The German humorous illustrator and artist Adolf Hengeler was born in 1863 in the town of Kempten
in the south east of the country. And in 1878 when he was 15 he took
an apprenticeship as a lithographer before studying at the School of Applied Art in Munich.
Even as a student he was having work published in the humour magazine Fliegende Blätter and
would continue to do so, almost exclusively for two more decades.
So by the time he graduated he was already well known in publishing and he was also
moderately successful as a painter. And from quite early on in his career
his cartoons were regularly compiled into albums, all of which sold well.
By far the majority of his work was monochrome and rendered with remarkable dexterity in pen and ink.
Some was printed as line only and others used additional grey washes of
watercolour to provide greater definition to the various elements of the picture.
He was particularly adept at capturing nuances of expression in his subjects
and although highly comedic his characters resonated with recognisable plausibility.
On the relatively rare occasion he got to use colour the same method was used with
considerable visual appeal, and it's a great pity there aren't more examples to be had.
He had a particular fondness for group scenes in which some form of anarchy or disaster was taking
place, and he was highly skilled at creating interplay between the various characters involved.
In addition to his ongoing commitment to Fliegende he also found time to create
some particularly agreeable children's book work, unfortunately none of it in colour.
Nevertheless they were highly absorbing and entertaining with some nice anthropomorphic
touches. And from the later 19th into the 20th centuries his work
was well known throughout German speaking countries by both adults and children.
In 1912 Hengeler's reputation led to his appointment as a
professor at Munich academy and he continued in that role up to 1925
When war broke out in 1914 he was 51 and not expected to fight,
but during the years of the war his style changed radically and he created
propagandist material using a rough crayon technique in both colour and monochrome.
That many of his students had not made it back from the war had a profound effect on him, and
this may or may not have been the reason behind he largely abandoned satirical work, although I did
find a couple of crayon examples from the 1920s. But the rest of his life was spent
almost exclusively as an artist while continuing with his role as an academic.
And Adolf Hengeler died in 1927 in Munich at the age of 64.
Achille Beltrame was born in 1871 in Arzignano,
Italy. And he later enrolled into the Brera Academy in Milan
Following his art training he started working for the Ricordi studios in Milan in 1896,
creating postcards which were used to promote the many operas being staged in
the city at the time. And for the same studio he created several theatrical
posters which also showed a talent for more graphic visual approaches.
In 1899 his work came to the attention of the publisher Luigi Albertini,
And he was impressed enough with Beltrame's work to immediately offer him the job
of art director and illustrator for his Sunday supplement Domenico del Corriere.
And although he also worked with some success throughout his life as a painter for the best part
of half a century that was Beltrame's virtually sole vehicle of expression as an illustrator.
At this time, and for some time to come,
photography was still monochrome only and didn't reproduce all that well. And
to record any event the photographer had to physically be wherever it occurred.
But Beltrame was possessed of a combination of great visual imagination and draughtsmanship
which enabled him to record all manner of global events from the comfort of his studio.
And throughout the first decade of the 20th century his frequently melodramatic but always
compelling visualisations of any number of wars, catastrophes and politically potent moments were
published on the cover and in the supplement's pages for the edification of the readers.
In 1914 he created a cover illustrating the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo,
the event which escalated rapidly into the Great war.
And following this naturally enough the war became the dominant topic for Beltrame to illustrate.
In this conflict Italy fought with the allies against Germany, and he visualised many scenes
of major battles, recoding heroic victories and defeats in roughly equal measure. As with all his
illustrations he never actually set foot anywhere near the location of any of these battles, and yet
still somehow achieved highly plausible outcomes. During the conflict he also created some striking
but more sedate covers for the magazine La Lettura.
Once Germany had been defeated in 1918 he returned to other Italian
and world events and disasters as the country adjusted to what would be an uneasy peace.
In the 1920s when Benito Mussolini and his supporters increasingly dominated Italian
politics Beltrame continued to create more of his usual series of disasters and events
without reference to the political upheavals taking place in the country.
But by the 1930s he was producing a large volume of imagery in support of Mussolini
and portrayed him heroically as the world once more headed inevitably for another war.
Under Mussolini Italy was allied with Germany this time around,
and Beltrame's work reflects that in the wartime illustrations he produced,
but in 1941 he retired and handed his role over to the equally talented younger
illustrator Walter Molino in 1941, and he died in Milan in 1945, at the age of 73.
Lucian Bernhard was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1883,
as Emil Kahn, but for unknown reasons changed his name in 1905. It's recorded
that he studied but only very briefly at the Munich Academy, and was otherwise self-taught.
He moved to Berlin in 1901 where he worked as a poster designer and art director for magazines,
and within a few years he had become one of a
small group of illustrators and designers who were instrumental in the creation of
Plakatstil, which translates from the German to the pleasingly literal Poster Style.
In 1905 his winning design for a poster competition held by the Priester Match
Company did his reputation no harm and many more similarly minimalist posters followed.Such
was the success of this radical stylistic departure from what had preceded it that by
a year later at the age of only 23 Bernhard opened his own studio with 30 employees.
He and his Plakatstil associates used a reductive approach to their images and the application of
flat non representational colour. Ornamentation was considered redundant and many of these
posters dealt only with the inherent aesthetic presentation of whatever was being advertised.
This no-nonsense discipline was also known as the equally literal Sachplakat or 'object poster'.
Throughout the first decade of the century and into the second
his studio produced a large volume of posters, for all manner of clients.
Bernhard was employed by the German government during the First World War to produce propaganda
posters, and oddly for these he used a more expressionistic although equally
minimal approach, And his work played more on patriotic themes than attacking the enemy.
After the war he became Professor of Poster Design at the Berlin Royal Academy but In
1923 Bernhard moved to the United States and traded on his reputation to create work for
American clients, who were attracted to his simple dynamic approach to image making at
a time when most American advertising was far more traditionally rendered.
In 1928 he reamed up with Rockwell Kent and others, including fellow
German emigré Bruno Paul to establish the New York design company, Contempora.
Throughout his early career in both Germany and the USA Bernhard had enjoyed particular
success as a designer of typefaces and on occasion this aspect of his abilities fed
into the posters and other publicity work he created. His work in this period continued
to be in demand from a wide range of clients and among others he produced a particularly
large volume for Amoco Oil, which ran from the later 1940s into the 1950s with great success.
Although this later work continued to adhere to the principles established in his earlier
posters by this point it had long since lost its novelty value and had been overtaken by
more contemporary exponents of dynamic poster and advertising work to emerge in the USA.
How long he continued to work in advertising I have been unable to
find out and the available evidence suggests he spent most of his later life as an artist,
primarily of female figures, up to his death in 1972 at the age of 89.
French illustrator Pierre Brissaud was born in Paris in 1885 and like so many others
who would become popular in 1920s France his art education took place at the École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1907 when he was 22 and just out of art school Brissaud found some early success,
more for his work as an artist than for his illustration.
But his exhibitions of prints and watercolours drew him to the attention of Parisian publishers,
and fashionable magazines offer him regular commissions to
appear on their covers and in their pages. More than any other it was the prestigious
fashion magazine La Gazette du Bon Ton which most commonly featured Brissaud's illustrations,The
great majority of these were printed using the pochoir method, under Brissaud's direction.
Despite the laborious nature of this reprographic process all his images
possessed a spontaneous visually character, and His use of colour
to create light and shade in his work was a particular attractive atmospheric feature.
But it wasn't all fashion work and he also illustrated the book Eugenie Grandet by
Honore de Balzac in 1913, with both colour and monochrome page illustrations. And in
the following year he produced a typically stylish and elegant press advertisement for Renault cars.
In virtually all his work Brissaud's characters were place within integral scenic backdrops which
frequently gave his fashion illustrations a strong suggestion of some form of narrative
which successfully held the viewers attention more than most. And this quality contributed
to his continued popularity in fashion circles throughout the decade and well into the 1920s.
In 1925 he illustrated the erotic story Le Leçon d'Amour dans un Parc, written by René Boylesve was
published, and although frequently featuring nudity and scenes of sexual dalliance none
of Brissaud's highly decorative scenes from the narrative could be considered in any way vulgar.
In that year the owners of Vogue magazine bought out the Gazette and naturally enough from this
point on his work started to feature in their pages too, and not just in the French editions.
This high profile international exposure conrequently led to
him also making numerous contributions to other American magazines including
House & Garden, in the later 1920s into the 30s
But in that decade he increasingly turned to book illustration, in particular a series
of classics for George Macy's Heritage Press. Brissaud's first commission was
for a 1935 edition of Manon Lescaut written by the Abbé Provost in 1731.
But by this point he was much less prolific and it was 1944 before he published Edmond Rostand's
Cyrano de Bergerac. And there followed a similar gap before his edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madam
Bovary was published in in 1950. But all his book projects including 1954's edition of Shakespeare's
play Two Gentlemen of Verona maintained the same standards of visual appeal as his earlier output.
Sadly the same couldn't be said of his last published work, a series of comparatively
loosely drawn lithographic historical prints dated from 1959 when he was 74
years old. And Pierre Brissaud died 5 years later in 1964 at the age of 79.
That's it for now and I hope you found something here to hold your
interest. See you soon with more of one kind or another I hope.