Art: U. S. Illustrators

Last week was an active week for U. S. illustrators. At its club house on Manhattan's West 24th Street, the big happy family known as the Society of Illustrators neared the end of a month of sober lectures by technicians including non-illustrators Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Reginald Marsh. At the swank Park Lane its members reveled until dawn in gay costume at their annual "Bal Scramboree." And at the Grand Central Fifth Avenue Art Galleries the society put on its 37th annual exhibition, prefaced by a defensive program note. "These men are first-class craftsmen in a most difficult field," it said defiantly, "but the art critics and the plush carpeted galleries know them not."

Even the plushiest art critics agree: that since the time of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, U. S. magazines have easily led the world in the quality of their illustrations; that the financial success of illustrators has drawn much talent which in another country might have gone into non-commercial art; that all illustrators, even the most original, are inveterate swipers from every source; that magazine illustration in the U. S. has developed in about four broad styles.

Broadcloth Boys. Immediate granddaddies of one contemporary school were the American pre-Raphaelite Edwin Austin Abbey and the Romanticist Howard Pyle, both august figures around Manhattan's mellow Century Club in the 1890s. Pyle, later joined by his star pupil, N. C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth, founded an informal art school at Wilmington, Del., where young Pyles and young Wyeths still make most of the art news (TIME, Nov. 15; 1937). Abbey's Tennysonian women and Pyle's nut-brown heroes haunted subsequent illustrators in oil. So did their love of historical romance. One of their stylistic descendants is Norman Rockwell (45), whose first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared in May 1916, and who has grown rich on the subsequent 185. A perpetually delighted, boyish man much like his own schoolboy characters, Norman Rockwell paints with unvarying lovability, blatant technical flair and particularly lusty highlights. He and Mead Schaeffer, his good friend and fellow romancer, turned up at last week's ball in costumes they were then engaged in painting.

Dean Cornwell (47), learned illustration under Pyle-Pupil Harvey Dunn and about 1916 got a free hand from the late Editor Ray Long to become Red Book's (later Cosmopolitan's) pride and joy. His illustrations for such fictioneers as Blasco Ibanez, E. M. Hull, Arthur Somers Roche and Somerset Maugham were as exotically escapist as the tales themselves, and his studio became famous for its clutter of authentic props. In 1922 tall, enthusiastic, travel-loving Artist Cornwell went to London to work with Frank Brangwyn, has since incorporated that decorator's style with his own in some of the most splendiferous symbolic murals in the Western Hemisphere—one in the Los Angeles Public Library and one now being finished for the General Motors Building at the World's Fair.