Mid-century Romance and Misadventure

Bernard D’Andrea, Saturday Evening Post, November 1957.

Romantic fiction was a staple offer in the pages of Saturday Evening Post and a legion of highly proficient illustrators were on hand to give visual form to tragic and comic stories of love and betrayal. Some of the visual interpretations reveal a psychological complexity in a single image, every bit as effectively as a narrative spread over 8 or 10 pages of text.  These illustrators were masters of gesture and expression, expert in capturing minute variations in body language to convey emotional subtleties.  This was an age in which prosperity and anxiety seemed to advance in step - the Cold War undermined the sense of national security along with a growing unease that over-consumption and the breakdown in community values as millions moved to the suburbs was corroding the American soul.  The fear of crime couldn’t be washed away by alcohol and barbiturates.  Communism was an ever present, if ill-defined threat to the American way of life and efforts to eradicate its influence fed the climate of political paranoia.  Casual violence toward women and children was broadly condoned while adultery and coercive sex were only condemned if they came to public attention.  Maintaining an appearance of moral rectitude was imperative - any fall from grace would be ruthlessly punished by community pressure as much as legal proceedings. Women were often unwelcome and underpaid in the workplace and protection from harassment and exploitation was minimal. All these threads could be found in popular fiction and may explain why so many of these images contain unsettling and ambiguous gestures, glances and facial tensions. Carefree relationships and romantic bliss are in short supply.  Surrender to passion is more common, perhaps because it paves the way to the high drama of disillusion, treachery, desertion and cruelty.  This selection of images are mostly from Saturday Evening Post - artists are identified and dates of publication supplied where known.  Some examples are better than others. The subjects all include a couple - among them are several examples of what illustrators referred to as “the clinch” plus a few from other fiction genres such as crime and adventure.

Unknown illustrator, Saturday Evening Post.

Alex Ross in Ladies Home Journal, December 1948.

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

Joe Bowler, Saturday Evening Post, date unknown.

An expedition to a lingerie store illustrated by Joe De Mers for Saturday Evening Post.

Jon Whitcomb for the readers of Ladies Home Journal, July 1948.

Coby Whitmore for Saturday Evening Post, date unknown.

Saturday Evening Post, date unknown.

A frantic couple under siege - illustrated by Bernard D’Andrea, Saturday Evening Post, "The Hounds Of Youth" (1961).

Thornton Utz illustration for Saturday Evening Post.

Saturday Evening Post, illustrated by Edwin Georgi (1896-1964).

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

James Bingham, Saturday Evening Post, December 1955.

Alex Ross in Ladies Home Journal, October 1948. 

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

Coby Whitmore for Saturday Evening Post, date unknown.

Peter Stevens (1920-2001) for Saturday Evening Post, September 29, 1956.

Steamy mid-century romance illustrated by Jon Whitcomb for Ladies Home Journal, September 1948.

Coby Whitmore for Saturday Evening Post, 1953.

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

Lionel Gilbert (1912-2005) for Collier’s Magazine, January 1952. 

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

Peter Stevens (1920-2001) for Saturday Evening Post, date unknown.

Saturday Evening Post, illustrator and date unknown.

 

James R Bingham, Illustrator for Advertising

This is a follow-up to a post dated 19 September 2015. Alongside the work he supplied to Saturday Evening Post, Bingham had a successful career illustrating for a wide range of advertisers. The noir-style imagery that so effectively accompanied crime fiction in the Post was never going to meet the needs of advertisers but Bingham had no problems working across genres and could offer an accessible style for almost any occasion. In World War 2 he supplied his clients with imagery that reflected the visual drama of armed conflict – the rampaging Cadillac tank crushing all before it and the fire-fight in the jungle achieve a sense of enhanced realism that photographers struggled to equal. Transport-related subjects engaged his interest – in the ad for US Airlines he conveys the visual poetry of a snowbound nocturnal landscape with the reassuring aerial presence of the latest turbo-prop airliner in the starry sky. For Southern Comfort he created a romanticised image of a vintage riverboat cruising upriver on the moonlit Mississippi, the rays of the setting sun appearing to ignite the smoke rising from the chimney stacks. All of which evoke the timelessness and the easy-on-the-palate quality of the product. There’s more romance in the advert for Nash cars, an ad that rests on a much-used theme found at the end of the war – an effort to re-engage the post-war public with the business of consumption. The happy couple behind the wheel have an affinity with Bingham’s editorial illustration. As does the period illustration for Western Electric with theatrical caricatures of a type frequently seen in the Post. The image of Western Electric girls toiling on an assembly line is one of Bingham’s finest – a beautifully controlled repetition of forms tells all we need to know about the anonymising tedium of the workplace. Two dramatic skies complete this far from definitive selection. The first, again for Western Electric adds much-needed interest to a mundane desert landscape while the second, for Barrett Chemicals is even more dominant, graced by a fortuitous rainbow that illuminates a passing vehicle.

James R Bingham, Illustrator of Fiction

The illustrations of James Bingham (1917-71) in Saturday Evening Post are not among the most highly regarded. It’s easy to see why – there’s no flashy brushwork, no painterly flourishes and no crowd-pleasing caricatures. The flat and undifferentiated surfaces are not especially inviting and the use of colour can appear garish at times. But Bingham was a consummate professional and his understanding of composition and ability to organise and combine form on the printed page never failed him. There was a strong cinematic element in his images, often suggesting the asymmetric dynamics of Hollywood film noir where dramatic slanting beams of light contrasted with deep pools of shadow to enhance the sense of unease. At his best in images like the erotic encounter between doctor and nurse or the femme fatale stealing from a suitcase outside a motel he captures a deep sense of foreboding that events are going out of control and all will end badly. Plunging perspectives and a preference for a low eye-level all played a part. His talent for visualising criminal behaviour made him the first choice to illustrate Earl Stanley Gardner’s “Perry Mason” stories whenever they appeared in Saturday Evening Post. Only once, for the issue dated 22 December 1945 did Bingham paint a cover for Saturday Evening Post but he produced an enormous volume of illustration for advertising which will feature in a future post.