An illustrator is someone who provides pictures or graphics to help break up the text of a book or article and also provides a visual representation of something going on in a text. Illustration can therefore be thought of as a derivative form of art because the art does not rely on itself alone to convey its experience and message and that designation as derivative is also earned because illustrative art will have to be relatively simple and of conventional taste so that it will satisfy its magazine and best seller audiences. “Illustrator” can be thought of as a term of condescension by someone concerned with “high art”. Yet there was a great age of illustration that accompanied the popularity of wide circulation magazines, the technology available, from the 1880’s on, to give good quality reproductions of the artwork, and there was also a mass market for illustrated best selling novels, such as “Treasure Island”. Moreover, the age of illustration is not totally past. Consult the front page of the New York Times and congratulate the paper’s photo editor for having picked out what is usually a very artistically composed illustration for some top story. So let us consider the accomplishments and the point of view of some master illustrators from its Golden Age.
Frederic Remington is an illustrator who worked for “Harper’s Weekly” and for “Collier’s” magazines and illustrated books, including one by the young Theodore Roosevelt. He is now collected in museums but his work has the tell tale characteristics of the illustrator. He settles for the easy drama of an Indian meeting his fate, or of the tension between a peddler selling his wares to Indians, or of a man taming a horse, he especially adroit at drawing horses in a variety of postures. His lines are simple, the colors clear, the story of each painting pointed, all of these designed to capture the attention of an audience not schooled to appreciate art and so not ready for the darker emotions conveyed by high art or even to look attentively at faces, as would be required for looking at a Rembrandt, the pleasure coming from looking into the depths those faces convey rather than in the appreciation of a moment of action or in the story the picture tells, even if on its own.
Remington is also careful not to try to expand the consciousness of those who see his illustrations. It is hard to say that was deliberate or the expression of his own limited consciousness. As others have said, Remington does not portray dance halls or bars or the girls to be found there. It is obvious that to do so would not be suitable for his respectable audience, although even grand opera, that most middle brow of Nineteenth Century pursuits, was willing to deal with courtesans and playboys. More than that, Remington does not provide pictures of chuck wagons or of bunkhouses, those other staples of Wild West life, perhaps because they would testify to the way of life pursued by men living together communally, sort of like Spartan youth who were ever preparing for war, for then it would become understandable why men might want to go into those saloons and carry on with bar girls on the few occasions when they were able to go into town, “on leave” from their ordinary chores. No wonder their favorite companions were their horses, or so it was made to seem.
So Remington can be seen, as can many other illustrators, as a cultural conservative. He portrays an idealized form of social conflict, that conflict confined to limits that make it heroic: man against horse, man against nature, man against Indian. He does not provide a portrayal of the ever evolvingynamics of how people live with one another so as to best exploit their environments. He provides excitement rather than gravitas, the allure of the West rather than its actual experience, and so is akin to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where domesticated Indians made believe that they were attacking cowboys.
Remington did set the tone for that long range of Westerns that began in Hollywood about the time he died in 1909, that leading to the need for a long series of revisionist Westerns, from John Ford, who saw the cavalrymen as perched in a fortress community that tried to replicate a more civilized life style, while yet always on the lookout for Indian rampages, through “Shane” and “Gunfight at the OK Corral”, which saw Westerners as troubled people, to Sam Peckinpaugh’s “The Wild Bunch”, which saw the end of the West and the outlawry that went with it, and even to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven”, which saw the West as simply a place from which to retell the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah going into Egypt and Abraham allowing his wife to be mistaken for his sister for reasons not made clear in the Bible but made very clear in Malick: she could seduce the guy who lived on the hill. Remington is what everyone afterwards has to reject as the true picture of the West, and so those who want to accept his Romanticized view of the West are doing so by neglecting reality, which is certainly an easy way of choosing the history you want.
Consider another illustrator: N. C. Wyeth, who illustrated early mass circulation editions of “Treasure Island”. Wyeth presents burly, swarthy, scowling pirates, some with open shirts showing off hairy chests, most with bandannas, many with red sashes across their heavy midriffs and otherwise white clothing. They are heavily armed, brandishing swords and pistols. The present a stereotypical notion of evil incarnate, the worthy enemy of all who are upstanding and righteous and just ordinary folk, and so the right name for a perpetual foe who arises in different guises in different times. Robert Louis Stevenson’s original, written down, pirates were much more charming than that, especially Long John Silver, who Stevenson lets escape at the end of his novel because he had securely engaged himself with the Stevenson audience and they would not have wanted him tried and hanged. He was too eloquent for that. But Wyeth simplifies: there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there is no getting around that, which is a very cultural conservative assumption, cultural liberals believing, in general, that criminals can often be converted into victims just as heroes can be turned into the deranged-- though I never did find a way to transform George Wallace into anything other than he was, even when he became an object of pity to the liberal press after he had been shot.
The Wyeth take is exemplified in later generations by the cartoonist, Jake Kane, who drew Batman and his strange crew of evil opponents: the Penguin, the Joker and the like. Wyeth and his descendants bring up and personify the universal challenge of right versus wrong, of criminal justice gone awry, that the main indication of the faults of society, rather than the challenge of poverty or illness, those two recommended as objects of contemplation and relief since Biblical times. Later illustrators abandon the universal theme of the deviant who needs to be punished, and go back to the Remington project of altering the past or even their present so as to make it more palatable, to make of it a past or present more suited to their sense of what life should be like and so, it is presumed, really was or is like.
A good example of this is Norman Rockwell, who might be considered the last of the illustrators, in that print magazines like “Collier’s” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, the last of which carried Rockwell paintings on many of its covers for many years, went out of business in the Fifties because there was no longer a market for high circulation print magazines. The rumor at the time was that “Collier’s” went out of business in 1957 because of an entire issue it had devoted in 1951 to how a Third World War would go. The United States would conquer the Soviet Union but New York City would take A-Bomb hits twice. Economics aside, that theory buttressed the idea that popular journalism has to carefully consider the emotional impact on its middle brow audience of what it publishes and so must proceed gingerly.
Rockwell might not be thought of a cultural conservative because he did a cover in 1963, “The Problem We All Live With”, where a young black girl, prettily and properly dressed goes off, presumeably to school, amidst the much taller people--the adults--who were escorting her there. She was a heroine, quiety paying mind to what she had to do, which was to get through this ordeal. Other of his paintings, however, celebrate the idea of community, that old trope of cultural conservatism which extols the well ordered and organically whole social life. There is the story picture “The Runaway” of the policeman who sits on a stool next to the runaway boy at a drug store counter. The picture is well composed, the runaway’s bandana of stuff he took with him there beside him on the floor, the appurtenances of a malt shop on the counter in the background. There is plenty of information out of which to build the story. There is also, however, its moral.. The policeman is the community at its most benevolent. He is supportive and takes the time to provide his young charge with anear to hear the runaway’s problems as well as, presumably, an ice cream soda, a staple of creature comfort, however much the picture rings an overly saccharine note in that only the police in a small town without much else to do are likely to take this much time for a runaway. That he is patient is the point of the picture; the drama is in how he can be so patient. This is not true to life; it is true to an idealized sense of life that the audience just wishes were true.
More evasive still are the pictures composed by Rockwell to document the Four Freedoms enunciated by FDR when he met with Churchill off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1941, before America’s entry into World War II. Rockwell exemplifies “Freedom from Want” as a Thanksgiving dinner where the turkey has pride of place in the center of the picture. But the phrase “Freedom From Want” was not meant to evoke abundance but starvation, and that is not represented in this picture which is another tribute to what America does right at least for those who are doing alright. Similarly, his picture to illustrate “Freedom of Speech” shows a man in a dirty jacket (a nice touch) proclaiming his views while his fellows look on approvingly, when the whole point of freedom of speech is that a person is entitled to it even when his fellows will not look on approvingly. The value of the picture is in the face of the speaker, straining for profundity out of his rather grim and lined visage, his face showing his character. It is touches such as this that make some think that Rockwell was more than an illustrator, but so stereotypical is the concept of the speaker that it is only possible to think of him as a striking example of a type rather than as a distinct individual, which is true of any number of novelists, such as Somerset Maugham or Wilkie Collins, who fall short of the first rank precisely because they so sharply delineate a type rather than provide a character. Moreover, the town meeting form of democracy, that descended from De Tocqueville’ idealization of it in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, does not deal with the machine politics that came to dominate urban politics in the last half of the Nineteenth Century, or the media politics of the Twentieth Century, those also part of the American tradition. It is easier to go backwards than to imagine what was the present in Rockwell’s time.
So the point about illustrators is not just that they were a function of what the press could handle in the way of art during the heyday of the magazine. It was that they communicated the ideology of their times. They champion a common America, united in belief and prosperity. It was a moment in American cultural life, an appeal to the wholesome, and illustrators stand out for that, just as does Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” or Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!”. That moment wears its heart and its morals on its sleeve, shoving its point of view at the reader or audience, which is not what high art does, which makes you work to figure out why it affects you. Illustration is not that; rather, it is a way to exemplify a feeling already held with a stereotypical visual representation of that feeling, no questions to be asked.