Graphis 66 – Fortnum & Mason

This is an extract from the celebrated Swiss graphic arts magazine Graphis – issue 66, published in 1956. Charles Rosner tells the story of how the Piccadilly shop, Fortnum & Mason publicised its activities with a well chosen selection of distinguished graphic artists and illustrators. Rosner writes about how the store was adapting to the decline in its traditional markets brought about by the fading fortunes of the landed gentry and the loss of Britain’s Imperial possessions, using direct mail and elegantly designed publicity to broaden its appeal. After almost a decade of food rationing had recently come to an end, conspicuous consumption had to be made socially acceptable again. The era of post-war egalitarianism was coming to an end, disposable incomes were rising and there was no shame in lavish spending on luxury goods. It’s interesting that Edward Bawden became the first choice of illustrator. His inventive, humorous and gentle fantasies effortlessly create a sense of goodwill, relaxing the reader and making them feel good about treating themselves to the best that money can buy. Bawden was without equal in his ability to bring renewed vitality to the most mundane of objects and delight the eye with spritely forms, wonderfully defined in pattern and line. Today’s store still exists to serve a rich and exclusive clientele with food, drink and homeware at astronomic prices. In the present economic climate the shop should be busier than ever. As wealth continues to be siphoned upwards into the hands of the super-rich at an ever increasing rate, the ever expanding supply of high net worth individuals should be enough to keep the store busy for the foreseeable future. Follow this link to see a superb example of Bawden’s Fortnum & Mason work at the Alphabet of Illustrators.

Tintin in Hollywood

Tintin’s first trip to America took him to Chicago in 1931. In recognition of his heroic efforts in vanquishing the city’s criminal gangs, the boy reporter was offered a starring role in a billion dollar movie production by Paranoid Pictures. Eighty years on and the juvenile newshound has finally appeared on the Hollywood screen courtesy of Steven Spielberg. Despite the expensive motion capture technology, Tintinologists have not been impressed and many have denounced the film as a travesty and an annihilation of the authentic spirit of Tintin. Hergé’s wonderfully economic and expressive ligne claire was the first casualty of motion capture, discarded in favour of photorealism. Instead of being contained within the comfort of Hergé’s hand-drawn contours Tintin has been ejected into a supremely uncomfortable three-dimensional universe. To add to his troubles, his adventures, always improbable, have been launched into a new zone of special effects and percussive explosions. The problem seems to lie in the US where Tintin has never been more than a minority taste. To overcome this lack of enthusiasm the film-makers have employed the full and formulaic arsenal of shock and awe implausibility to drive the narrative at neutrino-like velocity – it remains to be seen whether the enormous sacrifice of subtlety was worthwhile when the film opens in the US in December.


Whatever the critical reception the Tintin industry will continue to expand and fortunes will be made from the sale of mountains of memorabilia and merchandise. European collectors seem happy to pay premium prices for Tintin products – if Americans can be persuaded to do likewise, the Hergé Foundation and its commercial arm, Moulinsart, will soon be adding millions of dollars to their vast stash of euros.

Silent Witnesses

An exhibition entitled Silent Witnesses: Graphic Novels Without Words opened in Lincoln on May 29th. and runs until August 30th. Details can be seen here. Featured artists include Frans Masereel, Otto Nückel and Eric Drooker. Below you can read the brief essay that I wrote for inclusion in the exhibition catalogue on the subject of the splendid Mr Drooker.

Flood!

It’s always a great event when, once or twice a year, the New Yorker appears with an Eric Drooker cover. For over a decade Drooker has been an occasional but regular contributor to the last major magazine to exclusively feature hand drawn artwork on the front cover. Under the inspired art direction of Françoise Mouly, the New Yorker has continued a long tradition of graphic excellence and provided Drooker with a platform for his melancholy visions of an urban civilisation that over-reached itself. In the 1980s, Drooker’s illustrations belonged on a rather higher shelf, on the front page of Screw magazine.

Drooker was born on New York’s Lower East Side into a family with generations steeped in political radicalism. This provided a direct link with the often overlooked culture of New York social activism – New Masses, William Gropper, Philip Evergood, Woody Guthrie. He grew up in Lower Manhattan with a passion for the poetry of the city which he explored on endless cycle rides. A talent for drawing lead to the Cooper Union where he studied Fine Art, specialising in sculpture. After graduation he returned to his earlier enthusiasm for Masereel, Lynd Ward, Robert Crumb and Zap comics and immersed himself in drawing and painting. His evolution into a self-publishing comic book artist was also stimulated by an involvement in street politics and radical causes.

Drooker’s graphic novel, Flood!: A Novel in Pictures was published in 1992 and demonstrated how effectively he had absorbed and transformed the inherited visual language of Frans Masereel, the Flemish 1920s pioneer of social commentary in wordless fiction. Drooker’s first awareness of Masereel dates from the age of 10 when his grandfather gave him copies of Dover reprints of Passionate Journey and The City. In a 2003 interview Drooker described how these exemplars seeped into his artistic consciousness over the following decade to the point where they became a major inspiration.

The anonymous everyman hero of Flood! fights for survival in a brutal, callous metropolis in a timeframe that begins in the era of Reaganomics, dives back into the pre-history of Manhattan before rocketing forward into a future of environmental catastrophe. Soft, warm-blooded creatures navigate through a hostile world of hard metallic surfaces, where interminable flights of concrete steps plunge deep into the darkness under the rain-swept city streets. Alone and isolated, our hero is the only person to brave the incessant downpour without the protection of an umbrella. The city rapidly decomposes in the face of the eternal deluge and the reader is transported via an airborne transition into a sinister vision of the carnival at the end of the Universe. In the final third of the book the blue ink is introduced by the artist in person as he enters his own narrative. What follows is a complex meditation on early American hidden history, on militarism and the brutality of the state and the futility of fighting environmental forces with human technology. The closing image shows the twin peaks of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State just above the waterline with a modest Ark sailing between them.

The narrative tempo is driven along by irresistible visual rhythms, formal repetitions and a picture frame that divides and sub-divides into ever smaller units before exploding back into full page imagery. The tension is sustained by the power of Drooker’s drawing and his talent for narrative compression. Polarities of light and dark dramatise images of stark savagery and physical exuberance. Drooker has acknowledged the influence of Max Beckman, Otto Dix and Ernst Barlach. A sense of mechanistic alienation is conveyed through interludes of calm composure where the poetry of the city illuminates the scene. The ambivalence of his feelings about the city is revealed in the loving attention to such details as the slab-sided subway trains, the stacks of newsprint on the news stand and the jungle of sleazy signage devoted to marketing pleasures of the flesh. Freedom from oppression, ethnic diversity and respect for the human spirit are at the heart of Drooker’s vision and memorably reinforced by the wonderfully simple graphic device of the human x-ray where the skeleton and heart are revealed as emblems of human frailty and vulnerability.

Drooker has admitted that without early exposure to Masereel he might never have gravitated to wordless fiction and he offered the interesting thought that telling stories in pictures was a very effective way of communicating complex ideas to working communities divided by a multitude of languages. These comments, and all others attributed to Eric Drooker are taken from an indispensable interview published in The Comics Journal, Issue 253, June 2003. The Eric Drooker website is a visual delight and can be seen by following this link.