Stanley Clarke Hutton was born into a middle class family in London in 1898 but in his
professional life he dropped the name Stanley, and was just known as Clarke Hutton.
It appears he avoided the Great War somehow and in 1916 when he was 18 years old he started
work as an assistant stage designer at the Empire Theatre in London's West End and he
continued to work there for the next 10 years.
But following a trip to Italy in 1926 he decided to attempt a career as an artist.
So the following year he took a traditional lithography course at the Central School of
Art in London and not long after he began putting what he had learned into practice
with a series of commissions for the children's Picture Puffin imprint at Penguin books.
And it was illustration rather than art with which he became most successful, although
he did continue making limited edition prints and watercolours.
Because his illustrations were produced with time-consuming traditional lithography rather
than offset full colour he wasn't as prolific as others but nevertheless he managed to create
about 50 visually distinctive books during his career.
It wasn't only children's book work and in 1934 He illustrated the novel, Mon Repos by
Nicholas Bevel.
A year later he illustrated 2 volumes of comic verse written by Douglas Byng, with some suitably
bright absurd compositions.
Presumably considered too old to fight, Hutton also remained a civilian during the Second
World War and continued to create books such as his collection of comical interpretations
of nursery rhymes, published in 1941.
And he followed this a year later with a book about acting titled Punch and Judy.
In 1945, when the war ended he collaborated with Noel Carrington on the illustrated book
Popular English Art.
And in the same year he illustrated his first pictorial history book for Oxford University
Press. This was A Picture History of Britain, which was one of their most popular publications
at the time. And he created more for similar books in the same series and others with a
historical theme up to 1966.
He was remarkably prolific in the postwar years and among other successes he created
a popular re-telling of Noah and the Flood for children in 1946, still using the traditional
lithographic process.
There was also a dramatic visualisation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, not much
later.
And he returned to childrens work in 1948 for the eductional book The Story of Tea,
and the more frivolous The Circus is Coming, by Noel Streatfield.
In The later 1950s and 1960s Hutton seems to have favoured more serious minded fiction
such as 1960's The Beach at Falesa, written by Robert Louis Stevenson some 70 years previously.
And this later work, including books by Mark Twain, Charlotte Bronte and Sir Walter Scott
used a far more expressionistic technique than previously.
The last dated book I found was 1971's edition of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and although
different sources disagree about the year of his death 1984 seems the most likely, at
which point he would have been 86.
French illustrator Charles Gesmar had a particularly brief life, which usually leads to widespread
posthumous adulation, but he seems to have been the exception to the general rule.
He was born as Charles Geismar into a Jewish family in Nancy in 1900 , and even by the
age of 11 he had enrolled at the city's school of applied arts.
When war broke out in 1914 the Geismar family moved to Paris and it was there, when he was
still only 15 years old, that Charles met the actress and dancer Andrée Spinelly, who
was so impressed with his drawings she asked him to design all her costumes.
And over the next couple of years, he quickly became a ubiquitous presence in costume, set
and poster designs for the massively popular Parisian cabaret.
His youth and by all accounts unstable character led to many temperamental outbursts, and during
a more than usually heated argument with Spinelly in 1917 he fired a pistol, supposedly in an
attempt to shoot himself. But he only managed to put a hole in the toilet cistern and flooded
her home instead.
She was understandably far from amused and she terminated both their friendship and his
employment. But despite his growing reputation for instability
yet another female show business icon of the time known by all as Mistinguett, took him
on as her costume designer and exclusive poster artist, and in that capacity he was remarkably
productive.
It appears she had a rather motherly affection for the young man, describing him as gentle
and ultra-sensitive.
And in addition to the large volume of work he created directly for his new employer he
was in great demand by all the main music halls in Paris for posters, publicity material
and costumes for many other stars of the Paris Music Hall.
In late 1923 Gesmar sailed to New York with Mistinguett. And while living it up in the
city he designed all the costumes for the revue Innocent Eyes, which was launched in
Atlantic City in 1924, followed by a very popular regional run in other states and cities.
The following year, through his costume and set designs he made a telling contribution
to the re-opening of the famous Moulin Rouge, which had been closed for a decade, and he
was hailed as being vital to the cabaret's rebirth.
Orders for costume designs and posters for theatres and cabarets across continental Europe
followed hot on the heels of this success, and he quickly became very wealthy from his
international commissions, along with the work he was still producing in Paris.
According to Mistinguett's memoirs he spent the money at an alarming rate, and among other
extravagances and vices he developed a taste for opium.
And as with quite a few later rock and movie stars Gesmar was one of those figures who
burned brightly but briefly and he died in 1928, just before his 28th birthday.
Richard Floethe was born in 1901 in Essen Germany but he spent most of his adult life
working in the USA.
For reasons I can't begin to imagine all the sources I found focus almost exclusively on
his career in art rather than illustration, and even the Richard Floethe website doesn't
show a single example of his playful illustrations for books. I'm going to try to redress that
shameful imbalance here.
Between 1920 and 1925 he trained in printmaking and painting at various art academies throughout
Germany including the Bauhaus, and after working freelance in Germany he left for New York
City in 1929 in the hope of finding greater success in the USA.
On his arrival he worked briefly for a New York advertising agency, but not much later
he began a career as an artist and freelance illustrator.
In 1934 his coloured woodcuts for the German folk tale Till Eulenspiegel won the Limited
Editions Clubs illustrated book of the year and this success drew significant attention
to his illustration work.
Floethe's rapid success in art and illustration led in 1936 to him being appointed as director
of the Federal Art Project's poster division, although his work for them was more administrative
than creative.
In 1939 he bought a farm in Middletown, New York with his wife Louise Lee, from where
he continued to paint and publish.
And in 1946 arguably his most compelling and enduring illustrated book was published. This
was an edition Carlo Collodi's 19th century tale of Pinocchio. These narrative illustrations
were created with flat coloured shapes, which nevertheless had emotional power and illuminated
the narrative with great empathy. And they were ably supported by many monochromes using
the same blockish technique. I've been unable to find verification but it seems highly likely
these were created as woodcuts.
A year later he published a whimsical monochrome line illustrated edition of the tales of Boccaccio,
and in 1951 The World's Best Limericks with a series of similarly minimal brushed line
spot illustrations.
During the rest of the decade, in addition to his ongoing work as an artist Floethe illustratated
several other books including 1956's simplistic but visually inventive Wumpy's Christmas Gift,
written by Nancy Nash.
Floethe and his family had relocated to Sarasota, Florida in 1950 and from that base he and
his wife began to travel widely around the USA and further afield to exotic places including
South America, Asia and the Caribbean.
And as author and illustrator they collaborated on a total of 23 books. The last was Jungle
people, about life in Surinam, which was published in 1971.
During the last decade of his life, Floethe concentrated on his art and he died in 1988
when he was 87 years old. I mentioned American pinup artist Zoë Mozert
in my women in illustration video but I subsequently realised her work is well worth a more detailed
look
She was born in Colorado Springs in 1907 and her actual name was Alice Adelaide Moser,
but she changed it to her more exotic alias before embarking on her illustration career.
In 1925 she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and also did some
life modelling to pay for her art education.
Very little is written about her early career and the only significant information I can
find is that following graduation in 1928 she set up her own shop window display business.
Following this unlikely sounding beginning in 1932 she relocated to New York to find
work as an illustrator.
Quite quickly she was given commissions for True Story magazine.
The following year she won a scholarship to the Art Students' League but even while studying
there she also continued to build her portfolio and client base with work for other pulp magazines.
And in the mid 1930s she was taken on as a staff artist at True confessions. And during
her tenure she produced a large volume of illustration, including many covers featuring
saturated colour portraits of the stars of the day.
But this didn't prevent her continuing to work for other magazines with glamorous and
racy subjects.
By 1937 she was well established and earning a very good living from this work, which had
paid for her luxury apartment in Greenwich Village.
In 1941, Brown & Bigelow bought Mozert's first pinup and signed her to an exclusive 15 year
calendar contract. From that point on it was pin up art which dominated her output.
In terms of her technique, she had been inspired by the glamour work of Rolf Armstrong. He
used pastels with great skill and precision and she decided early on to emulate his approach.
Many of the images Mozert created for calendars were also reprinted as postcards, and the
popularity of her work inevitably led to a number of commissions for press advertising
campaigns targeted at the female market.
In 1945 she moved again to California, where she also picked up some poster work for several
Hollywood movies.
One of her most publicised and notorious posters was for Howard Hughes' production of the Outlaw,
featuring a smouldering image of the film's female star Jane Russell, which ran into some
censorship problems at the time.
In her pinup calendar work Mozert was frequently her own model, using cameras or mirrors to
capture the pose. And when this became widely known through a Colliers magazine article
it only added fuel to the idea that she was herself somewhat of a siren, and her own body
became as famous as the art she created.
None of the sources I used reveals at what point Zoë Mozert retired, but I haven't found
any images beyond the mid 1960s. And All I can tell you with any authority is she died
in Flagstaff Arizona 1993 at the age of age 85.
That's another four for the archive and with luck there will be four more in the not too
distant future. I hope to see you then.