U. S. Illustrators

Last week was an active week for U. S. illustrators. At its club house on Manhattan's West 24th Street, the big happy family known as the Society of Illustrators neared the end of a month of sober lectures by technicians including non-illustrators Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Reginald Marsh. At the swank Park Lane its members reveled until dawn in gay costume at their annual "Bal Scramboree." And at the Grand Central Fifth Avenue Art Galleries the society put on its 37th annual exhibition, prefaced by a defensive program note. "These men are first-class craftsmen in a most difficult field," it said defiantly, "but the art critics and the plush carpeted galleries know them not."

Even the plushiest art critics agree: that since the time of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, U. S. magazines have easily led the world in the quality of their illustrations; that the financial success of illustrators has drawn much talent which in another country might have gone into non-commercial art; that all illustrators, even the most original, are inveterate swipers from every source; that magazine illustration in the U. S. has developed in about four broad styles.

Broadcloth Boys. Immediate granddaddies of one contemporary school were the American pre-Raphaelite Edwin Austin Abbey and the Romanticist Howard Pyle, both august figures around Manhattan's mellow Century Club in the 1890s. Pyle, later joined by his star pupil, N. C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth, founded an informal art school at Wilmington, Del., where young Pyles and young Wyeths still make most of the art news (TIME, Nov. 15; 1937). Abbey's Tennysonian women and Pyle's nut-brown heroes haunted subsequent illustrators in oil. So did their love of historical romance. One of their stylistic descendants is Norman Rockwell (45), whose first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared in May 1916, and who has grown rich on the subsequent 185. A perpetually delighted, boyish man much like his own schoolboy characters, Norman Rockwell paints with unvarying lovability, blatant technical flair and particularly lusty highlights. He and Mead Schaeffer, his good friend and fellow romancer, turned up at last week's ball in costumes they were then engaged in painting.

Dean Cornwell (47), learned illustration under Pyle-Pupil Harvey Dunn and about 1916 got a free hand from the late Editor Ray Long to become Red Book's (later Cosmopolitan's) pride and joy. His illustrations for such fictioneers as Blasco Ibanez, E. M. Hull, Arthur Somers Roche and Somerset Maugham were as exotically escapist as the tales themselves, and his studio became famous for its clutter of authentic props. In 1922 tall, enthusiastic, travel-loving Artist Cornwell went to London to work with Frank Brangwyn, has since incorporated that decorator's style with his own in some of the most splendiferous symbolic murals in the Western Hemisphere--one in the Los Angeles Public Library and one now being finished for the General Motors Building at the World's Fair.

Penmen. Great progenitor of the pen-and-ink school was the virtuoso, Charles Dana Gibson, whose crisp and incredibly thoroughbred characters lived so vividly in the old Life that in 1920 Gibson was able to buy the magazine for $1,000,000. President of the Society of Illustrators from 1904-05 and from 1909-20, Gibson was honored at last week's exhibition by a retrospective room full of Gibson Girls. Now 71 and long retired, high-collared, big-chinned "Dana" Gibson paints all day in a 59th Street studio but not a soul is permitted to see his work. Held in great disdain by the Pyle school as "hothouse" draftsmen, Gibson's followers James Montgomery Flagg and Howard Chandler Christy had their years of glory but are now meeting stiff competition.

Philadelphia School. As worthy as Gibson to be called the dean of U. S. illustrators, in the opinion of many artists, is a stolid, 68-year-old Philadelphian who now lives in a white frame house and raises chickens in Gladstone, N. J. Frederic Rodrigo Gruger studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts along with Artists John Sloan and William Glackens, got into illustrating as they did, by doing newspaper work in Philadelphia. Gruger remained an illustrator. After 1899 when George Horace Lorimer became editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Gruger became the mainstay of that magazine. The Post's romantic and period fiction by such experts as Joseph Herge-sheimer and Donn Byrne got half its atmosphere from Gruger's oldfashioned, deep-browed men and frail but credible ladies. Though limited in range, Gruger's draftsmanship and handling of dark and light masses could be compared with the French Masters Daumier and Forain. He never used a model. The kind of cheap cardboard on which he drew with carbon pencil and lamp black is now known as Gruger board.

Among noted Gruger men are light-handed, prolific Wallace Morgan and the immensely successful Arthur William ("Brownie") Brown. As illustrator for Tarkington, Kelland and other light fictioneers, popular, saturnine Artist Brown made a cool Wall Street million before it melted down in 1929. At 58 he says he is doing it again. Other illustrators like to kid Brown about his draftsmanship, but the laugh is on them. There is some quality in his clean-cut youths and pretty girls that fits the American Dream.

Glamor Guys. The younger school of illustrators is, in technique, distinguished for lucid wash drawing, "suggestion" and glamor. Its pioneer artist is Italian-born John La Gatta, 45, a mustachioed believer in the tall brunette and one of the few big-money illustrators who providentially salted his earnings away in real property (on Long Island Sound, with a yacht) before 1929. La Gatta's specialty is swooningly sleek backs. The sex appeal which is La Gatta's stock-in-trade has been parodied by Yaleman Peter Arno in the most devastating battles of black & white in contemporary drawing. Almost all other young illustrators are practiced hands at the slim, distracting figure -- a subject which nearly monopolized this year's illustrators' exhibition, to the impoverishment of what Pyle or Gruger would have called illustration. Best young draftsmen : Al Parker, John Gannam, Harry Beckhoff of Collier's, Garrett Price, James W. Williamson.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.