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.

 

Paper - Material of a Thousand Uses

This guide to the uses of paper is a typical mid-century publication aimed at schools, offering free learning materials in return for a chance to advance the cause of business to a new generation.  For a modest financial outlay, businesses could present a human face and claim to be agents of corporate responsibility.  The illustrations will be immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the artwork in Ladybird Books - formal, descriptive, slightly heightened in colour and unemotional.  Two themes dominate, the first being to impress the young reader with a sense of the mammoth scale of the enterprise - vast machines operated by a workforce of heroes. The second theme is best described as a thousand things you never knew about paper from tabloids to tissues. It shows us an orderly society where the working man wore a flat cap and foremen wore brown coats - a lost world of stoic deference selectively recalled by an older generation desperate to see it revived before they exit the stage.

 

The Factory

For more than two centuries, the image of the factory has stood as an emblem of manufacturing and mass production. Carefully planned or simply improvised and extended as required, factories were an essential element in the iconography of industry and economic activity. Social historians divide them into two categories - basically pre-Ford and post-Ford. In a pre-Ford factory a single product was processed from raw materials. A post-Ford factory brought together a large number of components, many of which were made off-site, and combined them into something much greater by means of an assembly line where every intervention and activity was calculated to maximise efficiency and boost profitability. In the years of neo-liberal ascendancy, the post-Ford bargain with organised labour that ensured the workforce was sufficiently remunerated to afford to purchase the goods they produced has gradually withered away. Two powerful forces have emerged over the last 30 years to transform the modern factory - the first being automation and the second, the business of global outsourcing to secure the cheapest supply of labour. The image of the sprawling factory, often visualised from above, has completely lost the sense of awe and wonder that it once inspired. And very few remain embedded in urban areas where their presence once served as beacons in the local community as well as product advertising. It’s far more common to see images of the demolition of factory premises than to see the inauguration of new factories with the promise of employment and prosperity. To recapture any sense of that lost wonder we have to look to Asia where mega-factories such as Foxconn in China have borrowed the Victorian idea of the industrial settlement or company town and expanded it on a stupendous city-wide scale. 

Today’s employers rarely concern themselves with the welfare of their workforce - their responsibilities being confined to the simple transaction of remuneration for labour. Coercive control is the preferred model for improving productivity and the favoured tools are intrusive surveillance and real-time monitoring of performance against ever more demanding targets. Victorian paternalists had a sense of their duty to contribute to the health and education of their employees by establishing schools, colleges, libraries and clinics and paying their taxes. Little of that impulse has survived into the present where a reductivist view of human relationships dictates that business must be unimpeded by social concerns. The costs of ensuring a continuity of healthy and educated workers are for the taxpayer while business exercises its moral duty to pay as little tax as possible. Taken to its extreme this requires workers to accept terms that reduce them to anonymised units of labour with unending responsibilities and no rights. Not even assets, they are mere utilities, like water or electricity to be turned on and off as required. 

The story of the rise and fall of the factory, and the battle between capital and organised labour is told in Joshua B Freeman’s book, Behemoth - a detailed account of the birth and development of modern industry that presents a wealth of fascinating material. It was a surprise to discover that when American business began to construct textile mills on the British model they first had to evade the restrictions that Britain imposed on the emigration of skilled workers in an attempt to defend its technical advantages. New England mill owners relied on child labour and payment in vouchers redeemable at company-owned stores, just as in England. Labour shortages followed as the mills expanded in size and located to less populated areas. This lead to the large-scale recruitment of female workers and the provision of hostel accommodation with leisure and educational amenities attached. Perhaps a response to the example set by Robert Owen at New Lanark. In the absence of economically viable supplies of coal for steam power, New England operations continued to depend on water power with the result that the smoke darkened skies and atmospheric pollution of industrial England were several decades late in arriving. The result was that the early American industrialisation was a much more humane and utopian operation than its English counterpart. I had lazily assumed that the ultra-aggressive turbo-capitalism that erupted in the Reagan-Thatcher era was an all-American construction but it seems that its roots lie much closer to home. 

The images of factories displayed here are mostly taken from mid-century American advertising post-1945. This was an atypical period when organised labour briefly held the upper hand as the US economy shifted rapidly to a peacetime footing and chronic labour shortages placed unprecedented power in the hands of unionised workers. The pushback was not long in coming as employers campaigned to equate trade union activities with the new universal enemy - Soviet communism - throughout the Cold War 1950s. 

Mid-century American Illustration – a selection of double pages

To start 2018 we present some double page spreads from US magazines, mostly Saturday Evening Post with a few from Ladies Home Journal. In some we see the illustrator doing no more than take advantage of a broader space to add impact but in the best the illustrator has found fresh and innovative ways to integrate image and text to dynamic effect. The very best are those where the artist has exploited facial close-ups, dramatic lighting and tonal modelling to spring the image off the page and into our eyes – Jon Whitcomb and Alex Ross being masters of this technique. Artists include George Hughes, Melbourne Brindle, Robert Patterson, Halleck Finley, Peter Stevens and Walter Baumhofer. Baumhofer’s contribution (This time it’s Goodbye) artfully frames the text extract while maintaining a powerful spatial tension between the foreground figure and the distant couple she observes from behind the curtain.