The illustrator known as Willy Pogány was born in 1882 as Vilmos
András Feichtmann in Szeged,Hungary. He had early ambitions to become an
engineer but he spent much of his youth drawing and painting and eventually went on to study
art in Munich and then Paris, where he tried and failed to attract any attention to his paintings..
In 1903, he changed his surname to Pogány for reasons I've been completely unable to find out,
but in that year his first published illustrations appeared in a book of Turkish Fairy Tales.
It featured a series of skilfully executed pen and ink monochromes of considerable sensitivity.
And there were also several pages printed with a limited palette of flat colours which
were far heavier and rendered in what looks very much like colour woodcuts.
At this time London was by far the biggest centre for the publication of illustrated books,
and Pogany managed to get together enough money to leave Paris for London,
in the hope of more regular work.
He was far from an overnight success, but in 1906 he was commissioned to produce a large
volume of monochrome line illustrations for The Welsh Fairy Book by W. J. Thomas,
which was published a year later. And the book also featured a watercolour
frontispiece which clearly showed his facility with that medium.
In 1908 Pogany got married and had two more successful books published.
A Treasury of Verse for Little Children contained another series of full page monochromes,
all of which were well composed and featured particularly graceful calligraphic line work.
And in this book there were several more highly decorative and atmospheric
colour plates rendered with ink and tonal watercolour which gave the book considerably
greater appeal to the young readers, even if it did raise the price considerably.
Perhaps most significantly for his early career the same year saw the publication of Pogany's
remarkable visualisation of Goethe's Faust. This dark moralist tale of a man who sells his soul
to the devil could not have been further from the light fantasy tone of his children's work.
The book contained a large number of uniformly memorable pen and watercolour wash illustrations,
each of them attractively and dramatically composed with particularly well evoked lighting.
And this collection gave a clear indication of the persistence of
Pogany's creativity and natural affinity for narrative continuity.
This was the start of a period of intense productivity and among others in 1909 he
created both watercolour paintings and simpler line drawings for an
edition of Nathaniel Hawthorn's Tanglewood Tales.
But it was also in that year that his illustrated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was published,
and the inclusion of orientally styled hand lettering and page decoration contributed to
making this a milestone in both Pogany's career and the publication of gift books in Britain.
Once more Pogany's dexterity with watercolours and narrative
subjects were harnessed with immense creative success throughout the book.
All the images were predominantly scenic, but included smaller figures within the compositions,
and the book sold well and was highly regarded among the better off in Britain at the time.
The level of his popularity in this market was by the turn of the decade
rivalling that of Rackham and Dulac and in 1910 the collection titled Folk Tales
from Many Lands was published with yet more agreeable formally delineated monochromes,
and the by now expected atmospheric full colour pages to accompany the various stories.
But as with the previous years Omar Khayyam this year's runaway major
creative achievement was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samual Taylor Coleridge.
This particularly dark epic poem provided Pogany with the perfect opportunity to create a series of
dramatic illustrations which were instantly considered to be classics of their kind.
As with the Rubaiyat it wasn't just the illustrations themselves which made this book
such a desirable volume. The design of the pages, intricate borders and the palette of colours used
in their decoration combined with the narrative work to make this a major creative achievement,
and yet another runaway success which set the bar for others to attempt.
Obviously not one to rest on his laurels between 1911 and
1913 Pogany published illustrated editions of the nordic mythological tales which had
been used for the operatic works of the composer Richard Wagner.
Tannhauser was the first and set the tone for the whole project. Once more the reader couldn't fail
to be seduced by sympathetically designed page decorations and text and an abundance of rousing
heroic imagery rendered in full colour, limited colour and pure linear monochrome.
Parsifal followed a year later with equally irresistible qualities and
the last visualisation of this romantic mythological trilogy Lohengrin appeared in 1914.
When viewed as an interconnected trilogy Pogany's visualisation of these tales was every bit as
emotionally charged and accomplished as the music which had inspired them. And
the apparently limitless graphic variation he brought to this body of engrossing illustration
has rightly led to it being considered one his greatest and most enduring achievements.
In addition to this monumental and iconic volume of work he had even found time for other lesser
demanding projects including re-tellings of both Robinson Crusoe and Hiawatha with suitably amended
storylines as whimsical picture books, with young children in the eponymous roles in 1914.
In that year Britain and France declared war on Germany,
and whether that was the reason I don't know, but Pogany left for the USA.
The reputation he had acquired in the previous decade in Britain made this an easy transition
and following his arrival More Tales from the Arabian Nights was published in 1915.
The watercolours he created for this book were every bit as engaging as his earlier successes,
and in this instance he seized the opportunity to further enhance the notion of exotically oriental
romance offered by the text. But although his settings and costumes spoke of Arabic culture,
the majority of his characters and particularly the females were patently of western origin.
Pogany's compositional skills were well to the fore in this publication
and he was highly selective about what elements were and were not included.
He produced an equally engrossing collection of colour full page illustrations of various
scenes taken from the Old Testament for the book Bible Stories to Read
and Tell which was published a year later. I found no references to Pogany's approach
to historical research or for that matter his use of life models to inform his work,
but the end results of these projects speak volumes about the effectiveness of his methods.
Pogany's illustrations were also featuring in the pages and on the covers of various
American mainstream magazines and his flair for the romantic and exotic was
also harnessed frequently for advertising work in a series of colour press ads.
And in a run of remarkable productivity Pogany's
illustrations for Padraic Colum's The King of Ireland's Son were also published in 1916.
As was now the virtual template for all his published work this book contained a mix of
clean expressive linear renders interspersed with atmospheric colour page inserts.
A year later Pogany indulged his obvious interest in classic fantasy literature with
his his interpretation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. And although there were
also some line only illustrations the great majority of images in this volume were painted
and reproduced in full colour throughout. His work was by this point a truly international success,
and the books he illustrated sold in large numbers in both the USA and Europe in large numbers. And
there was no letting up of the remarkable levels of his creative productivity.
In 1918 Pogany worked with Paidrig Colum again on a retelling of the Adventures of
Odysseus for which he produced a collection of plausibly neo-classical formal line illustrations.
But the days of the lavishly produced gift book was clearly over and the book
couldn't hope to be as visually impressive as his pre-war output.
For the next few years he also designed scenery and costumes
for various productions at the Metropolitan Opera and in 1921
Pogany became a naturalised American citizen. Despite his many other commitments and commissions
he continued to occasionally create magazine covers and yet more press advertising,
and in 1922 he collaborated again with Paidrig Colum on The Children of Odin. This was another
particularly sparse but expressive monochrome line only collection of Nordic mythical imagery.
In the same year he unveiled his murals for the August Heckscher Children's
Theatre. These enormous paintings depicted scenes and characters from various iconic Fairy tales,
and even setting aside his other ongoing work this must have been a major commitment and achievement.
The Legend of the Tulip,A collection of children's stories by Isidora Newman was
published in 1926 and featured some attractive but atypically loose watercolour illustrations.
And in the same year he returned to classically styled line work with a collection of erotic pen
and ink illustrations with an obvious nod in the direction of art nouveau decadent
Aubrey Beardsley for the Songs of Bilitis, originally written by Pierre Louys in 1894.
By the later 1920s he had all but abandoned his earlier tonal watercolour work,
and Willy Pogány’s Mother Goose in 1928 showed an altogether different approach to image making.
It seems he had been influenced by the cultural advance of modernism, also known as Art Deco,
or at least had been prepared to adapt to this change in the direction of prevailing fashion.
But whether or not this had been a calculated move on his part to stay relevant ultimately
made little difference as both the colour work and bold black and whites he produced for this volume
revealed he was every bit as adept with this as with his earlier more overtly painted style.
Other than the attractive colour endpapers he created, his 1929 visualisation of Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was entirely black and white, and stylistically appeared rather
undecided with a technique which hovered somewhere between his older and newer visual approaches.
The world of advertising still manifestly preferred to harness the exotic and romantic
appeal of his watercolour paintings to sell their products. But the two books
he had published in 1930, Casanova Jones by Joseph Anthony, and Magyar Fairy Tales,
written by his brother Nandor, remained resolutely monochrome and by his own standards unexceptional.
By this point in his career Pogany was also working as an art director for several Hollywood
films including a couple of Busby Barkley extravaganzas Fashions of 1934 and Dames,
and his illustration career took somewhat of a nosedive as a consequence.
It would be another two years before his next significant book illustrations were published in
a 1936 edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. These romantic verses
brought out the best from Pogany with a series of emotionally charged watercolours, and among them
was this remarkably candid miniature masterpiece which must have seemed fairly risqué at the time.
And after another 2 years in 1938 he returned to his more folk art naive styling for a
very attractive edition of Alexander Pushkin's story, The Golden Cockerel.
And the brightly coloured results made for an engaging playful series.
He had earlier divorced his first wife and subsequently got re-married to the writer
Elaine Cox and in 1939 he collaborated with her on an animated short featuring the young
woodland faun character Peterkin, produced by Walter Lantz, and in the following year a book
was published. But the book used the original cel painted frames, laid over watercolour backgrounds,
and the result was some way distant from what they might have been if painted by Pogany himself.
In the mid 40s Pogany published a trio of books on various aspects of drawing and painting and they
proved popular with many aspiring illustrators who were trying to improve their skills.
And at this time he was working regularly for the popular magazine The American Weekly.
In 1944 he created a series of zodiac themed pinup girl images,
and several other themed colour covers. In 1947 he also produced tis cheerfully
provocative but far from vulgar nude for a calendar.
Around the turn of the decade his work for the American Weekly featured a particularly
popular set of Shakespearian covers emphasising the bard's female characters,
and the series not only showed that he clearly hadn't lost any of his earlier talent for the
use of watercolour or his Hollywood style flair for romance and glamour.
His last published illustrations were for his sister's book The Art Of Hungarian Cooking in
1954, and Willy Pogany died in New York City in 1955 when he was 73 years old.
Given the dizzying heights he had attained during his remarkably diverse and prolific career it's a
great pity that Pogany didn't leave the stage on a more creative high point for an epitaph,
but even so most of us would happily settle for just a fraction of his talent and the
success he had enjoyed in both creative and financial terms. And I think its
fair to say that the high points he had created along the way more than
entitle Pogany an enduring place among the giants of 20th century illustration.