Before I started making this series I had never encountered the distinctive and amusing
work of American illustrator Peter Newell and I'm guessing he'll probably be unknown
to most of you too.
He was born on a farm in Illinois in 1862, but a life of farming was not what Newell
had in mind, and he set about trying to get established as a magazine illustrator and
caricaturist.
But it was his lighthearted children's illustration which began attracting most of his commissioned
work and it was in this area that he had by far the greatest success.
By 1883 he had made enough money to be able to relocate to New York, where all the important
publishers were based and set himself up as a children's illustrator.
In the decade that followed he steadily built and consolidated a strong reputation for book
and magazine work.
In 1893 his innovative children's book Topsys and Turvys was published.
Newell created the book so the images could be read as different things when the book
was turned upside down. It proved very successful but he wasn't in any hurry to follow it up
and he carried on taking commissions for magazines and books.
In 1901 he illustrated John Kendrick Bangs' rewrite of the Baron Munchausen story, and
the series of comical evocative watercolours Newell created for these improbable adventures
drew yet more favourable attention.
He was extremely prolific at this time and in the same year his memorable editions of
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were published.
Like his colour work These illustrations were created as line and watercolour wash, but
they were printed as monochrome halftones and lack the same well-defined visual appeal.
He returned to full colour with the peculiar story The 20 Mule Team Brigade in 1904 and
a year later the book Mother Goose's Menagerie was published.
This time the black and white illustrations were created as pen and ink line only, giving
them greater clarity than his Alice images.
But it was Newell's series of vivid and precise colour images for this book which made it
one of the most memorable and visually satisfying of his career. Every one of these full page
illustrations contributed to making the book particularly successful.
But success was far from guaranteed and around the same time he also created a comic strip
titled The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead, which owed more than a little to Winsor McCay's
Little Nemo in Slumberland, but it managed only the briefest of runs.
He returned to more original concepts with The Hole Book in 1908.
This book had a supposed bullet hole cut out of the middle of it, and the subsequent pages
revealed its comical trail of destruction. This may or may not have been the first time
such a device was used in a children's book but it was certainly one of the most popular
and entertaining.
Not one to let the grass grow he followed this success up with the Slant Book in 1910.
This was another novelty book which was actually printed as a rhomboid and followed the chaos
caused by a baby carriage as it ran downhill.
And there was 1912's the Rocket Book, which worked on the same principle as the hole book
but of course this time the rocket had travelled vertically through the pages.
By this point Newell was a very successful and wealthy man but his opportunity to enjoy
the fruits of his labours was shorter than it might have been, as he died rather prematurely
at the age of 61 in 1924
In 1938 Time magazine proclaimed Howard Chandler Christy to be America's most commercially
successful artist of the day. So how he's come to be so quickly forgotten is a mystery.
He was born in 1872 in Morgan County, Ohio and went on to study at the Art Students League
in New York in 1890.
Only a year later he swapped courses for a spell at the National Academy and he subsequently
began his illustration career as a war artist.
He was sent to Cuba to create a series of illustrations of the Spanish–American War
of 1898. These dramatic images were published in several popular American magazines such
as Scribner's and Collier's Weekly.
These images propelled Christy to national celebrity, but he didn't particularly want
to be typecast as a war artist and instead built a new reputation for his evocations
of female beauty.
These illustrations were hugely successful and appeared regularly in books, magazines
and advertising. Although the women he painted at this time
were invariably beautiful they were far from being pinups and consequently they had broader
appeal, particularly to the female readers of the magazines and books.
When America joined forces with the allies during World War 1, military matters were
inevitably back on the agenda.
But this time he generally avoided painting scenes of conflict, and instead used his female
characters on rousing propaganda and recruitment posters as well as patriotic magazine covers.
When the war ended Christy returned to his romantic and historical commissions for books
and magazines and from 1920 onward he was also in great demand as a portrait painter
for those wealthy enough to afford his services.
He was a remarkably versatile artist who was equally at home working in oil paint, watercolours
or pen and ink. And although many of his paintings were incredibly precise and plausible on occasion
he seemed to enjoy more spontaneous expressionistic brush work.
Other than a handful of illustrations Christy seems to have had little time for line work,
and most of his monochromes were rendered tonally, usually in watercolour.
In 1934 he was commissioned to paint a series of female nudes to decorate large wall panels
in the New York City restaurant Café des Artistes.
These were a far cry from his earlier females and were explicitly erotic in their appeal,
even if designed to resemble classical art.
And the success of this commission led to many more featuring vibrantly rendered fantasy
nudes cavorting around all corners of the image.
But his move into erotica didn't do the reputation any harm and in 1940, he was commissioned
by the White House to paint the Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United
States.
During his long and spectacularly successful career Christy had been married twice, both
times to women who had modelled for him, and although he didn't make the same mistake again
he did live with the last of his models Elise Ford who was 40 years his junior and stayed
with him until he died - presumably with a smile on his face - at the age of 80 in 1952.
German political cartoonist and humorous illustrator Oskar Garvens was born in 1874 in Hanover
into a very wealthy family and he grew up in an atmosphere of indulgent affluence
In his teens he studied drawing and sculpture and when he had completed his studies around
the turn of the century he quickly became established as a sculptor of considerable
talent.
And for the best part of 20 years he created many figurative 3 dimensional works which
earned him a well deserved reputation.
But in 1919 at the age of 45 he turned away from sculpture towards satirical and political
cartoons.
Within a couple of years he had become a constant and frequent contributor to the satirical
magazine Kladderatsch.
Garvens' drawing style was particularly forward looking and economical.
He worked mostly with flat spot colour when he wasn't working in monochrome, and he had
a highly controlled fine linear approach that wouldn't look out of place in a contemporary
graphic novel.
I've been unable to dig out any verifiable information but it's highly likely that he
was creating these images direct onto lithographic stone.
If not he must have been using both pen and crayon or charcoal to achieve textured effects.
But whatever his methods and media the quality of his anatomical understanding, and
and visually fluency couldn't be debated.
During the 1920s and into the 30s most of the images he created for Kladdaredatch and
other German magazines were generally quite lighthearted, apolitical and sometimes comically
surreal.
But when Hitler's National Socialists came to power in 1933 his earlier playfulness disappeared
and it was soon replaced by a darker more cynical humour. As war grew ever closer his
images increasingly fell into line with Nazi ideology.
This illustration was titled the sculptor of Germany and a clear indication of the level
of Garvens support for the fuhrer and his antisemitism.
His illustrations became progressively more hostile towards Britain France and America,
and he used the supposed manipulative nature of Jews to convince readers that the coming
war was all their fault.
And once the war did begin in 1939 he continued in a similar vein up to the eventual collapse
of Kladderadatch and the rest of the Pro-Nazi magazines.
In 1945 When Hitler and Goebbels were dead, and Germany surrendered Garvens
knew his career was over and he disappeared into the shadows and died virtually forgotten
in 1951 at the age of 77.
French poster artist Jean Carlu was born in a small town just outside Paris in 1900.
He had planned to become an architect like his father and older brother, but in his teens
his right arm had to be amputated after a serious accident.
But showing a determination that few of us could hope to match he taught himself to draw
with his left hand, and simultaneously abandoned architecture in favour of illustration.
It took him a couple of years but by 1919 he had overcome his disability enough to get
a job at the Devambez advertising agency creating posters.
Although remarkable for having been painted with his left hand the early posters had little
about them that was distinctive.
But in 1921 when he illustrated a poster for the French release of Charlie Chaplin's film
the Kid, which attracted a lot of favourable attention.
Not long after he left the agency to work for himself and by 1925 was successfully creating
posters for a wide range of clients.
By this time Carlu was heavily influenced by Cubism, and this dovetailed nicely with
his own innate art deco inclinations.
From early on his shapes were bold and barely representational and colour was generally
flat and rarely naturalistic.
It's possible that the reason Carlu isn't better known is that he has tended to be overlooked
in favour of the more widely celebrated A. M. Cassandre.
But his work was every bit as dynamic and aesthetically pleasing, and it's worth pointing
out that he had already been using this style for 3 or 4 years before Cassandre created
his first poster.
Like others he was making use of the airbrush to achieve smooth and some textured tonal
effects, but it was by no means the dominant factor in most of his work, which also displayed
the widest possible colour application from the roughly expressionistic right through
to completely flat.
By this time his work had become known and highly regarded in other countries and in
the early 1930s he was invited to create covers for Vanity Fair in America.
Throughout the 1930s he continued to refine and push at the potential of his approach
and the posters he made in this period show an enviable level of persistent creativity
and experimentation.
When the second world war broke out he managed to get out of France before the German occupation,
and he went back to America again.
There he created more posters, many of which were patriotic propaganda for both America
and France.
Even those who don't know Carlu may well be familiar with this particularly iconic wartime
poster, which was also hijacked for a rock album cover in the early 1980s.
Even when the war had ended he stayed to work in America and didn't return to France until
1953.
By now he was an international success and his work was rightly seen as an example of
what modern poster art could be.
In this period he began creating posters for both Air France and Pan American airlines
and this kept him in the public eye well into the 1960s.
After this there was no more work from Carlu but he would have been 70 years old in 1970
so it's a reasonable assumption that he retired.
And Jean Carlu died in 1997 at the age of 97 since when his remarkable body of massively
influential work has been largely ignored.
that's that for this instalment, and I hope you'll be back for the next one.