Adolphe Willette was one of the early modernisers of French Illustration and yet he isn't as
widely recognised as he deserves to be.
He was born in the town of Châlons-sur-Marne in 1857 and he studied for four years at the
School of Fine Arts in Paris.
He moved to the Montmartre district in 1882 , rented a studio and set about a career as
an artist and illustrator.
He had some work published on the covers and in the pages of Le Courrier français, and
in 1887 his series of wordless sequences detailing the misfortunes of a pierrot character was
published.
And around that time in his role as a painter he created some spectacular murals for Le
Chat Noir cabaret and bar, where he was also a regular patron.
His popularity as a magazine illustrator grew quickly and most significantly for his career
he began a long successful relationship with Le Rire, for whom he created some of his most
memorable and absorbing images.
Because of his obvious affinity for magazine work Willette attempted to establish several
of his own but none of them had lasting success.
As you would expect of an illustrator of his generation most of his early work was printed
as monochrome, but once colour became an option he took full advantage of it to enhance his
images.
Whether he was drawing directly onto lithographic stone or using pen and ink I wouldn't care
to hazard a guess - but the visual evidence suggests that he used both during his career.
But as with so many others it remained the complex and energetic line work that defined
his stylistic approach.
Sporadically he also created posters and he demonstrated a natural ability to produce
dynamic eye catching images to compete with those of his friends and regulars at Le Chat
Noir, Jules Chéret and Toulouse Lautrec.
During the Great War Willette produced patriotic material in the magazines he worked for particularly
in the pages of Le Rire Rouge. But most of the images he created were more
lamentations of the war itself and France's suffering rather than overt attacks on the
enemy.
After the war he carried on as before and returned to his usual clients and themes,
celebrating and occasionally warning against the potential consequences of the decadent
anarchic Parisian lifestyle.
All of which kept him professionally engaged into the 1920s.
And in 1926 Adolphe Willette died in Paris at the age of 67.
Tony Sarg is generally an unknown quantity in Britain and I'm guessing thats probably
the case all over the world with the exception
of the United States.
But even there I doubt he's as well remembered as he should be.
He was born in 1880, the son of a German father and English mother in Guatamala, where his
father was the consul.
The family returned to Germany and Sarg entered military academy at the age of 14 and was
commissioned as a lieutenant at 17.
But in 1905 he resigned his commission and 4 years later in 1909 he travelled to England,
where he began a career creating illustrations for posters, magazines and postcards and quickly
made a name for himself.
Among other commissions he created a series of popular comical crowd scenes for posters
which were displayed on the walls of the London underground.
And to demonstrate his versatility he also designed a series of posters for bus transportation
in a totally different style.
When Britain went to war against Germany in 1914 he sailed back to the U.S.A. and set
himself up as an illustrator in New York.
With the reputation he had forged in Britain Sarg found it relatively easy to acquire American
clients including The Saturday Evening Post, for whom he demonstrated a talent for realism.
He worked from his studio in Times Square and his level of success grew rapidly.
Despite his success in illustration for adults he increasingly aimed his work at the children's
market.
Sarg specialised in devising animal characters to educate as well as to entertain young readers.
Some of his story books were created with moveable parts, others explored history with
a comic twist and they always had an exuberant sense of fun.
As a child he had been fascinated by his grandmothers collection of puppets and in 1917 he set up
his own touring puppet theatre company which also proved immensely successful in the coming
years.
Sarg demonstrated yet more versatility with a series of 20 animated films between 1921
and 1924.
These films were created using animated silhouettes and they were far better than anything else
created at that time.
But I don't want to lose sight of Tony Sarg the illustrator and with seemingly impossible
productivity he continued to create amusing and educational books for children.
By this time he had become quite famous and a lot of merchandising was created using his
images on any number of items, particularly table linen and clothing.
There were even Tony Sarg shops in New York and Nantucket selling any number of items
featuring his designs.
It's worth noting that in the middle of the 1920s during the great depression he was earning
80,000 dollars annually which is now about 1.2 million.
In 1928, he designed, and with his team of assistants built huge helium-filled balloons
for Macy's department store parade. And the crowds went wild for these comical inflatables
The puppet show he created for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair was a hugely popular attraction,
but not long after his team of workers left to create their own business.
But even with his assistants now in competition he couldn't stop himself from staging more
shows. All of them lost money and he racked up a colossal debt which led to him declaring
bankruptcy in 1939.
In the following year his illustrated version of Pinocchio was published. This would prove
to be his last book because he died in 1942 at the age of 62 from medical complications
following minor surgery in New York.
German illustrator Karl Arnold was born in the town of Neustadt in 1883.
In his teens he trained to be a painter at an unknown art school and he would have graduated
somewhere around 1904 or 5.
With his art education behind him he started to pick up commissions from several German
magazines.
But most significantly in 1907 he began contributing to the popular satirical magazine Simplicissimus.
His own inclination towards harsh frequently vitriolic satire made him a perfect fit for
this magazine and before long he was hired as a permanent and valued member of the editorial
team.
So from this point onward all his work was published in Simplicissimus.
More than most other contributors Arnold used the magazine's limited application of spot
colour to create aesthetically pleasing images which added a positive contribution to the
illustration. All his work was possessed of a remarkably
precise and expressive line and he obviously had no time for and no need of laborious hatching
techniques.
Others at Simplicissimus were also exploring this more modern graphic approach but none
could match the precision of his technique.
Virtually all his work used dark fantasy scenarios and monstrous demonic creatures, and he dealt
primarily in visual metaphors in the alternative world he created.
Like the rest of the staff at Simplicissimus he was not enthusiastic about the Kaiser's
apparent determination to go to war.
But once war had begun Arnold felt obliged to support the german forces out of sheer
patriotism.
When the war had ended he returned to less harrowing material and even found the time
to create a visually engaging children's story which unusually for him used a full colour
palette.
I don't know if these watercolours were a financial success but I've been unable to
unearth any similar examples.
If it was the only one of its kind that's a great pity.
In the mid 1920s Germany was in serious recession and the stability of the country was threatened
by both revolutionary leftist and right-wing nationalist gangs causing mayhem in the streets.
Arnold wasn't the only illustrator to make fun of Adolf Hitler and his ideology at this
time but he was certainly among the more eloquent critics.
But when the National Socialists gained power in 1933 stormtroopers turned up at the magazine's
offices. The threat they posed was obvious and some of the artists left the country while
they still could.
Arnold was among those who not only stayed and carried on working for Simplicissimus
but quickly took up a new position which was staunchly in the Fuhrer's favour.
He doesn't seem to have created any directly antisemitic material, although he pulled no
punches in his criticisms of the allies and it's debatable whether his conversion to the
cause was genuine or simply a matter of self preservation.
Arnold stayed with Simplicissimus until its collapse in 1944 and once Hitler and the Third
Reich were beaten he emigrated to the United States where he lived as anonymously as he
could until his death in 1953.
Ukranian illustrator Vladimir Bobritsky was born in 1898 and he later studied at the Kharkiv
Imperial Art School.
When the Russian revolution erupted two years later he managed to escape the chaos and violence
using a passport he had forged by hand.
Once he was out of Russia he travelled from place to place in eastern Europe working as
a classical guitarist, a talent he had acquired in his youth.
In 1921 Bobritsky emigrated to the United States and set up a small textile printing
business in New York. How he could afford to establish this business and why it was
in textiles isn't recorded.
But in 1925 he was offered the position of art director for the prestigious department
store Saks Fifth Avenue.
This doesn't seem to have stopped him working for others, and in 1926 the first of his covers
for The New Yorker magazine was published.
This series greatly enhanced his profile and almost immediately he became a frequent contributor
to several other magazines including Vogue and Vanity Fair .
And by now using the pseudonym Bobri he increasingly established himself as a highly creative and
successful illustrator throughout the 1930s.
From around 1930 onwards he also created many book jacket designs for both fiction and factual
books with his semi-abstracted images.
Bobri continued to perform as a classical guitarist and in addition to his concerts
from 1946 onward he was also the editor and art director of the magazine Guitar Review.
In the early 1950s his restless creativity gave him a nudge in the direction of children's
picture books, and he illustrated a series of religious books by the writer Dorothy Knipe.
But his earliest real commercial success in this arena was in 1957 with his illustrations
for Inez Rice's story the March Wind. This modern fantasy gave him the opportunity to
be at his playful best and he created a series of varied and visually engaging page layouts.
A year later he equalled the success of these illustrations with his work for Charlotte
Zolotow's Sleepy Book. And this time his illustrations went even further into abstraction and simplicity,
using flat solid colour and yet more imaginative layouts.
His colour images were created with gouache paint, and he utilised its ability to be applied
opaque or as tonal washes.
I don't know for sure but it's possible and even likely that some of the children's books
in particular may well have been created with printed spot colours.
Suzanne Gottlieb's What Is Red? was published in 1961, and Bobri's significant contribution
to this book and others led to him being rightly hailed as one of the most imaginative modernist
illustrators for young readers .
This success didn't stop him from accepting a long running seres of press ads for Hanes
stockings in the early 1960s and he demonstrated equal creativity and lateral thinking in this
work too.
But in the 60s most of his illustration work was for children's publishing and
His last book before retirement was 1969's A Kiss Is Round written by Blossom Budney.
All in all Vladimir Bobritski had highly successful careers in both illustration and music, and
although retired he remained creatively active well into old age.
And although he did get to have an old age it ended badly when he died in a fire at his
home in 1986. He was 88 years old.
And that concludes this quartet and another is coming as soon as I can make it.
I'll see you then.