In the first part of the art of
illustration we covered about 17 centuries and the innovations in printing which took us from here to
here ...and finally here.
But of course we know far more about recent times than the distant past.
So this time we'll only be covering not much more than a century in about the same amount of time.
As the 20th century began illustrators continued to revel in the newfound freedoms brought about by offset lithography
While the period didn't produce any innovations it did produce some striking illustration both in color and monochrome.
A lot of the work produced seemed to express a mood of nostalgia.
tThis was only to be expected in the fairy tale worlds evoked so
convincingly by the likes of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and
a romantic ruralism was certainly obvious in the meticulous watercolor illustrations of Beatrix Potter.
But the same mood permeated images aimed at adults, too.
Even when selling something as irrefutably modern as the motorcar
few were prepared to accept this was becoming a mechanised age.
Perhaps it was the prevailing influence of Alphonse Mucha, but it did appear that tradition and nature were the dominant themes
There was one area where this wasn't the case.
Comic strips at the time were primarily for adults and appeared in newspapers across Europe and particularly America
In the States Fred Opper produced some revolutionary
stylized cartoons which contrasted sharply with the anatomical precision of what had previously been seen.
But the artist who did more than any other to revolutionize the cartoon was George Herriman.
He created the strict Crazy Kat which featured outrageously loose characters in a desolate environment.
The strip was defined by surreal visual humor which played with concepts of time and space
and was based around an inherently violent love story.
This was also a period of global political unrest with any number of
territorial squabbles going on at any given time and
finally these squabbles coalesced into the first world war in
1914.
And on both sides of the conflict
illustration was co-opted into playing a role.
It was used as a psychological weapon to recruit men into the armed forces
to keep society going in their absence and of course to depict the enemy as vicious barbarians.
When this sorry episode ended in
1918 it soon became clear that the war had swept away one way of living and brought about another
and as we entered the twenties there was a broad acceptance of and even
enthusiasm for modernity.
This was most obvious in the design movement known as Art Deco.
And in illustration A. M. Cassandre
was rightly the most celebrated Art Deco stylist.
More than anyone else
he pushed at the boundaries of geometrical approaches to image making and still managed to preserve a broad aesthetic appeal in his work
Although Ludwig Hohlwein's illustration work was considerably less
geometric it showed similar interest in the aesthetics of minimalism and the potential of posterised color.
These two illustrators clearly led the field and many others followed suit
and other than the odd exception Deco and modernism appeared to have triumphed on a global scale
Even America and Japan came under his spell.
Both live action movies and animated films were born of the late Victorian age
but by the 20s they had come to dominate the world of entertainment.
And because photography still had some catching up to do it was almost exclusively illustrators who produced the film posters.
Predictably most were as crudely melodramatic as the films they promoted but occasionally potent images were created
which rival anything before or since.
This poster for Fritz Lang's Metropolis being a case in point
and the striking if racist poster for the first ever sound movie in
1928 shows just how radical illustration could be.
The 20s also saw the arrival of the first animated star of the silent movie era
Felix the Cat was little more than a series of circles and tubes which looked nothing like a cat
but was effectively the template on which many others including Mickey Mouse would be based.
All animated characters have to be created first as illustration
and similar to the demands of the comic strip must be capable of any number of poses and emotive facial expressions.
We've seen how earlier, but not much earlier children's books were largely backward-looking in terms of both content and style
but in 1928 children's illustrator Wanda Gag published the book millions of cats.
This is now recognized as the first modern picture book and with some justification
Gone was the formal relationship between typography and image instead the book was driven by the stylistically naive
but playful illustrations and the words were only there in support.
But like Lear before her it would be some time before anybody else cottoned on to this idea.
From an illustration perspective the30s saw little change, but all aspects of illustration continued to flourish.
America's flirtation with Deco and geometry turned out to be brief and in the mid thirties a new giant of
illustration first appeared in the form of Norman Rockwell.
His remarkably skillful paintings were unapologetically traditional in their approach
but it was his unerring ability to make you believe the scenarios he depicted
which endeared him to all America and much of the rest of the world.
Such was his popularity that other exceptional American illustrators of the period tend to be overlooked
The Incredible pen and ink work of magazine illustratorLee Conrey being just one example of this effect.
1938 saw the entrance of Superman originally created by Joel Shuster and Jerry Siegel.
The drawing wasn't up to much and the dynamic compositional potential of the medium was yet to be realized
but credit where it's due.
These were the first tentative steps towards what was to become a whole new popular art form in its own right.
In the same year Disney released Snow White the first color feature-length animation.
In addition to animators there were hundreds of concept artists, character designers,
storyboard and layout artists and background illustrators.
The quality of background art in Disney films became something of a trademark
and went a long way to make disney's dream of a motion fairytale book come true.
But a year later the world was at war once again, and this time there really were good guys and bad guys.
Hitler's Chief of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had orchestrated a relentless campaign
which dehumanized and vilified Jewish people and glorified traditional German nationalism.
The propaganda response from the allies during the war ranged from the saintly and heroic images of noble warriors
hrough to the comic mockery of the enemy and their leaders.
Eventually in 1945 the good guys won, and everybody tried to return to normal life.
America's visual identity continued to be shaped largely by representational illustration when it wasn't being shaped by photography
Rockwell was still the leading light of all things American
but as with Hohlwein and Cassandre in the 20s and 30s
many others in the States emulated the technique with varying degrees of success.
One of the most successful was Albert Dorne.
Like Rockwell he could draw and paint exceptionally well and used composition and the isolation of characters with equal success
Russian born Boris Artzybasheff applied his prodigious talent to a more surreal darkly humorous approach
involving the distortion of characters and frequently the morphing of them into machine based hybrids.
Although popular at the time he remains relatively unknown compared to his more mainstream contemporaries.
In Europe we tried desperately to cling to abstraction and geometry
but at best it could only be considered a rerun of the 20s and 30s.
Occasionally illustrators with more distinctive and expressive styles such as Edward Ardizzone and the massively influential Ronald Searle
broke the mould
but it did seem there was nowhere new left to go.
Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was published in
1963 and was a real shot in the arm for picture books and by association
illustration in general.
It was an immediate success across the world and remains a milestone of children's illustration.
The three robbers by Tomi Ungerer was actually published a year before
but tends to get overlooked because of the shadow cast by Sendak's success.
It was more stylistically challenging and recalled the radical approaches of both Edward Lear and George Herriman.
Ungerer is an interesting case not just because he represented an antidote to Rockwell and his disciples.
He was able to float freely across a wide area of the media without compromise.
There are press ads, magazine work and high-profile posters as well as his children's books and
notorious outings into Beardsley influenced pornographic imagery.
1967 saw the Arrival of Hippy culture
and for illustration
this was a brief of significant flowering of brightly coloured psychedelic imagery
Created in the Maine to support the music and underground lifestyle of the era.
And it looked for a while that it just might be a style revolution equal toArt Deco.
But it didn't translate well into the mainstream and by the early seventies the flame had pretty much gone out.
The years that followed constitute something of a wilderness for good illustration.
Despite what the hippies had tried to do there was no getting away from the fact that it was now a
postmodern world and the best you could do was reinvent the wheel and
photography had overtaken illustration as the dominant means of visual expression in the media.
But you can't photograph what doesn't exist so fantasy art of all kinds flourished.
Science-fiction books, comics and kids picture books weren't after all concerned with reality.
Frank Frazetta was the yardstick by which all other fantasy artists were measured.
His muscle-bound heroes and heroines were remarkably well evoked both in color and monochrome.
He's best known for the many book covers
he produced which were invariably dynamically composed and believable despite the impossible nature of his subjects.
His influence can clearly be seen in contemporary comic books and game concept art.
At the other end of the style spectrum there was the clear line style best represented by the Dutch
Illustrators Joost Swarte and Ever Meulen.
It wasn't exactly original sit owed an immense stylistic debt to Herge's
Tintin and the early comics such as Crazy Kat.
But it's unpainted mechanical approach has proved to be an enduring one.
In the year 1984 few of George orwell's dire predictions had actually come to pass
even if Ridley Scott used this concept in his TV ad for the Apple Mac computer.
The personal computer was of course a revolution which has come to equal if not surpassed Gutenberg's printing press
but as with colour printing in the 19th century not everyone was convinced so even into the 90s
successful illustration such as the comic book work of Frank Miller and Mike Mignola
and Josh Kirby's discworld book covers were produced traditionally.
Ironically even in early computer games concept art was predominantly hand drawn and painted
But digital means evolved more rapidly than anyone would have thought possible
and the device that has hammered the last nail into traditions coffin is the graphics tablet and stylus...
a computer screen you can draw and paint directly on to.
There will probably always be room for hand rendered illustration. Just as there are still people thatching roofs in rural England
But most illustrators working today
can't even remember a time when there weren't computers and paper and paint are almost prehistoric tools
To end the art of illustration I can think of no better way than to put together a cross-section of contemporary illustrations found online
If nothing else they demonstrate the illustration still has its uses and that
Illustrators will always rise to the challenge of whatever technological advance is thrown their way