IPA - The End of Illustration?


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The End of Illustration?

by Steve Heller

Norman Rockwell idealized America through his covers for the Saturday Evening Post and America idolized him as the people's artist. Illustration was the people's art. Today, however, painted and drawn illustration—narrative and conceptual—is, in the words of one skeptical design magazine editor, "unnecessary in an era of digital media." So is the illustration discipline really marginalized? Or to paraphrase Charles Dickens: Is this the real skinny or the skinny that might be?

Digital media, and specifically the PhotoShop extension, has had a profound influence on the way that art directors and designers currently view illustration. Once graphic designers depended on the rendering skills and conceptual acuity of illustrators. Now they can assemble ersatz illustration-collages by themselves. PhotoShop has certainly not replaced illustrators altogether (and many fine illustrators employ PhotoShop as a tool), but this tool is far more threatening than any previous technological development in the history of illustration.

Here are some reasons why:
1. Prior to PhotoShop, collage and montage were alternatives to painting and drawing, either as a direct link to fine art, or as an option for mediocre painters or drawers. Some graphic designers occasionally used their own collage and montage to bypass illustrators altogether; currently with PhotoShop this is a common practice.

2. Prior to PhotoShop art directors and designers worked in concert with illustrators on the content of illustration, but were reluctant to interfere in the image-making process itself. Today, direct intervention through PhotoShop, such as digitally changing components of an artwork without the artist's permission, is on the rise.

3. Before digital methods, art directors and designers were hesitant to rely on stock art as a means to illustrate articles or advertisements. Yet with more efficient digital platforms and websites, stock art has become an accessible, inexpensive and hassle-free alternative to commissioning original illustration (it also bypasses troublesome illustrators).

4. Stock art mitigates the need for originality on the part of the art director or designer. Certain stock houses hire neophyte artists, paying them low fees to render generic concepts in distinctive styles that may have originated with higher-priced veterans. The resultant glut of stock art undermines the ability of young artists to develop their craft through interaction with art directors and designers.

5. Since finished art can be bought straight from an online catalog as easily as a video tape or fruit basket, young art directors and designers do not develop creative relationships with illustrators.

6. Finally, the fact that fewer designers commission fewer illustrators reinforces the bias against original, hand-crafted illustration.

Illustration methods and styles throughout the twentieth century have incrementally shifted along with changes in art and technology. For example, illustration at the turn of the century was the primary visual storytelling medium, but the popularity of photography at mid-century rendered it supplementary, if not vestigial. In turn, illustration has adapted from being primarily representational to ostensibly symbolic. But with so many digital "illustrative" options available today, and a preference for photographic and digitally concocted imagery, painted and drawn illustration, whether narrative or symbolic, is viewed as a relic of the PC (pre-computer) era.

Although the status of contemporary illustration is uncertain, this article should not be read as a plaintive plea for the restoration of the so-called "Golden Age." Rather it is more important for graphic designers to see how illustration has evolved and what role it plays today in both popular culture and mass media.

The regenerative power of threatened obsolescence can, in fact, do wonders. The specter of a dying field may signal doom to some, but others see it as a call to arms. Norman Rockwell's rise and fall (and resurrection)* illustrates the point. As the model for lesser adherents, his style was destined for obsolescence. Rockwell was the virtuoso, but the overly rendered paintings produced by his legion of imitators ultimately dominated mass publishing and advertising from the late 1930s into the early 1950s. With lesser works over-saturating mass media, Rockwell became the figure-head of sentimental, romantic, and saccharin illustration. In a postwar period that gave America the Red Scare, Military Industrial Complex, A-bomb, civil rights, abstract art, and television, Rockwell's Vermeer-like images of a halcyon America were deemed by younger illustrators unstylish and unrealistic. Isn't it comforting to know that the field was doomed even back then?
*[In the past year, the retrospective exhibition, "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People," has earned Rockwell art historical acclaim not as a mere illustrator, but as the artist of American icons].
The "Rockwell style" was actually a sweeping umbrella that included work that Rockwell would never have sanctioned even while it mimicked his own. In contrast to Rockwell's own depictions of emotional nuance, what should be called neo-Rockwellian mannerisms were often stiff, puerile, and sanitized. Where Rockwell portrayed a diversity of people, his acolytes relied on stereotypes that represented a limited range. With the popularity in the 1940s of photojournalism and with the shift in the 1950s from painting to photography in advertising, this cardboard approach was an ineffectual way of representing the human condition. So, if illustration was to have any viability in the TV age, old methods had to be expunged. During the ensuing melee Rockwell was purged, at least as a model of contemporary illustration.

By the mid-1950s modern painting influenced illustration, and a few young illustrators challenged the hegemony of the academic realists. The old school was known for slavishly, though meticulously, rendering exact passages from underlined texts (usually assigned by editors). Conversely, the young turks established moods through the expressive application of color and form in paintings and drawings that wed realism and abstraction. The human figure no longer had to be an exact replica; backgrounds did not have to be thoroughly researched; verisimilitude was not necessary for a successful image. The late Robert Weaver, one of the pioneers in the shift from neo-Rockwellian
academicism to representational expressionism, explained that this was the beginning of a time when illustration was used to portray heretofore ignored themes and taboo notions.
Now the illustrator was required to express ideas rather than mimic verbatim scenes: "We had to show the notion of left-handedness and depict crime on the street," he once said, "not a couple on a date."

The "new" American illustration of the mid-1950s can be summed up in one word: Conceptual. Illustration evolved from what-you-see-is-what-you-get to conceptual because the issues and themes covered in magazines were becoming more complex, more critical. Although most neo-Rockwellian illustrations were based on a broad idea, these illustrators rejected illusion, metaphor, and symbolism in favor of the explicit vignette. Precise physical detail was more important than psychological enigma. Even Rockwell's own paintings, which were influenced by allegorical painting of the Renaissance, were precise scenes void of the ambiguity that invites a viewer's deep interpretation.
The younger artists of the 1950s, among them Weaver, Robert Andrew Parker, Phil
Hayes, Al Parker and Tom Allen, not only painted in the automatic manner of the Expressionists, their images were designed to be deconstructed like poetry. By the late 1950s photographers vividly captured the surface of things, leaving depiction of the interior world to illustrators.
As TV eroded popular interest in magazines, expressive and interpretative illustration offered alternative editorial dimension. Illustrators were given a key role in the phenomenon known as "The Big Idea," which was an extraordinary confluence of rational graphic design and acute visual thinking. The rise of conceptual illustration during the 1960s, furthermore, was marked by an unprecedented collaboration between illustrator and art director/designer because illustration was viewed as an element of design—but design was not only about simply making special effects on a page, it was about making messages. In the Rockwellian era, the art director would position the painting in a layout near the appropriate text. In the new scheme, art directors worked with illustrators on concept, composition and layout, as well. Either an illustration was integrated into a format or given its own page adjacent to an elegantly and sometimes metaphorically composed block of text. Conceptual illustration served two purposes: It provided meaning—and commentary— and gave a publication its visual personality.

Neo-Rockwellian obsolescence helped spawn conceptual illustration, but there were also iconoclastic artists instinctively bucking trends and fashions. Among the innovators, Saul Steinberg, Boris Artzybasheff and Robert Osborn invested illustration with wit and satire, expressionism and surrealism. They further imported European notions that rejected turgid realism in favor of allusion. Their graphic commentaries on a broad range of social and cultural issues energized the covers and pages of, respectively, The New Yorker, Life and The New Republic, proving that illustration could influence opinion as well as illuminate text. The relative success of these artists in capturing a popular following gave impetus to editors and art directors, notably Cipe Pineles at Seventeen, Leo Lionni at Fortune, Henry Wolf at Esquire, Frank Zachary at Holiday, Richard Gangel at Sports Illustrated, to pursue other conceptualists. And a growing number were indeed waiting for their turn to be published.

The new generation of American illustrators were influenced by modern art (Cubism, German Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism), nineteenth century cartoons (Honoré Daumier, J.J. Grandville, Thomas Nast), comic strips, primitive art and various other eclectic art forms. Where Neo-Rockwellians lagged behind contemporary advances in fine art, the new conceptual illustrators liberally borrowed from the Moderns. Rene Magritte, the Belgian surrealist, had perhaps the most profound influence on American illustration during the 1960s, exemplified by the work of then Push Pin Studio artist Paul Davis. Unlike Salvador Dali, Magritte's surrealism was less rooted in Freudian dream interpretations than ironic juxtapositions that tested accepted perception. He further built a clear, though mysterious, symbolic language that illustrators discovered could be applied to commonplace editorial themes. A gigantic boulder floating in space, a cloud-burst of bowler-hatted men, a train coming through a brick fireplace as from a tunnel and other bizarre situations formed the basis of a vocabulary that was used to visually comment on economy, politics and society. And what better way to cover such complex issues than through metaphors that transcended the commonplace.

In the late 1960s to the early 1970s, magazines that proffered "the new journalism" (a unique form of editorialized reportage pioneered by Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and others) also promulgated the new illustration, which was more interpretive than photography. Esquire, Evergreen, Ramparts, and New York magazines where among the wellsprings, giving regular outlet to leading conceptualists such as Davis, R.O. Blechman, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, James McMullan, and Brad Holland, among others. By the early 1970s the New York Times Op-Ed page, art directed by J.C. Suares,* and established as an outlet within the newspaper (opposite the official editorials) for independent opinion through text and art, opened a floodgate for artists who practiced a linear, Dada and Surrealist-inspired illustration. These drawings complimented or commented upon the texts being "illustrated." Illustrators were encouraged to reflect upon the "essence" or underlying concept of a text rather than literal passages. They were hired as translators of verbal ideas into visual ones, and therefore became virtual "co-authors," as integral to the page as the writers. Illustrators were also discouraged from using universally recognized symbols (i.e. dollar signs, Uncle Sam's, flags) in favor of more personal icons drawn from the subconscious, which, in turn, invited the reader to interact with the art.* (The author of this article followed Suares as art director from 1974 to1976).

Nevertheless, the Op-Ed approach bred many imitators and with them a litany of cliches, including the ubiquitous "everyman" trope which is adhered to today. This includes such variations as a big everyman on a small landscape, a small everymen on a big landscape, small everyman standing on a big everyman, etc. Because Op-Ed art emerged as an archetype of illustration during the 1970s and 1980s, imitators sprang like mushrooms and this form of conceptual art became almost as hackneyed as neo-Rockwellian realism.

During the intervening years, however, American illustration decidedly expanded its conceptual and stylistic range. It was very much alive in the1980s, as evidenced in the American Illustration annuals, which like the earlier European Illustration annuals, celebrated diversity while emphasizing common roots. Although a Marshall Arisman was miles apart from a James McMullan painting, which was leagues apart from a Henrik Drescher drawing, each eschewed decorative tendencies in favor of conceptual thinking and expressive painterly methods. They were drawn together not by a Rockwellian style guide, but by a need to be individual yet communicative. As a group, the artists in American Illustration both followed and lead fine art (which was having its own identity crisis at the time). And compared to the predictable annuals of the Society of Illustrators, the 100 year old establishment based in New York City, American Illustration personified the unpredictability that had for years been percolating, but had never been assembled as a "movement," loosely knit or otherwise. Prior to the annual's initial appearance, the new illustration was found in certain venues art directed by adventurous art directors, including Robert Priest at Esquire, Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone and Judy Garlan at The Atlantic magazine. After its publication, and for many years following, art directors and designers seemingly everywhere turned to American Illustration as a bible.

It has been 19 years since the first American Illustration annual. The recent edition is larger, and the work selected by its jury continues to be visually striking and conceptually acute, and distinctive from the equally voluminous Society of Illustrators Annual. Yet illustration is in crisis. And not just because one skeptical design editor said so, but because many illustrators believe that it has been devalued by stock and marginalized by young and older designers who admittedly have little interest in the art form. By extension, art directors do not provide platforms for illustrators. (Such is the concern that in Fall 1999, 500 concerned illustrators met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for their first conference ever to discuss the future of their field.)

It is, therefore, curious that at a time when the outlets are severely reduced, stock houses are multiplying, and PhotoShop and other design methods have replaced conceptual illustration, that there is such a surfeit of excellent practitioners (and an equally large number of art school programs for illustration).

Does this mean that "The End of Illustration" is as specious as warnings about the end of history or the end of print? The millennial predilection for foretelling the "end of " must be looked at askance. If illustration is dying, it will be over many illustrators' dead bodies. One should never underestimate the primal urge that artists have to continually create images that are seen by many people. The art impulse is hard to switch-off which accounts, in part, for a fairly constant enrollment in illustration programs over the past decade. Moreover, despite adversity, this is the reason that many illustrators attempt to reinvent themselves, not just stylistically, but also in the ways they approach form and content.

Whatever one calls this period, crisis or transition or realignment, "The End of Illustration" is not as near as predicted. But owing to digital media and other design issues, illustration is in a state of flux that could dip or rise. Education is the first part of any solution. For too long, illustrators have been pedagogically segregated from designers. Even the most inclusive art schools do not encourage long-term marriage of the two disciplines. Invariably, segregation reinforces hierarchies, which perpetuates the myth of the lower caste illustrator. Although the educational needs of the disciplines diverge, it seems logical that there should be integration at certain stages. Even with the computer, designers need to know drawing, while illustrators should be literate with type.
But also on a conceptual level, illustrators and designers can share visual ideas, methods and strategies for conveying information and telling stories. But education is only the first step.

Graphic designers are learning that design is only a means of framing content. In order to expand it to a more self-sufficient role, it is necessary to take partial or total control in creating content. Illustrators, likewise, must take either a more collaborative or entrepreneurial role in the production of idea-products. Illustration may no longer be the people's art, as it was in the days of Norman Rockwell. But painted and drawn art continues to evoke ideas and emotion in its viewers. Unless illustration is reintegrated into the broader design process, a significant component of the visual media will atrophy.