Bob Newman Benefit Auction

Roberto Parada: Christopher Walken

Anita Kunz: Madonna 

The Friends of Bob Newman community is presenting an online benefit auction featuring artwork from a collection of top illustrators and photographers. This auction will raise funds to help defray medical bills and living expenses after Bob's serious accident last year.

This is an extraordinary opportunity to own original and limited-edition artwork by such stars as Philip Burke, Henrik Drescher, Jorge Colombo, Tom Bachtell, Robert Risko, Stephen Kroninger, Victor Juhasz, the list just keeps on going. Yes, it’s a who’s who of editorial illustration.

And it’s for Bob Newman, tireless promoter and enabler of great visual journalism.

Steve Brodner: Portrait of Bob Newman 

The Tumblr site is seriously off the hook. Go there to see all the artwork. Then go to the auction site to bid/buy.

There will also be a benefit party/gathering on May 29th at the Society of Illustrators in New York City. RSVP by May 23 here.

Dale Stephanos: B.B. King 

Hanoch Piven: Bruce Springsteen

How many portraits of The Boss can you find in the auction?

Roth Wrapped in Bacon?

What would his mother think?

Roth, of course, is recently minted octogenarian Philip Roth, and the wrapping in question is the unmistakable yellow cover of Portnoy’s Complaint designed by Paul Bacon. 

The Rothmania that swept the literary world (and Newark, NJ) on the occasion of the author’s 80th birthday in March, has subsided by now, but it had me looking at early Philip Roth book covers. There’s a lovely Goodbye Columbus cover by Paul Rand, and quite a stylish constructivist cover for the Zuckerman Bound compilation. But nothing beats the 1969 cover of Portnoy’s Complaint for iconic simplicity.

The color yellow, in publishing, has always signified salacious or scandalous content (French yellow books, yellow journalism, etc,). Furthermore, the associative meaning of the color had recently been reinforced in the public mind with the release of the film, I Am Curious (Yellow). Given the amount of sex and nudity consumed today as standard fare on screens of all sizes, it is hard for us now to imagine the shock caused by the Swedish import when it opened here in 1967. The film is now famously remembered as America’s first exposure to explicit sex on the big screen outside of a porn house.

Likewise, Portnoy’s Complaint delivered explicit sexuality (often of a solitary nature) from a literary author, to a mainstream readership. The hilariously vulgar novel debuted to an outraged public that, immediately, put it on the bestseller list.

Paul Bacon had recently hit upon a very commerce-friendly approach to cover design, which became known as the Big Book Look. He could deftly distill a novel’s essence into a single, small conceptual image, which he would combine with bold typography for the book title and author’s name. In an interview with Steven Heller, Bacon explains the pivotal role Portnoy’s Complaint played in the evolution of his design style.

Asked why he avoided his signature conceptual image, Bacon says it was because of the difficulty in portraying the book’s most prominent element: masturbation. But also, “In color, it was just so simple and raw.” He continues: “This was one of the things I started to do for books like Sophie’s Choice – that were strictly lettering covers – which in some ways I suppose was a coward’s way out. But it just seemed appropriate for these enormously complicated books.” Given the epic roots of Sophie’s Choice and Ragtime, Bacon felt that attempting to do anything other than a solution that proclaimed “Important book – read it!” would not work. “I guess that’s kind of a dumb thing to say, but it was at the back of my mind,” he admits.

This is a terrific example of how often "brilliant design" is a matter of instinct. Though Bacon claimed that the lack of “content” was a “coward’s way out,” the cover’s broad expanse of the brightest yellow possible couldn’t have been more perfect. The blankness hints at the anonymity of the old plain brown paper wrapper, and the color assures us of sexual content. The blaring, oversized type, however, announces that this book's subject will not be kept under wraps.

And there’s actually some commonality between the designer and the author. Bacon too is having a big birthday this year—he’ll be 90 in December, both grew up in Newark NJ, and both have an astonishing number of best sellers under their belts. While Roth’s output is admirable for its consistent critical acclaim and commercial success, Bacon’s is staggering. He’s designed over 6,000 book covers. 

You may be familiar with some of these …

Bacon designed some 200 record-album covers as well. In fact, it was through his involvement in the jazz world (read a four-part interview here) that he started designing record covers even before he concentrated on books. 

Faces on the Train

I saw these portraits last week in Stockholm.

I loved their quick brushiness.

And their enormous size was wonderful too.

They are actually quite large …

and run between ads along the subway wall.

Here are a few more shots from the Stockholm metro.

Dogs are allowed!

Frank McMahon: Visual Journalist

Talk about witnessing history! The journalistic career of Franklin McMahon, took him everywhere from Mission Control to watch the first moon landing, to the Chicago Eight trial, to the Watergate hearings, the Vatican, and the inner workings of the European Common Market. McMahon, who died Saturday at age 90, recorded it all with a pencil and sketchpad.

In 1955, Life magazine hired McMahon to cover the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi. Till was the black teenager visiting from Chicago who, after whistling at a white woman, was taken from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night and brutally murdered. McMahon recorded visual snippets of testimony and he captured the truly historic moment of Till’s uncle being the first black person to testify against a white person in Mississippi. (The white male defendants, who were acquitted by the white, male jury, later admitted to the killing for a paid magazine story.)

Read about McMahon’s life and the global reach of his journalistic pursuits in his Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame bio.

At the end of the New York Times obit, there is an attempt to define exactly who this man, with no definable job category, was. First there’s a paragraph describing what he was not, and then McMahon gives us what I think, is a perfect definition of a visual journalist.

Mr. McMahon insisted he was not a courtroom artist, although he was widely praised for his coverage of the Chicago Eight … He also said he was not an illustrator, although he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He was definitely not a portraitist, he said, because he never met his subjects. “I sit in the corner and make drawings of them,” he said.

And he even rejected the label of artist, though his work has been shown at many museums, including the Smithsonian. What he was, he said, was simply a reporter, who used art to tell stories.

Slideshow of Franklin McMahon's work at Chicago Reader

Recent iPhone Paintings

Connecticut Road

An assortment of recent iPhone paintings (using the Brushes app) to kick off the weekend ...



Muji Bag


Grace Building


Doppio


Decaf
(this was in Starbucks)


W. 73rd St.


Change Purse

iPhone Fashion Sketches

Last week was Fashion Week in NYC and stunning models were stopping traffic everywhere. This week’s traffic choke-hold is the UN General Assembly meeting. From the ridiculous to the absurd, I’d say.

I’m finding the Brushes app for iPhone quite addicting. I still have sketches from my trip to Croatia to post, but I figured these Spring 2012 looks have a much shorter shelf life.

Marc Jacobs


Max Azria, BCBG


Oscar de la Renta


Bill Blass


Rodarte


Calvin Klein


Ralph Lauren

15 dana, and counting ...

1972

Confession. I’ve been holding out. Big time. I’m so overwhelmed with all there is to see here in Croatia that I’ve not been able to digest, let alone post, as quickly as I would like to. Which might be why my being stranded in Zagreb for another week was meant to be.

You see, due to the storm-formerly-know-as Hurricane Irene, my flight back to NYC last Saturday was cancelled. Which meant that I was able to go to the Britanski antiques market here on Sunday. As I said, meant to be. I found a bunch of issues of an arts and culture magazine called 15 dana which means “15 days.” That’s exactly how long I’d been in the country, as of Sunday. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was meant to be.

The covers here are from the 1960s and 70s. There’s lots of great stuff inside as well--avant garde film, industrial design, Bohumil Stepan illustration, etc. But for now, the covers.

November 1969


March 1971


December 1969


1963


June-July 1966


1965


March 1966


February 1968

Vertical Alchemy

Though I’m used to it by now, I’m always acutely aware of how incompatible the vertical scrolling of Blogger is with our tradition of horizontal viewing. It's a convention that applies to everything from turning the pages of a book to watching the landscape from a moving vehicle. Even in this age of air travel and skyscrapers, our metaphors for time remain horizontally sequential. Time marches on, not up. We look forward to vacation, and think back on our childhood.

Try as I might to embrace Blogger’s inherent verticality, I often find myself frustrated at how difficult it is to display images that relate on a continuum. Even for individual images, expansive width is problematic. Horizontal pictures can get great play when printed on the spread of a book or magazine, but for this blog’s format, the wider an image is, the smaller it must be overall to fit into the formatted column.

Vertical scrolling, however, has its virtues. In fact, it turns out to be the perfect format for—are you ready for this—a vertical scroll!

The Ripley Scroll of Emblematic Alchemy, here, is from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and dates from circa 1570. I was curious to see what it looked like in its entirety, so I pieced together the full-length scroll from the 14 separate images provided. At the Beineke site, you can enlarge the images and study the glorious detail, but here is where, after 400 years, you can view this magnificent manuscript as it was originally intended—by scrolling vertically.

Note: There was a good deal of interpretive Photoshop work done to connect the pages that at one time were connected to form the scroll in the first place. Also, due to the image-height constraint of this platform, I had to break the full scroll into three long panels plus a small ender.

Embarrassing addendum, 7/12/11:
I awoke to find the first comment, below, from peacay of BibliOdyssey, directing me to a full-length, seamless version of the Ripley Scroll posted there in January of 2009. Truly embarrassing, because I can swear that I checked to see if the scroll had already been posted on that most likely of places.