing houses, and like many of his contemporaries
he generally favoured the use of dynamically posed single figures in his compositions.
Most of his work was reasonably representational, if distorted for comic effect, but every once in
a while he would veer off into more overtly modernist approaches. This more abstracted
poster from 1923 is now regarded as one of the most iconic images of the period.
I have no information about what he painted with but the likely contenders are gouache or tempera,
simply on the grounds that very few European illustrators at the time worked in oils.
In 1940 the visual evidence indicates his poster career came to an end, and
in that year he joined the staff of Pierrot, a popular children's magazine.
He illustrated the western adventures of Bill la Flêche,
followed by contributions to several other comics in France and Belgium, including
the very successful series featuring the heroic Jean d'Armor.
Arguably his most enduring association was with the girl's magazine Lisette,
and he continued to produce illustration for them into the 1960s.
Among his later creations was his character Professor Azimut,
which was considerably more comical and contemporary than most of his later work.
Whether Le Monnier had repositioned himself from posters to children's illustration out
of choice or whether he had fallen out of favour as a poster artist isn't known,
although I think the latter is the more likely.
But he stopped working altogether in the mid 1960s and he died at the age of 85 in 1978.
Otto Soglow may not be considered all that unsung by some American viewers,
but he is on this side of the ocean and certainly among the young, so he's included.
He was born in New York in 1900 and in 1918 he enrolled into the city's Art Students League.
And In 1922 his work started to appear in the marxist magazine The Liberator.
At this point his style was very much in the heavy shaded tradition
of the social realist movement, and in the next few years he continued with this technique
as he began getting his illustrations published in other magazines and newspapers.
By 1925 he was appearing regularly in another Marxist magazine New Masses,
as well as the New York World and the New Yorker .
By this stage he was creating less politically inclined material
and a more absurdist humour began to reveal itself.
And around the same time he also started using a more radically abstracted cartoon style,
which in terms of conventional draughtsmanship was about as un-drawn as it could be.
Most significantly in 1930 his Little King character made his debut in The
New Yorker and this strip quickly became popular enough to appear every fortnight.
His style had by now become remarkably minimal, and
as he developed the strip it became increasingly geometric in nature with each instalment.
But combined with Soglow's talent for deadpan humour what should have looked like a diagram
managed to be quite expressively human and even affectionate.
The strip attracted the predatory attention of William Randolph Hearst's King Features,
who wanted to syndicate it throughout America.
But The Little King was contracted to The New Yorker until 1933, so as a holding operation
Soglow produced the remarkably similar The Ambassador for Hearst's newspapers.
And as soon as the The New Yorker contract ended,
Hearst's syndication of the Little King led to a quantum leap in its popularity.
The strip frequently appeared in colour but this was applied
at printing to Soglow's black and white artwork.
In the wake of its popularity various animated films were made, but Soglow's
deliberately stiff line style and wordless humour didn't transfer to the screen very well.
Throughout the 1930s he illustrated humorous books,
and there were several anthologies of his cartoons published, all of which sold well.
In 1934 he also started illustrating the series It's the Law! written by Dick Hyman in the
American magazine and this highly successful collaboration lasted for 22 years up to 1956.
In the later 30s he created a series of line and wash colour covers for Judge magazine.
And When America joined the allies in World War 2 Soglow created some strikingly bold
comic domestic propaganda posters on top of his other illustration commitments.
In the years following the war he created other strips including the short lived Sentinel Louie
but none came close to the success of the Little King.
But even into the 1970s he continued to produce humorous columns and features
for The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker.
And after a long and highly productive career Otto Soglow died in 1975 at the age of 75.
The name Albert Dorne will probably be quite familiar to older viewers such as myself,
if only for this ad which featured in many comics of the later 1950s and 60s.
He was born in the slums of the east side of New York in 1906,
with a congenital heart condition and consequent ill health throughout his life.
His attendance at school was patchy and he spent much of his time at the Metropolitan Museum,
copying the paintings and drawing the sculpture exhibits.
He quit school as soon as he legally could in order to help support his family
and after numerous dead end jobs Dorne began an apprenticeship as a lettering artist.
And despite his total lack of formal art education
he quickly managed to get an upgrade to a job in a commercial art studio.
He stayed there for 5 years and learned the ropes of the illustration business,
and when he was confident enough in his abilities he left to pursue a freelance career.
It didn't take long before his illustrations started appearing
in prestigious magazines such as Life, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post.
He was happy working in any medium so there were fully rendered paintings , line and
wash illustrations created with coloured inks and line drawings printed as duotone.
What held them together as a recognisable individual body of work
was an approach to anatomy which used the lightest of caricatures of body language and behaviour.
In that regard Dorne was very much the equal
of - and some might argue - superior to Norman Rockwell.
He was particularly fond of isolating his characters on a white background to focus the
viewer's attention, making it ideal to work with large amounts of text in the pages of magazines.
Unfortunately I've found no definitive information about his use of posed models or photography,
but it must surely have been one or the other. The levels of plausibility
in all his images surely couldn't have been the product of imagination alone.
The complexity of some of his compositions was quite staggering,
and it's easy to see the crucial part played by the remarkably accurate
and detailed pencil drawings from where his images originated.
In the Second World War he created more dramatic serious-minded work for America's
propaganda campaign too, with a series of striking emotionally charged images.
But commercially it would be his goodnatured domestic visual humour
which was his strongest suit.
And this distinctive talent made him a popular choice for both advertising and editorial work.
Following the war Dorne continued to be one of the
most successful commercial illustrators in America and if anything his style and
outlook chimed even better with the mood of middle America in the 1950s.
His press ad campaign for Imperial whiskey, created as a series of humorous vignettes
had a particularly long and popular run, and so did his many press ads for Westinghouse Electrics.
And these were far from isolated examples of his enduring success.
In 1948 at the age of 42 Dorne came up with the idea of a correspondence course for illustrators,
and recruited eleven other well-known professionals, including Rockwell
to establish the Famous Artists School.
The course ran for several decades,
and attracted thousands of hopefuls trying to emulate these giants of the profession.
And Albert Dorne continued to produce yet more goodnatured Americana into the 1960s.
But in 1965 the heart disease that had beset him in childhood
finally got the better of him and he died at the age of only 59.
That's it for now and I hope to be back with another soon. So it's goodbye until next time.