100 Years of Illustration :

Dedicated to the memory of Ruth Tremaine Giambarba, 1932-1978.

Seen in retrospect the 1950s were wonderful years for those of us who were not sent to Korea to fight a bloody war from 1950 to 1953. I was discharged a Staff Sergeant in the 101st. Field Artillery of the Massachusetts Army National Guard where I served from 1948 to 1955. After the invasion by North Koreans in June 1950 our enlistments were frozen. We were required to stay close to home and wait for the call to active duty. Fortunately, it never came.

My first year as a private, 2-1/2 ton truck and jeep driver.

During this time my young wife Ruth and I improved a small "starter home” we bought, and then sold, to finance an extended trip to Europe. It allowed us seven months to explore countries west of the Iron Curtain and for me to discover my roots in Italy where my family has lived for centuries (Hannibal parked his elephants nearby during the Second Punic War). From 1955 through 1960 we managed to travel, live and work in Europe, for a cumulative total of two years or more, interrupted only with trips back to Boston when funds were in need of replenishing.

Ruth studied French and Italian by listening to Assimil phonograph records.

Then she subscribed to the French edition of Elle to be au courant with the language.

"Dans le vent," she said.

I was a cartoonist contributing to national magazines such as Sports Illustrated, and freelancing graphic art for advertising agencies and corporations such as Polaroid with whom I had a 25-year career as a designer and consultant. I was inspired by the Belle Epoque we experienced in Europe, what we now know was a Golden Age of design: from the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint to the Neue Haas Grotesk typeface and Braun household applicances. In the mid-1960s inflation would cause the following decades to be manipulated by bean counters with little feeling for creativity unless it related to their accounting practices.

Most of my drawings during our travels were made with a No. 1 Rapidograph fountain pen using Pelikan black fountain pen ink on the quadrille pages of a note book bought in Goteborg, Sweden. I drew from memory the images that I recalled seeing that day. I worked in my lap or on a table usually provided in the pension where we were staying.

Then, one night in Nervi on the Mediterranean coast, just east of Genova, I managed to refine many of the original sketches into the drawings that also appear here, working with the same pen on thin sheets of Italian air mail paper, bound in pads, that is purchased in tobacco shops.

That was over fifty years ago, and I have never been again so prolific. It’s obvious that I was critical of many Europeans. Perhaps it had to do with years of living in Boston where Anglophiles are a resident majority. Or maybe it was my response to the caustic cartoon wit of Ronald Searle and Tomi Ungerer who took such delight in savaging the residents of the United States they had observed in the same period of time.

Christmas dinner, Saint Christof am Alberg in the Austrian Alps, 1959.

I'll be adding much more so please stay tuned. . . .

Here are more, posted on 28 December --

Young Swedish couple

Mother and daughter, Goteborg, Sweden

German burgher

Teddy boy, London

Soviet GI, who called me "comrade" when we passed him in their zone of Austria.

And more, uploaded on 4 January 2009

Two Brits we met who were taking great delight in disparaging all things American. The toff and his missus weren't hesitant at all in enlightening us with what was really wrong with our country. Or for that matter, the Irish, Scots (who wanted their damn Stone back), Jews, Italians, those damned froggies across the Channel, Bolshies, Atlee and Labour, and the Americans who come over with more money than brains or good taste, and . . . oh, yes, let's do have another round. Jolly good and thank you very much.

"I say, where are you from in the States?"

A younger version of the previous couple, on the Lido, Venice.

A couple of older Germans on the Lido, Venice.

Danish couple watching the cars go by, somewhere on the island of Jutland, near Aarhus.

The original pen and ink drawing from which the painting in casein, above, was made. I think I like this much better.

This is the original page in a notebook where I had drawn a Swiss couple in Geneva braving a cold wind blowing in off Lac Léman. From it I later did the small gouache sketch below in another notebook.

A high point of our trip was our first visit to France.

This is a preppie American kid wondering what to do with himself in a Paris restaurant.

Meanwhile, out in the November cold, a colonial from North Africa sold chestnuts he roasted out on the sidewalks.

Other colonials arrived up from Le Metro carrying their worldy goods.

And dirty old men tried to sell postcards of nude women.

And women of the night practiced engaging smiles.

In Vienna, they appared to be much older, more tired.

Younger women worked their charms on jaded men in coffee bars.

Street walking was the tried and true means even in the outskirts of town.

The sketch from which the image above was made.

German motorcyclist approaching customs with his doucments or carnet.

Other scary guys -- Soviet officers working their own zones. The guy at the top kept me for an hour in the Soviet checkpoint at Helmstedt, Germany, then refused to let me drive on to Berlin. The other two were seen in Vienna showing off their shiny boots and tailored Class A uniforms, in stark contrast to the shabbiness of their enlisted men.

In Italy there seemed to be a dozen uniforms for every service branch. The troops with feathers in their caps belonged to Alpini, or Alpine regiments, officers in the Italian navy wore shorts out on the town in summer.

Former military men wore bunches of fruit salad on their lapels.

Men weren't the only ones checking themselves out in shop windows.

Young Italian men were well-tailored with excellent haircuts. Of course, farmers and older men seemed not interested at all in fashion.

Certainly I was no fashion plate, though Ruth was always well turned out. This is a happy couple as they stopped for a drink along one of the Italian lakes north of Milano.

On the road in France.

Ruth, on the way home, photographed from a lower deck. We always sailed Tourist Class, which for the modest sum of $180 fed a traveler three huge meals and more for as many days as it took to cross the Atlantic.

That was a great time in the history of this world, perhaps it will be remember as another Belle Epoque, as the French described their own choice moment in time.

News Update. Time magazine has just selected this cover by Bob Staake as the Number One magazine cover of 2008. Didn't I just got through telling you how great it is?

Here's the link.

It's time to include contemporary talent when it's too outstanding to be ignored. That's how I feel about Bob Staake's recent work for The New Yorker magazine.

This is the most recent issue which took its sweet time to arrive in our mailbox, which is why I'm a few days late with it.

Click on images to enlarge them.

This work entitled Reflections is sublime. I ran some work in the blog by Jules Guerin, an old-time architectural illustrator and while he was excellent for his time, this Lincoln Memorial of Bob's shows just how far illustration and design has come -- with rare exceptions -- in the 100 years since.

I don't think magazine cover illustration can get any better than this for a whole lot of reasons which would probably sound pompous to you. Suffice it to say that I feel strongly that this is every bit as good as the best Swiss posters of the last century. Highlighting the O in the title is in itself a stroke of genius.

Click on this link for more.