Illustrators at war with the canvas
Leonardo da Vinci is said to have held that all art begins with drawing, but he failed to say whether it also ends there. Since the 15th century, drawing, as the genesis of an artist’s vision, has been an esteemed category of fine art, a position that, alas, defied translation in the New World.
Perhaps if the artists whose works make up “Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950,” had lived in Renaissance Italy, they would not have suffered so much torment over their often bewitching turns as illustrators.
Illustration is not, of course, drawing, and as the New Britain Museum of American Art makes clear, that is part of the problem. The 38 artists gathered in this engaging exhibit toggled between commercial illustration and fine art, often striking an inelegant balance between idealism and pragmatism. Art had grown less pantheistic since the time of Leonardo, and industrial advances meant that art could be reproduced and disseminated with rapacious zeal. For an artist, that meant their work could be seen by more people than ever before. It also meant that they could be seen as sell-outs.
“The National Academy looked down on these illustrators as pariahs, as hacks,” says Douglas Hyland, executive director of the New Britain Museum of American Art. “They had almost prostituted themselves to commercialism.”
Of course, art has always been prostitution of some sort. In Europe it was called patronage; in the United States it was called capitalism.
The problem with commercialism is its tinge of crassness. If everybody likes something it can no longer be the exclusive privilege of the elite few. That is why Jonathan Franzen balked when Oprah Winfrey anointed his “The Corrections” with her imprimatur. Sure, it meant money. But money, to a few effete holdouts, is bad. Anything subject to the whims of the boorish rabble must be, by definition, pedestrian.
Once he had scored with his evocative anthems to ambiguity Edward Hopper distanced himself from his days as an illustrator. “Illustration didn’t interest me,” he sniffed. “I was forced into it in an effort to make money.”
What makes “Double Lives” so scintillating is that friction. Boyle writes that fine art is to illustration what poetry is to prose. But a better analogy might be that of journalism to literature, two genres inextricably bound to illustration. Illustration grew up with journalism. American literacy grew exponentially in the period “Double Lives” examines, and with it came a deluge of newspapers and magazines, all of which needed artists to enhance their products. For artists, like Winslow Homer, that meant a sure and steady paycheck, but the deal they struck was Faustian.
Homer’s trajectory was typical. He began his career as a Civil War illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, capturing montages of war from domestic duress to battlefield exuberance. Homer was brilliant at capturing the emblematic moment, inaugurating a filmic tradition in American illustration that extends to John Ford. But once Homer’s canvases, like his menacing “Skirmish in the Wilderness,” began to sell, canvases began to sell, he abandoned illustrations. Most artist, from John Sloane to Frederick Remington, did the same. Some, like Childe Hassam, scarcely mentioned their illustrations. One is on view here and its graphic sentimentality – a regrettable hallmark of too many 19th century illustrations – explains Hassam’s muteness.
While many artists, like Maxfield Parish, Henry Francis Farney and Edwin Austin Abbey moved fluidly between art and illustration, other artists, like N.C. Wyeth, seemed fatally condemned to it. A Wyeth illustration, such as the two striking examples from “The Yearling” and “Treasure Island” could add cachet to a volume, in the same way Wyeth selling it could detract from his reputation.
The dreadful reality, as Wyeth’s wan “Dying Winter” canvas attests, is that the artist’s oils lack the strapping zeal of his illustrations, like his dynamic illustration for “Treasure Island” on view here.
Most of the artists, from Reginald Marsh, to Thomas Moran, to Frederic Remington to Everett Shinn, create illustrations in keeping with their more celebrated paintings. The real surprises here, are the painters like Robert Frederick Blum. His “Two Idlers,” is so dazzling, with its dabs of primary color hammock fringe accentuating the primal nature of an encounter between dashing roué and indolent victim, that one is surprised he illustrated at all. He seems born for the canvas.
What makes Blum’s resplendent piece stand out is a quality underappreciated in illustration that had a potent effect on painting and, later, film: Its narrative quality. American painters and illustrators tune in to the quintessential depictive moment – the second when the can-can girl lifts her skirt and the base player leers, or when the last bison sheds his first drop of blood on the frozen plane– so that the works have a narrative edginess.
So influential was this dimension on the work of directors John Ford and Clarence Brown, that Brown used seven of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations from “The Yearling” to frame scenes in his film of the same name. That should have been a signal to Wyeth of the vibrancy of his illustrations, but it did not. He killed himself in 1945, a year before “The Yearling” was released, believing he was a failure as a fine artist.
The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., New Britain, through . For more information, visit www.nbmaa.org.