James Montgomery Flagg by Susan E. Meyer (book review).
Set yourself a task. Find a book about a particular artist and see if you can pull one at a reasonable price. Considering James Montgomery Flagg (1877–1961) is known for his military recruitment posters of Uncle Sam (posed by the artist himself), you would think it would have been relatively easy to get at least one of his books, let alone cheaply. Nope. This book by Susan E. Meyer was just serendipity at a reasonable price. Luck breeds luck.
Flagg was mostly self-taught and sold his first illustration to a professional magazine at the age of 12! His work here shows how good a pen and ink illustrator he was, not depending on cross-thatching for texturing, shadow, and depth, according to author Susan Meyer. He could also work in any medium, although he disliked pastels. From the opening chapters, it was also revealed that he could also write and direct 24 films and was very self-opinionated. In our eyes, he would be called a geek in the modern day, so he would have been one of us.
Looking more at the art and Flagg’s ink illustration, he does use thatch in the backgrounds and clothes texture. Perhaps not as extensively, and his line use for texture looks a bit maddening until you realise the illustrations are at least four times the size of the printed page when close-ups are shown at the correct scale and he was using a brush, not a pen.
There are a variety of paintings showing that he uses colour and shape as much as anything to define the style of clothes. If anything, much of it is a colour impression of what you think is there, and your head will fill in the rest, which is an art in itself.
His portraiture of actors and such from his time period conveys how they sat for him, although how he turned Katherine Hepburn into a caricature beats me.
It’s worth the effort to study his style. I suspect anyone copying it will immediately draw some comparisons. What you will learn is how much attention you pay to his paintings, and that Flagg was gifted with design, which explains why his art was so popular in his lifetime.
GF Willmetts
March 2024
(pub: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974. 208 page illustrated indexed large hardback. Price: varies and luck. ISBN: 0-8230-1835-0).
