Throughout its relatively short history American illustration had always been dominated by
images which demonstrated extraordinary levels of painterly skill and representation.
And despite the rapid encroachment of colour photography into the popular media this continued
to be the case in the 1950s.
The camera could faithfully record the subject but the skilful illustrator could provide
visual personality and tricks of exaggeration and emphasis in ways that the camera could
not.
No-one demonstrated this better than Norman Rockwell.
He had risen to prominence in the 1930s and by the 1950s he was easily the best known
illustrator in America .
His immense popularity was as much to do with the warm hearted patriotic ethos of the work
as his skill as a painter.
Although he used his immaculate brush technique to make his pictures seem real to the viewer
most of his characters anatomy and posing were actually exaggerated caricatures.
And rockwell wasn't the only successful traditionalist.
His arena had been primarily in magazines but Haddon Sundblom was better known for his
advertising campaign work.
Coca Cola wasn't his only client but they were the by far the biggest and most profitable.
His depictions of this rosy cheeked Santa Claus in particular have proven to be enduring
iconic images on a global scale.
His illustrations were uniformly breathtaking in the hyper realistic skill he demonstrated.
But Sundblom's reputation was based more on close ups and single figure work than on the
complex groupings frequently found in Rockwell's images.
Sundblom was also in demand for his rather coy pinup art and his stylistic approach had
an undeniably powerful impact on the man who was to become the most popular pinup artist
of all time.
Gil Elvgren
Although he had begun his career as another immensely talented all purpose illustrator
for advertising and publishing by the fifties cute females in varying degrees of undress
were his only subject.
Although it borrowed heavily from Sundblom there is real vitality in Elvgren's painting
and he built on a Sundblom classic technique of varying the precision of his brushwork
to focus and control the viewers' attention.
Like many illustrators he photographed his models to get the posing and lighting he wanted
but was not hidebound by it and added exaggerated lightly caricatured features to produce hyper
realistic effects.
Elvgren's pinups were in demand for any number of advertising projects but almost all his
work was commissioned for corporate wall calendars which were hung with enthusiasm by American
males in offices and workplaces across the states.
Albert Dorne's illustrations always showed great empathy for his fellow humans and he
used good natured humour to draw his audience in and engage with the subject.
He was no less skilful than the other realists but some of his illustrations were deliberately
less painterly and relied more on linear expression.
With Dorne in particular its easy to see that his characters are wildly exaggerated for
maximum humorous effect.
And Dorne was fond of frequently arranging his figures on virtually empty or at least
selective backgrounds giving them greater visual clarity and definition.
The graphic energetic work of Al Parker must be classified as representational but he had
a far more adventurous approach.
He worked in a wide range of media and took chances with some degrees of abstraction and
posterisation.
This gave his work a more distinctive less painterly look and maximised the graphic clarity
of all his illustrations on the page.
As such he was something of a hybrid and demonstrated that versatility could have its merits too.
Of course not all representational illustrators were as skilful as those at the top of the
pile.
Movie posters in general and particularly b movies and drive in films of the horror
and science fiction persuasion offered up some spectacularly cheesy imagery.
Similarly America had an insatiable appetite for racy novels also known as pulp fiction.
And these paperbacks were invariably sold featuring covers as lurid and provocative
as the stories they contained.
Comic books featuring superheroes such as Superman and Batman had first surfaced a decade
earlier but the fifties saw a massive explosion in both the popularity and diversity of subject
matter .
There were westerns, crime, science fiction, horror and even religious comics published.
Jack Kirby had created the highly successful superhero Captain America in the 1940s.
So its not without irony that in the 1950s kirby found his greatest commercial success
with teen girl romance comics
Kirby is rightly seen as a crucial figure in the development of comic art but it has
to be conceded his drawing was rather stiff and simplistic.
There were others who were far more adept with a brush or pen including Frank Frazetta
whose early comic work displayed an organic energy and precision far superior to that
seen elsewhere.
And Wally Wood was every bit as meticulous and created some of the finest examples of
comic art in the period.
Unusually he was able to hop between realism and cartoon humour with apparent ease.
And he demonstrated this with his contributions to Mad magazine.
First published in 1953 Mad was the brainchild of cartoonists Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder
who were soon joined by a list of other cartoon worthies such as Wood, John Severin and Jack
Davis.
In its infancy the magazine was relentlessly manic, almost exclusively in strip format
and poked fun at all aspects of American popular culture including other comics.
It was an instant hit with teens and young adults and paved the way for the underground
comix of the sixties.
Although Mad was an entirely new concept comic strips themselves had featured in newspapers
since the end of the previous century.
Peanuts by Charles Schultz made its debut in 1947 but in 1950 it was syndicated across
America and this is when its popularity went off the scale.
Shultz’s drawings were minimalistic and non-representational even by comic strip standards
but as with all the best scribbly illustrators his characters manage to be real in the viewers
mind.
Peanuts was easily the most successful of all the comic strips of the period but there
were plenty of others enjoying success such as the laconic humour of Walt Kelly's pogo
possum and Al Capp's raucous hillbilly series Lil Abner.
But nobody else seemed able to match Shultz’s ability to draw so little and say so much.
But with hindsight the most significant aspect of illustration in fifties America was the
unstoppable rise of a group of illustrators who had little time for painterly detail and
realistic anatomy.
They took their inspiration not from the old masters but from the
abstracton of Picasso, Matisse and Miro.
Jim Flora was arguably the prime mover in this modernist style and was best known for
the remarkably distinctive and idiosyncratic jazz album cover art he produced throughout
the 1950s.
Flora's illustration was bizarre, playful, comic, and occasionally sinister and he cheerfully
ignored all aspects of traditional illustration.
From 1955 onwards he wrote and illustrated a series of groundbreaking picture books with
the same crazed visually challenging approach.
There was The Fabulous Firework Family in1955, The Day the Cow Sneezed in 57, and 1959's
magnificently titled Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys.
These books were the first real signs in America at least that illustration could bear little
relation to reality and still have meaning for young readers.
And at precisely the same time the startlingly similar work of Cliff Roberts started making
an appearance.
Like Flora, Cliff Roberts' fascination with music was a defining feature of much of his
work.
His radical monochrome illustrations were used to great effect in the First Book of
Jazz published in 55.
Roberts generally used colour sparingly and with complete disregard for anything other
than its decorative power.
However this seahorse image for Ford motors is a clear indication of what he could achieve
if so motivated .
Roberts was adept in many creative pursuits and worked as an animator and character designer
for the equally modernist UPA animation studios.
That both Cliff Roberts and Jim Flora entered the public's consciousness at the same time
solidified the idea that this was a whole new stylistic movement and those striving
for painterly excellence should watch their backs.
Childrens publishing in particular fell for this new style virtually overnight.
In their lifetime Alice and Martin Provensen illustrated more than 40 picture books together,
half of which they also wrote.
They had been a couple both romantically and professionally since the early 40s and by
the 50s had become immensely popular.
In 1952, Martin designed the first now virtually unrecognisable version of Kellogg's Tony the
Tiger.
But it was their book work together which really made their reputation.
Although broadly speaking they were stylistically in line with the modernist stance their images
used abstraction and colour to make highly decorative and charmingly innocent narrative
illustration which held the young readers attention.
Mary Blair originally worked for Disney studios producing concept art for Cinderella in 1950,
Alice in Wonderland in 51 and Peter Pan in 53.
Her stylistic influence is strongly felt in those films, even if Disney back-pedalled
somewhat in the final productions from Blair's more enthusiastically geometric approach.
She left Disney in the mid fifties and began working as a freelance illustrator, creating
artwork for any number of advertising campaigns.
But it is her children's illustration which has proved to be her most enduring legacy.
As with the Provensens despite its geometric angular styling and virtual absence of perspective
there is real delight and humanity in all her work and an equally sensitive approach
to colour.
Eyvind Earle also joined Disney studios in 1951 as a background artist.
In 1953 he created the decidedly avant garde look of Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, a short
animated film which won an Academy Award.
He worked on several other Disney productions but most memorably he was responsible for
the radically modernist styling and background art for the highly acclaimed Sleeping Beauty.
Like Mary Blair, Earle's work had naturalistic aspects but was dominated by a resolutely
abstracted approach to form and colour producing a strikingly memorable and visually satisfying
hybrid technique.
Perhaps the most extreme and revolutionary of the modernist illustrators of the period
was Abner Graboff.
He had been working as a commercial artist and designer for a few years beforehand but
he came to far wider attention in 1954 with the success of his astonishingly radical illustrations
for a childrens book by Miriam Schlein titled The Sun Looks Down.
Graboff went on to illustrate and occasionally write quite a few others, each of which pushed
hard at the extremes of image making in a way not seen since Edward Lear a century earlier
Although just as driven by a broadly geometric approach to his work it was also much looser
in its application and its combination with more scribbly line work.
Stylistically you couldn't get any further from the painstaking approach of Norman Rockwell
and it's hard to see how these extremes could co-exist in the same decade in the same country.
But they did and ultimately it is the schizophrenic nature of American illustration from the 1950s
which created the diverse postmodern visual environment we now take for granted.