It shouldn't be much of a surprise that very few among us will have heard of Norwegian illustrator
Ragnvald Blix. Norway seems to be one of those countries that keeps a fairly
low profile, globally speaking. He was born in 1882 in Oslo,
the son of Elias Blix, a theologian and politician, and other than that his early
life is largely undocumented, although it is known he was entirely self taught in art.
Blix became the editor of the Norwegian satirical magazine Tyrihans in 1901at the remarkably young
age of 19. And by 1904 he had relocated to Paris where he began creating humorous
illustration for several newspapers and magazines including L'Assiette au Beurre and Le Rire.
He became particularly well known there for his series of comic parodies of famous works of art,
all of which featured his distinctive fine line work combined with various
flat mechanically applied colours. All the images in the series were
subsequently re-published with popular success as one collectible volume in 1908
But in that year Blix was tempted away from Paris to work for the popular
and highly regarded Munich-based satirical magazine Simplicissimus.
He had always been a great admirer of the older Norwegian cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson,
and because Gulbransson worked for the magazine Blix was keen to become a contributor.
And for a decade between 1908 to 1918 he made Munich his home and his always engrossing work
featured regularly and frequently in Simplicissimus's pages,
and he rapidly became one of their most popular contributors.
The work he created during this decade was extremely sophisticated,
and he deployed a powerful natural sense of aesthetics in his fine linear illustrations.
Quite a lot of what he produced for Simplicissimus was back and white only, and he created both
clean simple line work and more complex textured drawing. But just as frequently his
illustrations were published in colour, and like his art parodies this was applied at printing.
During the Great war he visited the topic only rarely and generally kept
to his more expected social satires. And when it ended in 1918 Blix returned to
Norway and became editor of a particularly obscure magazine, Exlex from 1919 to 1921.
Following the premature demise of Exlex he continued to create satirical and political
cartoons for several Norwegian papers, none of which I'm going to attempt to pronounce.
And he was still being published in Germany in the Berlin newspaper supplement Ulk.
But throughout the 1930s his images increasingly turned to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany,
which he was vehemently opposed to. And when Germany occupied Norway in 1940,
and the Norwegian government became their puppets Blix worked from the relative safety of Sweden,
from where he published yet more vitriolic anti-Nazi images using the name Stig Höök.
Following the end of the war Blix moved to Denmark, where his wife had been born,
and it's known that he carried on working for several more years,
but unfortunately I haven't been able to unearth a single visual example from this period.
And in 1958 Ragnvald Blix died in Copenhagen at the age of 76.
French illustrator Sylvain Sauvage is yet another who has become a virtual unknown,
despite the success he had during his lifetime.
There's virtually no information about his life and what little I could get was translated from
a very brief French Wikipedia entry so even that isn't necessarily all that reliable.
He was born in 1888 as Félix Roy in Baume-les-Messieurs in eastern France,
and where, when or even if he studied art isn't recorded.
The earliest dated work I've found was an edition of Voltaire's L'Ingenu in 1922.
By this time he would have been 34 so he either made a late entrance into
professional illustration or more likely the early work simply hasn't survived.
And from that point onward he created many illustrated books,
most of them classical French literature. But frustratingly although the publications
are recorded in many cases there's no visual evidence to show for it.
And the first to yield any pictorial material was an edition of the notorious erotic story Ernestine
written by the Marquis de Sade, which was published in 1926. And
oddly most of the pictures I can find, many of which were created as etchings,
give little suggestion of the sexually graphic nature of the text.
In 1929 he returned to more erotic material with a series of engravings and some colour
images to illustrate the amorous adventures of Casanova. And
although some of the images are on occasion fairly explicit,
they were stylised and created with enough visual charm to not appear to be particularly salacious.
Most of his work was reproduced using the pochoir stencil method printed on textured
papers to recreate the look of watercolour originals. but some were undoubtedly actual
watercolour applied in washes and printed lithographically.
And as well as his etchings he also produced work as woodcuts on occasion.
But whatever method was used his illustrations were possessed of
considerable aesthetic appeal.
Throughout the 1930s he remained productive, and in 1932 he published Le Florilège des
Dames, with yet more provocative images of young women.
Sauvage created what is arguably his most successful and enduring illustrated work with a
series of particularly absorbing colour pages for Rostand's tale Cyrano de Bergerac in
1936.
These complex and compelling compositions captured both the drama and light comic tone
of the text, and although also illustrated by many others both before and after his edition
remains easily among the best.
In the same year his suitably orientally styled edition of the story Madame
Chrysanthememe was published, followed in 1938 by his book about Louis 14th.
in 1944 he returned yet again to sexual themes for Contes et Nouvelles by Jean de la
Fontaine, and as far as I can tell his last published book was the Japanese-styled Pavillon
des Délices Regrettées by Yves Gandon in 1946.
And Sylvain Sauvage died two years later in1948 in Paris at the age of only 60.
Lovers of pulp fiction illustration will probably be aware of the work of Walter M.
Baumhofer, but despite being one of the greats of American realist illustrators
his memory certainly hasn't fared that well with a wider audience.
His mother and father were German immigrants and Baumhofer was born in 1904 in Brooklyn.
His artistic talent was obvious even in childhood and in 1922, at the age of only 16
Baumhofer was awarded a scholarship to study at the prestigious Pratt Institute.
In 1925, and still only 19 years old he began his career drawing
interior monochrome illustrations for the pulp magazine Adventure.
And within a year he had been elevated to the more sought after position of cover artist.
Which meant that not only was he paid more for his work but he also got to use his favoured medium,
which naturally enough as a realist was oil pain.
The scope of his pulp illustrations broadened considerably over the years
and there were very few genres he didn't have success with.
Among his more significant commissions was the large series of covers he created many for the
Doc Savage stories, but he became most closely associated with evocations of the old west.
Although some pulp artists never moved out of that market, the quality of Baumofer's technique
quickly attracted attention from the more upmarket glossy magazines, and his work began to feature
regularly in many of the better known, including The American Weekly, Collier's, and Cosmopolitan.
Even so he didn't completely abandon work for the pulps, despite the less than generous fees.
In 1945, Baumhofer and his wife moved to Long Island. and during the 1950s when the
pulp market was declining rapidly he made up the shortfall with work
for the new breed of men's adventure magazines, such as Argosy, and True.
In the late 1950s and early 60s magazine illustration in general was
taking a serious battering from colour photography and by this time Baumhofer
like many others was really feeling the pinch, as commissions began to diminish.
So he felt obliged to give up on illustration, and instead he worked as an artist, producing quite
a few oil paintings for fine art galleries and private commissions. And he carried on with his
painting well into later life with great success, and Baumhofer died in 1987 at 83 years old.
English illustrator and artist Stanley Roy Badmin was born in London in 1906.
His actual surname was Badman but his father changed it to avoid ridicule, so Stanley was
known as Badmin by the time he went to study at Camberwell and the Royal College of Art.
He began his career as an illustrator in the later
1920s with contributions to magazines including the Graphic and the Tatler.
He was also set on a career in art, and he gained a well earned reputation for
the quality of his etchings of the English countryside.
But his creative activities didn't generate a particularly large income and he also
taught at a couple of art schools to bring in some regular money throughout the decade, while
he continued to hone his abilities and become more established as both an artist and an illustrator.
By 1935 his reputation had grown somewhat
and in that year Badmin was offered a major commission from the American magazine, Fortune.
The magazine paid for him to travel to the USA and then from location to location
to depict various buildings of historic interest
and the results were both printed in the magazine and exhibited in New York, in early 1936.
Following this significant high profile success he returned to England and in 1937
he collaborated on the book Highways and Byways of Essex. This was certainly a Less glamorous
and profitable commission than his work in the USA but no less creatively worthwhile.
Despite this recent success in 1939 he was still living with his parents and when the
war broke out in that year he joined the Ministry of Information, followed by a stint with the RAF.
Nevertheless it seems he continued to publish illustration during the war,
and how he managed this I have no idea.
He wrote and illustrated three books for Puffin, all about the British countryside, and these are
considered to be among his most attractive pieces. They were certainly among his most popular.
Badmin worked primarily in watercolour, and although representational I'm not sure you
would call it strictly realistic, as it was quite mannered in its descriptive qualities,
and seemingly deliberately naive on occasion.
The book and magazine work he had produced to date created a strong reputation which led to
demand from the world of advertising, where his idealised evocations of English towns,
villages and landscape were used in several press advertising campaigns.
From 1945, Badmin worked increasingly as a commercial artist,
designing press ads and posters, and creating illustrations for greeting cards and calendars.
His style also became familiar to the British travelling public
through his work for London Transport and a series of posters for British Railways
In the later 1950s he also found time to embark on several major illustration projects for Shell Oil.
The first of these was Geoffrey Grigson’s The Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs in 1958.
And beginning in 1960 he produced a particularly evocative four volume
series titled Shell Guides to the Counties.
I don't know if this was his last project but if it was I can't think of a better legacy,
and Stanley Roy Badmin died in Bignor, West Sussex, in 1989 at the age of 83.
So it's goodbye for now and hopefully I'll be back with another fairly soon.