Irwin Chusid

This week Irwin Chusid, author/editor (with Barbara Economon) of The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics 2004) and the forthcoming Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (February 2007), brings us a series of guest-posts showcasing recently seen and rarely seen 1950s commercial art by Flora (1914-1998). More of Flora's mischief can be viewed at JimFlora.com and at JimFloraArt.com. You can contact Irwin at info@JimFlora.com. The Mischievous Art is currently sold out, and will be reprinted with The Curiously Sinister Art. All images are © Jim Flora Art LLC, owned by the heirs of James Flora.

Jiving Teens

The United States in the '50s was symbolized by the Cold War, Marilyn Monroe, Univac mainframes and the NY Yankees. The decade also saw the evolutionary emergence of a species of fleshy tuberous plant life that took root on upholstery -- the Couch Potato. Viewers in 1953 watched an average of five hours a day, which translates into commercial overload. As part of a campaign to draw sponsors to the still-nascent medium, the CBS Television Network produced a cartoon booklet extolling the sales potential of this talking furniture. Flora was hired to illustrate the 7" x 3-1/2" industry-circulated publication, entitled Primer for Prophets.

In single-word alphabet book fashion, P4P depicted the activities of TV-watching Americans during their non-viewing hours (e.g., A = Ate; G = Groomed; Q = Quaffed; S = Smoked), which suggested their purchasing habits. Every page of P4P is a Floralogical gem. His classic RCA Victor LP style is in full-bloom, with sharp features and instantly recognizable idiosyncrasies that scream Flora. Facial features are pointed and angled, teeth fang-like. Characters abound with fried-egg eyes, toucan snouts, and shoes shaped like fingernail clippings.

The "J" page, represented by "Jived," shows a teen couple gyrating near their record changer, with 45s scattered about the floor (giving the heebie-jeebies to vinyl junkies). Though ostensibly human, the teens are genetically Florafied. In paintings and commercial offerings, Flora had a penchant for outsized body parts and bonus legs. Two eyes and one mouth were rarely enough -- Flora often generously doubled nature's standard allotment. Counting on your fingers, Flora-style, would not necessarily produce multiples of five. In "Jiving Teens," an octopedal chick is dating a quintapedal guy. (Their offspring would be arachnids.) That's not all -- these kids are equipped with spare parts. Each seems to have partial -- and disconnected -- lower extremities capable of jitterbugging by some supernatural quirk of anatomical remote control. It's fun -- and disturbing. Which is why we called the first Flora collection "Mischievous" and the forthcoming edition "Curiously Sinister."

When I found Primer for Prophets in the archives, my instinctive reaction was to someday publish a limited edition facsimile reprint. It's a charming Flora rarity, and deserves circulation. Several pages of P4P will appear in the next Flora anthology. The "Jiving Teens" image currently appears on a T-shirt marketed by the Flora family.

"This boy’s gonna be a commercial artist."

I was in the 8th grade [ca. 1927]. I always drew pictures and they used to lend me to the high school to draw pictures for the high school paper. I guess the principal really thought I was going to do something someday, because I was a pretty bright kid. I didn’t start going downhill until high school. As soon as I met girls, my grades went to pieces. A phrenologist came to town and evidently he gave the principal a free pass and she took me there. I remember being in this hotel room and this phrenologist feeling my head! And then he said to her, "This boy’s gonna be a commercial artist." I didn’t know what a commercial artist was. Never heard the term before.

-- Jim Flora to Angelynn Grant (interview), November, 1990

Perhaps the tale is apocryphal. Flora was, after all, a storyteller. But if the above incident really happened (the discredited "science" of phrenology retained an antediluvian flock in the early 20th century), it either speaks well for determining vocation by the bumps on a kid's noggin -- or it was a lucky guess.

After Flora left the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1939, he cultivated a modest clientele in his hometown, mostly corporate and retail accounts. "I began to do work for Procter & Gamble," he recalled. "Dull, terrible work for point-of-sale things. I would draw people washing diapers, things like that." In the late 1940s, while employed by Columbia Records -- and dissatisfied that he had been promoted away from graphic design -- he began accepting outside assignments. Flora's freelance career took off in the early 1950s after his Mexican caper. Because his mortgage was at stake, he stood at the crossroads of art and commerce. An artist pleases himself; a commercial artist must please a client, and by extension the marketplace. Flora surely faced pressures to compete and to indulge art directors and sales brass, whose own mortgages hinged on the outcome of his graphic problem-solving; consequently, some assignments were less art and more like -- jobs. In a 1998 interview with Steven Guarnaccia, Flora admitted, "When I was freelancing, I had to do a lot of work I wish I hadn’t had to do."


Here are two examples which may or may not have been fun to do, but let's agree they're fun to look at. "You and Your Allergy" appeared in Collier's, August 1956, and "Boston's $50 Million Mile" ran in Collier's, May 1956. No need for graphic forensics. Just admire the master's handiwork.

The "Rapid-Turnover Freelance Factory"

In 1951, after rumbling back to the US from Mexico in his Hudson sedan, Flora started hustling design gigs to support his growing family (soon to number five children). He landed a Fortune magazine cover in 1952, and revived Coda for Columbia Records that same year. Aside from a short stint as Art Director for a doomed monthly called Park East, Flora was no longer tethered to a corporate desk. He became a rapid-turnover freelance factory, his graphic wizardry appearing in magazines, newspapers, and commercial literature until the early 1980s. (Throughout this period of gratifying commercial success, he continued creating woodcuts, prints, paintings and sketches as a fine art sideline.) His client roster included Mademoiselle, Fortune, The New York Times, Life, Parade, Computer Design, and countless other periodicals. In many cases, especially his pre-1960 oeuvre, all that now exists are foxed antiquarian issues and tearsheets. However, there are hundreds of later mechanical paste-ups in the Flora archives.

He was often called upon to add a playful, even sardonic illustrative twist to journalism on serious topics. He developed a knack for producing cartoonish maps, complex graphs, and visual punditry on science, money flow, geopolitics, sociological trends, technology, and world tremors. (More on this tomorrow.) These strategically plotted mise en scenes often reflected a cynical fascination (perhaps influenced by Rube Goldberg and Boris Artzybasheff) with creeping machinism -- how technology increasingly subsumed the activities of hapless humans. This is abundantly typified by "What is Automation?," which Flora contributed to Collier's magazine in March 1956.

Making A Piece of Excitement

The original 1943-45 run of Coda, the Columbia Records new release monthly, seeded a fan base for Flora's impertinent caricatures. His byline appeared in each issue. "Every art director in the country was buying jazz records, and everybody knew my name," he related in a May 1998 interview. "Everybody wanted to be on the mailing list for this little booklet." Flora designed Coda cover to cover. "I took them home and did them," he explained. "This was my fancy, and I wasn't going to let anyone else do it."

The legendary UPA cartoonist Gene Deitch was a Floraphile who became a lifelong friend. "Every week I would make a bee-line for my neighborhood record shop to pick up the Columbia Records release brochures designed by Flora," said Deitch. "His stuff just sent me into a graphic buzz, and I was brazenly imitating his style in my work. Flora eventually came across some of my stuff, and claimed he admired MY work! We met, and he turned out to be the sweetest, most good-humored and good-hearted person I ever knew."

Today's entry features a series of Flora illos from two 1952 editions of Coda. This was the rag's second incarnation, when Flora was jobbed the assignment on a freelance basis. As ever, it appears that his caricatures escaped parental supervision. Does that look like country crooner Lefty Frizzell? Er, no. Are those gospel singers? Beats me. The Mahler Symphony No. 8 earns a pastiche of interlocking shafts, crossbars, and dingbats which, as usual, reveals more about the guy at the drafting table than about the crusty composer. Asked if he listened to the music before designing his devilish LP covers, Flora replied: "If they had something to give me to listen to, they would give it to me. But mostly I just did them from the top of my head, and they gave me a great deal of freedom." He didn't care what musicians thought about his unrecognizable portraits: "I always thought that they did their thing, and it was my turn to do my thing." Suppressing his inner Eulenspiegel was not an option: "All I wanted to make was a piece of excitement."

Jim Flora's Coda

In 1943, four years out of the Cincinnati Art Academy, and one year after docking on the east coast, Jim Flora was named Art Director of Columbia Records. His boss, Alex Steinweiss (inventor of the illustrated album cover), had enlisted in the Navy. One of Flora's first directorial fiats was to launch Coda, a monthly new release booklet. Along with catalog details on fresh Columbia platters, Coda contained artist profiles, historical vignettes, and -- most pertinent -- an abundance of Flora visual chicanery. Coda ran from 1943 to 1945, after which it was replaced by The Disc Digest. By then, Flora had been promoted to Advertising Manager, and later to Sales Promotion Manager, positions which afforded him little opportunity to draw. This was a source of creative frustration; Flora was not born to be a bureaucrat. In 1950, having reached his limit of what he called "endless meetings, endless memos, and wrestling with budgets," he resigned, and "bitten by the bug of wanderlust," drove to Mexico with his family in a Hudson sedan. They lived south of the border for a year and a half, mostly in Taxco, amid what he called "picturesque ruins."

After his return to the U.S. in 1951, Flora embarked upon a freelance career in commercial design. One early client was his former employer, Columbia, who hired him to revive and illustrate Coda. A fish-eyed, sax-wailing St. Nick graced the cover of the December 1952 edition. The following year, Flora began designing LP covers for RCA Victor. The Santa handing out those plum assignments was RCA AD Robert M. Jones -- the man who had replaced Flora as Columbia AD in 1945.

Jim Flora (1914-1998)

James (Jim) Flora was one of the defining stylists of 1940s and '50s American commercial art. He concocted dozens of diabolic and hallucinatory record album covers for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. Any vacant real estate was temporary, as Flora cluttered available space with geometric doo-dads floating willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up fragmented torsos, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. His musician portraits were raucous and undignified, featuring piss-takes on such legends as Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Gene Krupa. Flora once said he "could not do likenesses"--so he conjured outlandish caricatures. Oh--and he was color-blind, which might explain why his subjects' faces were purple, green, or bedspread-patterned.

From 1960 on, Flora made a solid living illustrating for dozens of popular magazines and newspapers. He also authored and illustrated 17 children's books, earning a devoted young following. By that point his work had softened, losing its monstrous flair, which made him even more in demand (i.e., safer, more mainstream) as a commercial artist. It is Flora's edgy, early work that led Barbara Economon and me to undertake a series of books chronicling his first 20 years as a working artist. Vintage Flora album covers fetch beaucoup bucks on eBay. (The original art no longer exists.) His Pete Jolly Duo EP cover is one of the rarest of such artifacts. In fact, it has NEVER turned up on eBay. It was featured in our first book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

* This week Irwin Chusid, author/editor (with Barbara Economon) of The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics 2004) and the forthcoming Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (February 2007), brings us a series of guest-posts showcasing recently seen and rarely seen 1950s commercial art by Flora (1914-1998). More of Flora's mischief can be viewed at JimFlora.com and at JimFloraArt.com. You can contact Irwin at info@JimFlora.com. The Mischievous Art is currently sold out, and will be reprinted with The Curiously Sinister Art. All images are © Jim Flora Art LLC, owned by the heirs of James Flora.