Federico Seneca was one of Italy's most distinctive 20th century masters of poster art.
But for some reason outside his home country his memory hasn't endured as well as it should
have.
He was born in the town of Fano in 1891 and he studied at the Royal Institute of Fine
Arts in Urbino until 1911.
He then took a job teaching art and also began to tentatively try his luck creating posters.
Although he had some limited success there was little about these early images that was
particularly memorable.
But having been fortunate enough to survive his time as a pilot in the Great War he began
to develop an altogether more radical and distinctive stylistic approach.
In 1920 Seneca started working in the advertising studio of the chocolate manufacturers Perugina,
and it was with his work for the company that his style began to evolve.
It was far from an overnight transformation but his images became increasingly abstracted
and in particular the art movement futurism which was prevalent in Italy at the time had
an obvious influence on his output. Also prevalent was the rise of Italian Fascism under Mussolini
and there are some examples of his graphic support for the movement.
In 1925 the company merged with the pasta makers Buitoni, and naturally enough Seneca
started creating similarly daring posters for them too.
And between these two divisions of what had become the same corporation he was kept more
than busy for the next 12 years up to 1933, when he left to set up his own advertising
agency in Milan.
And although working independently he was in the fortunate position of having Perugina
and Buitoni as continuing clients while steadily building a broader client base.
Among them were several of Italy's more high profile businesses, many of whom were also
from the food and drink industry, although there were also several mainstream Italian
industrial manufacturers.
But in 1936, for reasons I can't imagine he dissolved the company and set up a new business
venture working in plastics. And he didn't return to creating posters until 1950, when
his plastics business eventually floundered. And for the rest of his career he worked as
a consultant for another advertising agency, and enjoyed yet more success in that capacity
with very successful campaigns for a long line of major clients up to 1958.
What he did after this I have no idea, although there is visual evidence that he also created
sculptures, but whether these were created before or after the illustrations I haven't
been able to find out.
And The only information I could find about his later life was that he retired to a small
town just south of Lake Como in 1969 and he died in 1976 at the age of 85.
French illustrator and artist Edy Legrand was born as Édouard Léon Louis Warschawsky,
in Bordeaux in 1892 to a French mother and a Jewish Russian father.
After finishing his studies at the École des Beaux Artes in Paris and the Art Academy
in Munich, Legrand lived and worked in Paris as an illustrator, almost exclusively in publishing.
In 1919, when he was 27 years old, he published his first children's picture book Macao et
Cosmage, subtitled the Experience of Happiness.
This was a series of highly stylised exotic images which were coloured using the pochoir
stencil method in collaboration with the printmaker Jean Saudé .
This collection is rightly now seen as one of the milestones in the history of illustrated
children's picture books and it's been reprinted numerous times since. There's no doubt that
this book was considerably ahead of its time and it has proved to be remarkably influential.
His next publishing success was Voyages and Glorious Discoveries of the Great French Navigators
and Explorers in 1921, which featured a series of brightly coloured angular illustrations
in a wide variety of aesthetically considered page layouts.
But despite his success as an illustrator he simultaneously followed a path as an artist
and enjoyed success in that capacity too.
In 1926 Legrand's illustrated edition of Pierre Dominique's, Les Danubiennes was published
with a series of deceptively gestural line and wash drawings.
And using a similar but far more detailed technique he illustrated the children's story
The Lion's Glasses, written by Charles Vitrac and published in 1932.
The following year he travelled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa and spent
at least some of any given year in Morocco for the next 2 decades.
Legrand's visualisation of Dante's Divine Comedy was published in 1938 and this series
of dramatic monochromes successfully brought this vision of hell to life.
And the following year he was commissioned to produce 5 volumes of Shakespeare's tragedies
for the George Macy Limited Editions Club.
I can find no record of what Legrand did during the second world war but once the war had
ended he spent a large part of the 1950s in New York, from where he continued his association
with the Limited Editions Club and created illustrations for several other American publishers.
Among many highlights were the 12 watercolours he created for the Plague by Albert Camus,
published in 1950.
And in the same year his illustrations for Cervantes's tale of Don Quixote was published
by the Heritage Press, and this series of complex line and subtle wash images was quite
rightly critically acclaimed as a highly distinctive visualisation of the narrative.
In the 1950s and 60s a large volume of Legrand's output focussed on religious themes. He produced
an extensively illustrated edition of the Bible with a series of suitably thoughtful
and dramatic monochromes and he also created a contemporary interpretation of the medieval
book The Imitation of Christ.
The last dated book I've found is 1964's The small flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi.
And Edy Legrand died in 1970 at the age of 78 in Bonnieux, in the south of France.
American illustrator and author Helen Sewell was born in 1896 in Mare Island, California
into an affluent family, although she spent a lot of time on the island of Guam, where
her father was the governor.
Tragically, she was orphaned at the age of 8, and was subsequently taken in by another
already large family.
She later studied at the Pratt Institute, and her first book was published in 1923,
when she was 27 years old.
The book was The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales, written by Susanne
Langer. It contained many simple but effective line illustrations throughout and it proved
to be the first of many, some of which she wrote and some which were written by others.
So the best I can do is highlight just a few in chronological order and choose from those
that are decently represented by images. Unfortunately quite a few are not.
A Head for Happy, which she also authored, was published in 1931 with some agreeably
absurd monochrome spot illustrations, and a radically minimal use of text that has now
become commonplace but was far from usual at this time.
In the following year she illustrated Little House in the Big Woods, the first of several
books for the writer Laura Ingalls Wilder.
This proved to be a very productive partnership and their collaboration produced quite a few
more such as Farmer boy in 1933 and 1935's Little House on the Prairie, which was later
made into a long-running TV show.
Sewell was remarkably prolific and 1934 saw 2 publications, with Bluebonnets for Lucinda,
written by Frances Clarke Sayers which was popular enough to be reprinted several times.
And in the same year a version of Cinderella, for which I can only find the cover.
Peter and Gretchen of Old Nuremberg by Viola Jones was published in 1935, and this book
contained a particularly distinctive and attractive set of images which combined hatching and
stippling techniques with an attractive limited palette of flat colours.
In 1936 Ten Saints, written by Eleanor Farjeon was published featuring a series of highly
stylised colour illustrations evoking medieval woodblock printing
And in 1937 she returned to the softer side of her technique with American editions of
The Magic Hill, and The Princess and the Apple Tree, both written by Winnie the Pooh author
A. A. Milne.
Sewell tackled more adult fiction in 1940 with her stippled monochromes for Jane Austen's
novel Pride and Prejudice, and in 1942 she created some dynamic and once again quite
angular two colour illustrations for the Book of Myths.
She returned to more expected children's material with Elizabeth Coatsworth's
The Big Green Umbrella in 1944 and her creativity and productivity showed no signs of diminishing
into the late 1950s with more successes including 3 Tall tales, and a particularly distinctive
colour visualisation of Alice Dalgliesh's The Thanksgiving Story.
In1957 she published Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility which proved to be her last illustrated
project, and she died in that year in New York at the age of only 61.
American illustrator Garrett Price was born in Bucyrus, Kansas in 1896 but a few years
later his family relocated to Saratoga, Wyoming and that's where he grew up.
Although he drew enthusiastically throughout his childhood, he later went on to attend
the University of Wyoming to obtain some other unspecified degree.
But once he had graduated he headed for the Art Institute of Chicago, and having completed
his studies there he found a job as a reporter and cartoonist for The Kansas City Star, before
moving on to the Chicago Tribune.
In the early 1920s he also started contributing to various magazines, and most significantly
In 1925 he began working for the New Yorker in its first year of publication.
He created a couple of quite graphically stylised modernist covers and became a regular contributor
of monochrome jokes for the interior pages.
At the same time he also featured regularly in the humour magazine Life, and was one of
the illustrators responsible for reviving the magazine's previously dated appeal. The
covers he created were lighthearted caricatured depictions of the young and carefree characters
of the Jazz Age produced in line and wash and usually set within large flat coloured
areas.
His monochrome cartoon work relied on a particularly fine linear technique which resonated with
the slender fashion illustrations of the day, and despite its comedic nature revealed a
high level of expressive anatomical understanding.
Oddly, this talent was hard to discern in his comic strip White Boy, which was first
published in 1933. The strip featured a teenager who had been captured and raised by native
Americans. And despite its less than dynamic graphic styling it ran for about 3 years.
Life magazine ran aground in 1934 but the new Yorker remained a regular source of income.
By this time his style had become noticeably looser. He was still creating covers with
ink and wash but he was now using a far more gestural technique, and this would remain
his favoured - although not exclusive - approach for the rest of his career.
During the second world war he created some domestic war propaganda, but the New Yorker
would continue to be his main platform and source of income.
And from the mid 1940s onward his now exclusively organic painting technique was used to great
effect on a significant number of the magazine's covers.
In the 1950s and into the 1960s he also illustrated a handful of light comic novels, including
a couple written by Frances Gray Patton, and 3 for the Miss Coverlet series written by
Mary Nash.
In later life he and his wife moved out to Westport Connecticut, and although he continued
to contribute to the new Yorker his output slowed down somewhat.
And Garrett Price finally retired in 1973, the year his wife died, and he joined her
in 1979 when he was 82 years old.
Which brings us to the end of this one and I hope we meet again for the next one.