James Montgomery Flagg

I Want You, 1917, James Montgomery Flagg
--the face perhaps most responsible for winning WW I.

James Montgomery Flagg
Self-portrait, 1956

If the name at the top doesn't ring a bell the image above should. A few days ago (03-30-13) I ranted regarding those who use the modifier "only" in connection with the word "illustrator." James Montgomery Flagg was an artists who ranks, perhaps a notch below Rockwell, but who also serves to prove the point that illustrators often have a greater impact on history and who we are today than most so-called "fine" artist who have ever live. He was born in 1877 and died in 1960 at the age of 82.

The invention of Uncle Sam ranks right up there with that of Santa Claus as among the most influential men who never lived. Of course Flagg didn't "invent" Uncle Sam any more than another illustrator, Thomas Nast, invented Santa Claus. Flag and Nast merely showed us what these men looked like--in Flagg's case, like himself. He used his own hansom face as a model (adding a few wrinkles along the way). The pose wasn't original (borrowed from a similar British recruitment poster), nor was the costume or the white goatee, but the face was pure Flagg (originally to save time, if not money, in hiring a model).

 

Flagg as Uncle Sam posing his model.

The Red Cross needed Flagg too.



The Fencer, (the alternate
title is obscene),
James Montgomery Flagg

Now, lest you get the notion James Montgomery Flagg painted only patriotic recruitment posters, there was another side to the man. He was a very adept portrait painter. Also, in addition to run-of-the-mill magazine ads, usually for men's clothing (in which he demanded his name not be used), Flagg was Life Magazine's answer to Norman Rockwell, but with something of a spicy twist. Beyond that, however, the man also loved painting nudes, as seen in his voluptuous The Fencer (left). And, while many artists down through the centuries have painted nudes, Flagg did so on a regular basis, supplying fodder for pinup calendars, salacious, even by today's standards, but considered just short of hard core pornography in that era.

Nervy Nat took his airship to Venus (in search of girls, what else?) The welcoming party left something to be desired, as did his crash landing in Paris.

I've always liked artists with a sense of humor; and Flagg's was nothing if not sharp, sometimes to the point of lethal. He was, in fact, a thoroughly adept cartoonist, who enjoyed his altar ego, Nervy Nat (above), with a gusto ranging from merely funny to hilarious. Nor did he take himself and his profession as sacrosanct. His photos with a female manikin hint not only at his sense of humor but his tightfisted grip on the dollar as well. Who needs a live model when you have a vivid imagination? 



Flag with his studio assistant

Flagg's sense of humor extended
to his covers for Life, this one from
1910.

Charles Dana Gibson

Studies in Expression, Charles Dana Gibson--no two alike.

Mr. Gibson, Portrait of Himself,
Charles Dana Gibson

I love illustrators. I hate those who look down upon them as something less than artists. In fact, insofar as their work is concerned, I see little need to separate the two other than to say that while all illustrators are artists, not all artists could make it as illustrators. Technically, the only line between the two is that illustrators have traditionally created primarily for publication while artists...not so much. During his career, Norman Rockwell blurred the line between the two distinctions to the point art critics and historians have mostly given up drawing one in his case, preferring the "slash mark" instead--artist/illustrator. Besides Rockwell, I especially love the work of Stevan Dohanos, Howard Chandler Christy, Jon Whitcomb, Ben Stahl, Art Frahm, Richard Dadd, and James Montgomery Flagg. Another of my favorites (I'm surprised I've not written on him before) is Charles Dana Gibson. Gibson was not like any of the artists listed above. He seldom, if ever, painted, but his drawings have become as iconic as any of the others, his name more recognizable than most of them.

Women drop things. Often they're adverse to picking them up, especially wearing tight corsets, long dresses, and tall hairdos.

If you can't read the extensive captioning beneath
the drawing, it involves a wealthy father
interviewing a potential suitor for his daughter.

I think what I like best about Gibson is not so much his art, which, like all illustrators, and indeed, many other artists, has become dated. One look and it screams: early 20th-century. No, what I like best is his sense of humor. It's sharp and dry, subtle, but ever-present though one couldn't quite class him as a cartoonist. Many such artists have a dry wit. The fact that Gibson consistently worked in black and white with pen and ink, suggests an affinity to cartoon art, yet, despite his self-portrait (above, left) he seldom exaggerated proportionally. His expressions are sometimes a bit comical as seen in his Studies of Expression (top) but never cartoonish. Humor, like art, can be dated, and Gibson's sometimes is, but even a hundred years after the fact, I still found myself laughing out loud at some of his wry observations and titles seen in his work. Gibson's dialog beneath his Civil Service (above, right) reads like the script from a TV sitcom. Likewise, I can identify easily with the men diving beneath the table to retrieve their wives' lost items (above). Been there, done that.

A Word to the Wise, Have a Good Book in Case You Are Bored.
I found the contrast between the uncomfortably stiff collars of the two young
men and the lack of such in the female attire more amusing than Gibson's title.

One of Gibson's illustrations
from The Prisoner of Zenda.

Gibson was born in 1867 in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His family tree sported two U.S. senators hanging from its branches and came decorated with considerable wealth. Displaying a great deal of talent in his youth, and with a family who could afford to send him the best art schools here or abroad, Gibson's art training, though excellent, was surprisingly limited--a mere two years at the Art Students League in New York (which may account for why he seldom painted). Nonetheless he sold his first drawing to Life magazine in 1887. He was twenty at the time. From there he quickly moved on to Harper's Weekly, Scribners and Collier's. Quite apart from his talent and sense of humor, the young man was apparently quite the self-promoter--an extremely valuable personal asset for any would-be artist, then or now. Gibson's "big break" came in 1898 when he was commissioned to do illustrations for Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (above, left) and later, its sequel Rupert of Hentzau. The two books became quite popular as much for Gibson's illustrations as for their plots.

Picturesque America (detail), Charles Dana Gibson.
(Bathing costumes, not swimsuits.)

The Gibson Girls

Of course, Charles Dana Gibson is best known for his girls. In 1895, Gibson had the great good fortune to marry a very beautiful woman, Irene Langhorne, who happened also to have four equally beautiful sisters, all of whom he persuaded to pose for his illustrators. Consequently, his iconic Gibson Girls were born, and with that many feminine personalities all around him, no doubt served as ready sources of humor, whether they realized it or not. They were simple, elegant, always beautiful, but the primary consideration in drawing them was being able to render hair...lots and lots of hair, stylishly coiffed, piled high, with not a single strand out of place. However it wasn't just the look these lovely ladies presented, but their spirit and the substantial, though often hidden, influence they exerted over their husbands, that made the Gibson Girls the epitome of early 20th-century femininity.

The title of this one has long-since been lost, and with it Gibson's personal slant on its meaning, though the tall, slender, businessman bears a striking resemblance to the
original John D. Rockefeller.

An early Life cover by Gibson dating
from 1906. It's not very "X-massy."

Someone once commented that Norman Rockwell was such a part of The Saturday Evening Post's success that he, in effect, "owned" the magazine. The same could be said regarding Gibson and Life magazine. Actually, starting in 1918, he did become the editor and eventually gained part ownership of the popular news and general interest publication. Despite a ready means of promoting his art in a magazine he virtually owned and edited himself, the popularity of his Gibson Girls declined after WW I. Gibson and his lovely wife retired in 1836 to their summer retreat on a seven-hundred acre island off the coast of Maine where he took up, quite belatedly, painting. He apparently wasn't very good at it, I could find only one example of any of his illustrations done in color, and that dated from 1903.

The RKO advertising department got ahead of the production department.

Fifty years after Gibson's death,
one of Gibson's "girls" was
honored with a postage stamp.

Charles Dana Gibson died at the age of seventy-seven in 1944, but not before having a strong cultural impact, especially upon the minds of Life magazine readers. Even before his death, RKO Pictures in Hollywood bought the rights to his drawings for use in a motion picture, The Gibson Girl, a musical comedy which was to star Ginger Rogers in the lead. However, financial setbacks at the studio and reportedly a poor script caused them to cancel the project shortly before shooting was to begin. Fifty years later, a Gibson Girl did, have the distinction of gracing a 1995 postage stamp (right) and Gibson himself is said to have "invented" a martini which came to bear his name (gin, vermouth, and a pickled onion garnish).


 

Ad Art

Four Freedoms, 1943, Norman Rockwell

One of the things that rankles me most is that some of the best art created, now and especially in the past, is thought to be not art at all. The reason? Because it is (literally) designed to sell. Art has many purposes. That's just one of them. Think where we'd be without buying and selling. Insofar as my pet peeves are concerned, the denigration of "ad art" is right up there with the related penchant those in the "fine" art world have of looking down on the artists skilled at creating ad art as "merely" illustrators. Such aesthetic snobs use the term with the same distaste usually reserved for lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen. Of course, there are hundreds of excellent artists who have suffered under the curse of being relegated to this second class citizenship but the unfortunate poster boy for such disrespect is Norman Rockwell. Yet, his Four Freedoms series (above) alone puts him near the top of anyone's list of great American artists. Moreover, his work often brings at auction, prices in excess of many so-called "fine" artists.

 

By the 1920s, stereoscopic card viewers may have been on the way out,
but newspaper and magazine ad art was in its ascendancy.

Historically speaking, leaving aside propaganda art designed to "sell" ideas or sell the image of ancient rulers(probably the earliest form of ad art), the art of sign painting stands out. Of course, such art usually had more to do with words than pictures and has remained that way for hundreds of years (at least until the advent of billboards). The real impetus for artist-drawn pictures designed to sell a product came with the technological refinements of the printer's art. To oversimplify somewhat, the proverbial "thousand words" of pictures took up less valuable space on paper and could be more quickly and easily digested that their equivalency in words.




Ad art circa 1876. What is it selling? Would you believe, a watch winder.
among other, less identifiable, items. Notice the mention of the number of "cuts"
 referring to images created from woodcuts. (Love the guy on the goat.)

From time-consuming wood blocks to lithography and hand-etched plates, artists and artisans by the thousands took up various creative and technical positions in producing this highly efficient ad art. But just as surely as the technology moved forward, so did the sophistication of the art itself. By the year 1900, technological advances, combined with developments in marketing and distribution (weekly national news magazines), demanded and lured highly accomplished painters to the highly lucrative field of ad art. However those who succumbed to this seductive lure were figuratively seen as akin to male prostitutes. I suppose female artists should consider themselves fortunate that early creators of ad art were mostly male.

 

An early 20th century portrait? No, ad art to sell Arrow shirts, J.C. Leyendecker.

Besides Rockwell, the top names in ad art from the past century include Howard Chandler Christy, Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Winslow Homer, J.C. Leyendecker, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Ben Shawn, and N.C. Wyeth. There are dozens of others, those are just the ones I've written about. Moreover, those are also the ones who mostly transcended the derogatory label of "illustrator." Ironically, the majority of the ones listed above are actually more famous than their "fine" art counterparts. I suppose this, "rankles" those in the fine art world writing and promoting artists such as Joan Miro, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet, Rene Magritte, Mark Tanguy, Lucien Freud, and Freda Kahlo, all of whom I've also written about but whom most people have never heard of. By the way, the list of artists from which I drew the last group had only one name from the first group. Want to guess which one?

Today the Internet absolutely devours ad art. What are they selling here? Who cares?
It's art that captures quite effectively the intense angst of modern day travel.
(If you really care what the ad is selling, scroll down.)

Did you guess right? Did you have a clue?

 

1940s Art

Welcome Home American Legion WW II Veterans, Hy Hintermeister.
The war ended...we won, by the way.

Even though I was born half-way through the decade, about three weeks after the War in the Pacific ended, I naturally don't remember much, if anything, of the social chaos that marked the most important decade of the entire 20th-Century. I was a child of five when the decade ended. I vaguely recall playing on the back porch of our home in Stockport, Ohio around 1949. For that reason, in exploring the art of the 1940s I'm forced to choose the art and artists I've read and heard were important, or that which I now find intriguing, or which looks as though it might have been representative of the art from that period. Normally art and war don't mix, but even though we refer to the war as World War II, actually only about half the world was involve. As they are prone to do, artists fled the conflict for those countries which were safer. In most cases, that meant the United States. Thus there was a tremendous amount of art produced during this decade, either by those fleeing the war or those artists such a Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton, Hy Hintermeister (top), and James Montgomery Flagg seeking to do their part in winning the war.

 

Salvador Dali, during the war and after the war.

War changes people. Nothing on earth has the power to alter the course of so many lives, for better or worse, than armed conflict, especially on the scale of the Second World War. Salvador Dali's war was the Spanish Revolution as depicted in his Face of War (upper image) from 1940. For some, the changes are temporary, for others the trauma of war runs much deeper. Dali's The Madonna of Port Lligat (lower image) from 1949, stands in stark contrast to the earlier wartime image.

More subtle reflections of the 1940s.

In Europe, especially in England, there was nothing subtle about the war or the art reflecting it. British artist, Clive Branson, in 1940, painted The Blitz: Plane Flying, attempting to capture the war from the point of view of the men and women in the street. Notice the plane has both Nazi and British insignia, underlining the fact that the terrors of war are felt by the civilian population on both sides. The painting has a surreal quality to it, but then too, so does war.

The Blitz, Plane Flying, 1940, Clive Branson

Meanwhile, back on the home front, to see the Cannon Towel ads running in major magazines, one might get the idea that war was fun (below). This is just one of several depicting GIs frolicking in the water, drying off with Cannon Towels, which in some cases barely concealed their nudity. Today, such ads would probably be deemed highly inappropriate, but back then, times were different. Americans were in need of comic relief, no matter how tasteless.



The desert war in north Africa, which this scene suggests, while perhaps having some ancient ruins, they were not known to be littered with ancient swimming pools. Pity the poor guy near the top serving guard duty.

Other companies were quick to feature GIs in their ads. The ad below is supposedly for an airline, but the windows are so large as to suggest a railroad car. In any case, notice that there are no enlisted men along for the ride. In periods of conflict since WW II, ad agencies have generally limited the use of military men and women to recruitment posters.

Officers fly. The enlisted men take the train.

The art of the 1940s reflects three conflicting images insofar as women were concerned. The media depicted them either as loving wives and mothers keeping the "home fires" burning; or as substitute industrial workers of the "Rosie the Riveter" genre; or as sex symbols ostensibly intended to give the GIs something to be fighting for. In any case, the 1940s saw the sowing of the seeds for feminism which, some twenty or thirty years later burst into a full-blown revolution which continues to rage even today.

Women traded in the acetylene torch for a sparkling new kitchen and booming babies..

The war ended with a blast (two of them, in fact). The GIs came home, and despite the best efforts of Norman Rockwell (bellow)and other illustrators to suggest otherwise, found themselves facing problem and shortages that had festered untended for four long years. At the same time, though, the U.S. found itself a world leader, the Great Depression hardly more than a bitter memory. The economy was booming as never before as the U.S. helped the war-torn countries of western Europe recover from the tragedy of destruction and deprivation the war left in its path.

The Homecoming GI, 1945, Norman Rockwell.

Some things remained the same after the war. Hometowns like Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee (below), though they had changed little during the war were destined to explode with prosperity. In other places things remained as bad or worse than before. Harlem in New York City as depicted by Paul Raphael Meltzner, despite the much-touted Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s, was even more dismal than before, only slightly better off than the worst small towns in the South with their lingering Jim Crow laws and black poverty.

State Street at Night, Bristol Virginia, Tennessee, Denise Beverly

Harlem, 1940s, watercolor, Paul Raphael Meltsner

Perhaps no other art form brings back the nostalgia for the 1940s more than that era's music. It began with the fading popularity of jazz and ended with what we've happily come to call the "swing" era. Janet Brice Parker's 1940s Jazz (below) suggests both eras. Click the video at the bottom to get "In the Mood."


 

1940s Jazz, Janet Brice Parker

The Unfinished Portrait of
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, 1945,
Elizabeth Shoumatoff.

 

The Art of WAR!

Revolutionary War posters. The fact that the colonists fired first in Boston
seems to have been but a minor detail insofar as Revere was concerned.

When it comes to art, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." That's how broad tastes in art can be. In confronting the topic of war art, posters in particular, "one man's patriotism is another man's propaganda." I don't know who first said that (maybe me). In any case, if the art history of posters is any indication, it would appear you can't go to war without a really good poster (usually many of them). We're fortunate in dealing with war posters in that, by definition, you can't have an effective poster without a suitable, inexpensive means of producing them. Simply put, hand-drawn posters just aren't worth the bother in times of war. Usually this mean a letterpress or lithography, the talented artists to design such works, and craftsmen needed to transfer them to paper. We'll skip over the guys with the wheat paste as we trace this art from artists to the walls of the citizenry to be aroused. This somewhat limits the period to be reviewed to the last two or three centuries.

Chinese Recruitment poster
from the Korean War era.

In that the Chinese are said to have invented movable type around 1040 there are probably some Chinese war posters gathering dust in some Chinese museum in a land far, far away, but let's not get ridiculous. However, during the 1950s and the Korean War (left), they seem to have not lost the knack. France, being something of the birthplace of poster art, one might expect several examples of such wartime patriotism/propaganda in connection with the 1870-71 Franco Prussian War. While there are a wagonload of battle prints produced after the war, apparently the conflict was too short and too devastating for the French to get involved in selecting type faces. I mean, when your country is being invaded by a hoard of Prussians, morale may suffer, but recruitment is seldom a problem. From the American Revolution (top), two very familiar names stand out with regard to wartime posters--Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere. Franklin's "Join or Die" graphic appeared as early as 1754 (in his own newspaper, of course) with regard to the Albany Plan of Union, the first effort to pull together the colonies into a single governmental unit (in this case for the defense against the French during the French and Indian War). Revere's etched print of the Boston Massacre dates from about 1771 and is very much in tune with virtually every example of wartime posters yet to come.

Civil War recruitment in the north--bring your own beachwear.

Recruitment was no problem.  Money was.

The American Civil War (1861-65) produced a riverboat load of wartime poster art, virtually all of it in the form of recruitment posters. Especially in the North, these bugle blasts were heavy on large font type, light on graphics, each emphasizing allegiance to various state militias while citing incredible, unrealistically short enlistments. The massive broadside headlines such as the one above seem hilarious to us today, but during the cold, northern winter months of 1862, no doubt sounded inviting. In the South, the emphasis was on individual gentleman commanders forming fighting units with cavalry being the starring attraction (bring your own horse). Both sides used the draft as in incentive to enlist volunteers. The Confederate bounties were in the form of rapidly inflating southern bank drafts so expediency was an economic incentive as well (spend it before it becomes obsolete).

Alfred Leete's 1914 Kitchener
poster was the inspiration for Uncle
Sam's "I Want You" version.

Joining England in a war was
a "hard sell" in the U.S. in 1918.
No shortage of symbolism here.

American artist, Herbert Andrew
Paus, urges civilian involvement
in a war that seemed far, far
away in 1918.

Skipping over the Spanish-American War (another conflict too short for posters), we find with the advent of war in Europe between 1914 and 1918 the truly "artistic" war poster coming into its own and this time, playing a major role, not limited to just recruitment but national morale as well. England was fighting for its empire and to preserve its pride while in the U.S. the conflict seemed over some vague, international laws involving rules of war and freedom of the seas. For poster artists on both sides of the Atlantic, promoting such concepts was a challenging assignment. In both countries there were patriotic appeals for civilian sacrifice, extraordinary homeland efforts, conservation, and vigilance, foreshadowing a much more intense emphasis on such themes to be seen in the next big war. As with the military, "the war to end all wars" was likewise just a warm-up exercise for the next poster war. Whoever said that the most important cause of WW II was WW I knew their history.

British wartime posters put artists into the conflict along with everyone else (love the pig).
 

Though much lampooned today,
the war against fear and panic
was critical to British survival.

Unlike 1918 in England, twenty-two years later the British civilian population were literally fighting for their lives. Although there were plenty of wartime posters to be found, those living in London and other major cities in England didn't need catchy phrases or eye-catching art to remind them there was a war on, which required as much an effort from them as from their sons fighting on the mainland. Hitler was knocking on their doors, often literally knocking them down, in fact. In the U.S., unlike the First World War, we didn't tiptoe into the second. We were bombed into it. When James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam pointed his sturdy finger and said, 'I Want YOU" he was pointing at everyone, even the sleepy isolationists waking up to harsh reality on the lazy Sunday morning of December 7th, 1941. He wanted Adolph Triedler's Soldiers Without Guns (below, left) and Morley's Victory Gardeners (below right). Along with the usual recruitment posters there were the morale boosters and the action organizing broadsides urging unity of purpose.

Soldiers never before looked so
beautiful, Adolph Treidler.

Morley's Victory Gardens produced
an abundance, even during war.

Question: And Babies? Answer: And Babies. 1970

World War Two was the last great "poster war." There were pale shadows of earlier graphic design war efforts during the Korean War but nothing notably collectible. Then in the 1970s, during the Vietnam era, the poster war effort unexpectedly shifted to anti-war. The flower children cried for love, not war. Vietnam brought us the My Lai massacre which brought to living room television horrific scenes of human destruction on a massive, vivid scale never before scene by the American public. War was no longer sanitized. Neither were the anti-war posters. Perhaps the most gruesome was one titled And Babies (above) from 1970 based upon a government photo and a Mike Wallace interview with My Lai participant, Paul Meadlo, describing his mowing down of men, women, children, and babies.

-----------------------And on a lighter note---------------------

WW I

Vietnam War