Inside the Business of Illustration

Steven Heller, Marshall Arisman

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781581159455
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte e business

his guide to the ins and outs of today's dynamic illustration business tells budding illustrators everything that their teacher didn't know or their art director didn't tell them. Using an entertaining, running narrative format to look at key concerns every illustrator must face today, this book covers finding one's unique style and establishing a balance between art and commerce; tackling issues of authorship and promotion; and more. In-depth perspectives are offered by illustrators, art directors, and art buyers from various industries and professional levels on such issues as quality, price negotiation, and illustrator-client relationships.

Part

One

An Overview of Art versus Illustration in America

CHAPTER ONE

Art and Illustration

Working illustrators know from day-to-day experience that this business has changed dramatically. We remember being able to make a decent living from editorial assignments—some people even did better than that. We remember a time when there were a great many publications and a demand for illustrated visuals. Today, fewer illustrators are getting work and the new outlets for illustration are not yet fully realized. Where they exist, the fees have not kept up with the cost of living. The pessimistic conclusion voiced by more than a few artists is that editorial illustration is dead and unlikely to come back. The truth is, this is not a new predicament for illustrators, or fine artists, either. The difference lies in expectation levels. Illustrators make money, fine artists don’t. They are both myths. The art business depends on the existence of a market. The market for illustration, as well as fine art, rides smoothly and easily on the back of a thriving economy, and can disappear when the bear comes out of hibernation. But today’s economic uncertainty doesn’t bode well for illustration or fine art. We realize that a rebounding market does not seem to be in our immediate future and it has begun to trigger demands for change in the way our business operates as well as a need to reexamine our options as artists.

Today, serious illustrators are bonding together in organizations like the Illustrators’ Partnership of America to pursue finding larger or different markets for illustration and protecting the rights to the work. Bringing together the power of the many and using it to help individual artists practically is a worthy goal. But it makes no sense to me to spend the energy and time to structure and commit to any organization, with all that it entails, before at least trying to demystify the myths underlying the business of illustration and understanding how we arrived at this point, i.e., a sense of our own history. That might make a difference by helping us to recognize that beyond making a living, artists have hopes, dreams, and needs that drive their ambitions and make them strive to fulfill their potential. And the question of whether it is possible to explore that aspect of the artistic process within a professional group structure should certainly be addressed. It is, for me, an essential element in the teaching of illustration at the graduate level and fundamental if success is to be achieved in any organization that represents the true interests of illustrators.

What’s Wrong with Pragmatic Solutions?

In art education circles, the most prevalent solution being offered to the problem of a shrinking market is one that is reasonably offered to any nonartist whose field of employment offers fewer opportunities. Illustrators, they say, should develop graphic design skills because there are more work and more career opportunities in graphic design. Illustrators can design Web sites, books, become art directors, and they can always illustrate when there is an opportunity, they say. The argument goes, designer/illustrators can draw and develop conceptual solutions giving them the edge in getting jobs. Many of the most talented MFA illustration students at SVA have strong design skills, computer proficiency, and can art direct with the best of them. So it sounds like a reasonable solution to a real problem.

However, such a solution could only be put forward by pragmatic school administrators or non-illustrators. It presumes that the choice to illustrate is one of a number of career directions for the artists involved. From my experience, there is only one other career choice for most illustrators and that is figuration in a fine art context whether it is in video, film, painting, or sculpture. No one would presume to tell fine artists that instead of making pictures they should become plumbers or lawyers, sell insurance—or do graphic design. What they do say is learn plumbing or something else to pay for the time to paint or sculpt or make videos.

The intention involved in being designers is to bring together elements of design—type, illustration, photographs, etc.—and to arrange them in an appropriate way for the publication, poster, ad, or book that communicates to a large audience. The art is involved in the originality and creativity of the design. The historical roots of graphic design go back to the printing press and book design. The historical roots of illustration are in the figurative fine arts and not in graphic design, as so many people believe.

The majority of graphic designers have more in common with the producer in film or television than with painters. The large majority of illustrators share the intention of fine artists devoted to figuration. The business of illustration and how to revitalize it cannot be understood, nor can solutions be discovered without understanding its tangled roots. Illustration and graphic design are like bananas and oranges sharing the same fruit bowl. Illustration is primarily a freelance career. Graphic design is primarily salaried. Beyond that there are serious creative differences between the design process and making illustrations as well as the personal differences among those who draw and paint and those who make use of the drawings and paintings of others.

In order to have serious discussions on how to resuscitate the illustration field and make it a “business” again, we need, first, to be clear about the role money plays in all art and how it relates to the impulse to make art. Is it the most compelling reason to become an illustrator? Would an artist choose fine arts—where there is no promise of making money—if the promise of making money in illustration did not exist? Would you not choose to become an artist at all? Is there a productive way to make money and continue to produce art that may or may not produce cash?

The story of Howard Pyle—acknowledged today to be the father of American illustration—is a metaphor for the struggle of contemporary illustrators and painters to understand in themselves the artistic strivings for validity, recognition, and money. It was his awesome personal drive, determination, and artistry that would lay the foundations of the field and his story gives us the seeds for understanding our current dilemma. Pyle’s career would be shaped on the one hand by the invention of the camera (1839) thirteen years before he was born and on the other by what seemed to him an obscure artistic debate on the validity of narrative in painting that raged in Europe while he was in art school. The parallels between the events of that time and today are strikingly similar in determining the career paths of today’s illustrators.

It is a history lesson with implications for our lives as artists.

Howard Pyle: Father of American Illustration

Howard Pyle was born on March 5, 1853. He was the eldest child in a Quaker family where creativity was strongly encouraged. As a child, he loved illustrated books and when he learned to read, devoured adventure stories. Pyle attended the Van der Weilens School of Art in Philadelphia. There he was taught to draw and paint from life, studying classical composition and content from the traditional masters. He was studying to become a painter, a fine artist.

The turn of the century saw artistic Europe in a fury of discussion on art’s function in an age of mechanical reproduction. In nineteenth-century Europe, figurative painting was de rigueur for artists as it was in America when Pyle was a child. Winslow Homer, who covered the Civil War (1865) for Harper’s Weekly as an illustrator/painter, painted rural scenes for more than a decade after the war. After a trip to England, the sea became his realistic subject matter as a painter.

By 1900, as Howard Pyle’s artistic vision became more cohesive, two older American painters were already influential forces in the art world. Frederick Church (1826–1900) dominated the romantic tradition of landscape painting known as the Hudson River School—founded by his teacher Thomas Cole (1801–1848). Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) who was trained in Paris and influenced greatly by the work of Manet was also a major American realist painter. His subject matter included a series of studies and paintings of surgeons’ operating. He revolutionized how art was taught in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century by insisting students have sound anatomical knowledge and that they do extensive drawings from the nude model—his personal interest in photography was not reflected in his formal teaching method.

But as the twentieth century developed, it was the art from Europe and the continent that was new and exciting. The movement was dismissive of the figure and enamored of both conceptual and abstract artistic directions. Manifestos abounded on impressionism, cubism, dadaism, futurism, fauvism, and all the other “isms” of the early twentieth century. At the same time, photography was by 1900 a profound influence on all fine art all over the world. Before the camera, painting represented visible objects. The four edges of that canvas contained a stable, non-moving world. The viewer’s attention was held in place by perspective devices and compositional elements structured by the artist. The photograph raised the question of whether it was valid to continue to paint recognizable visual objects including people. By taking a photograph, one could document whatever the camera captured with accuracy. Beyond that, the camera could take a photograph that captured movement and could show a single moment in time. The European theorists posed the question of whether, in fact, it made the photograph more trustworthy than painting.

The American realist painters—Pyle, Church, Eakins, and others— ignored the controversy raging abroad. Convinced of the validity of their vision to represent Americans and the American landscape accurately, they were not impressed by Europe’s fashionable romance with abstract notions.

But Howard Pyle’s commitment to figuration carried an extra edge. Europe was, after all, an ocean away, its values if not frivolous, were, he believed, unconnected to the concerns of Americans. It was inconceivable to him that any art dismissive of the figure could be successful in America. Pyle was convinced that his Quaker beliefs in the importance of upright morals, good character, solid citizenship, religious upbringing, hard work, and patriotic duty—characteristics imbued in the great classics in American literature— could be translated into a new American fine art form. He set out to consciously develop his own art movement. He called this picture making instead of painting, and it was decidedly figurative. He, in fact, used photographs as reference, when needed, to heighten the drama of his pictures. The “freeze frame” was used to stop the action. A sword caught in mid-air, the impact of two jousters meeting.

The pictures were not shown in museums or galleries, which in America then were small, private and exhibited landscapes painted with painstaking detail by artists such as Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Doughty. Pyle’s pictures appeared in the pages of magazines, books, and periodicals that were delivered into the homes of thousands of consumers. For many, it was the only art with which they were familiar, and often the pictures were framed to hang on their walls. The images were art for the people, art about the people. The work embodied national character, geography, and America’s abiding interest in sports, glamour, and money. This was art that related to the country’s past and present. It could be understood without explanation or manifesto. The European art movements —or for that matter any of the conflicts of the early twentieth century American schools of figuration or representation—were simply unknown to Pyle’s magazine readership.

“You can’t run around the country explaining your pictures when they hit the news stand,” Pyle told his students.

The invention of photoengraving—freed from the more complicated process of engraving or lithography—allowed paintings to be reproduced easily. Pictures sold stories and magazines. Only 700 periodicals existed in 1865, but by 1900, there were nearly 5,000 publications that printed more pictures for less money and the picture makers got rich. The amount of money they earned convinced the artists that the pictures they were creating were works of art. It was a self-deception in which many artists throughout history have found themselves trapped.

In 1900, the average annual salary for an American worker was $400. Illustrators were paid that for one picture. Howard Pyle’s annual salary was around $50,000 dollars. He was a household name. His financial success proved to both Pyle and the early capitalists that his new art form was here to stay. His social circle expanded to include the foremost politicians of the day including the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, along with Henry Cabot Lodge, Oliver Wendell Homes, and Woodrow Wilson. His friends Mark Twain and the artist Frederick Remington considered him a major talent.

With each success, personally and professionally, the reality of a truly American art form based in classic American literature seemed to be coming to pass. At least that’s how it appeared to Howard Pyle in 1903. Europe’s shifting art movements were inconsequential to Pyle. His small, insulated but influential support group and his students were utterly convinced by his charisma, his belief in the potential of America, and his talent. The more convinced they were, the more confident he became. Howard Pyle’s students—his hope for carrying forward a National Art Spirit—regarded him as a visionary rather than as a highly paid, talented artist pursuing a career, which was what he was. They believed his motives were pure, that is, based in his commitment to creating important, original fine art.

Pyle was dismissive of the broader art community in the United States, including Eakins—whom he respected as a painter—and the Hudson River School largely devoted to landscape and figuration. He believed they lacked patriotic vision and that they ignored the more worthy aspects of the American character in their subject matter. Meanwhile, the traditional art schools—like Van der Weilens—were wholly unimpressed by Pyle’s popular success. They believed he was merely impersonating painting.

Van der Weilens devotees, among others, embraced the new concepts and new ideas coming from the continent; this European influence in thinking drove their curriculums. The philosophical struggle between the value of figuration and the aesthetic reality of abstraction and conceptual directions in art consumed students, faculty, collectors, and dealers.

Pyle had no choice but to open the Howard Pyle School—later known as the Brandywine School. He expanded his studio space and accepted twelve students from more than five hundred eager applicants. Each student received a workspace near the master. Pyle, and only Pyle, determined when a student would graduate. Some stayed a few months, others years. Pyle taught what he did and convinced his students that his work represented the new American art form. But one thing he was not teaching them to do was to explore the world they knew from personal experience, or the world as they observed it. He firmly believed that the outlets for their imagery—books and magazines—were permanent. The publishers not only wanted these pictures, but they needed them to maintain their readership. However, he said, “My final aim in teaching will not be … the production of book illustrators but rather the production of painters of pictures.”

He taught his students how to costume their characters, stage scenes, and create excitement with a number of compositional devices like single point perspective and internal triangles. He turned the faces of his main characters toward the audience. Maintaining the interest of the viewer was primary.

“Howard Pyle taught the art of picture making as an act of self-revelation. ‘He tried to enter your thinking mind whether it was [the] conscious or subconscious mind,’ said one student.”*

Emphasizing the integrity of each student’s individual reactions, Pyle schooled his artists in what he called mental projection. He urged them to “project your mind into the subject matter until you actually live in it. “ The result was an exciting picture, filled with action, where characters seemed to come to life.

Within a few years, the work produced by Pyle and his students monopolized the magazine business. Vincent Van Gogh was collecting Pyle’s tear sheets from Harpers’ Monthly and the film director D.W. Griffith based entire battle scenes on Pyle’s paintings.

“Live in your pictures,” Pyle said and “dig deep.” It was the pinnacle of his career, and his confidence. But, things were about to change. Books had been a major outlet for Pyle’s paintings in 1893 but by 1900, the illustrated-book market was dying. At about the same time, the magazine business—which was monopolized by Pyle and his students’ paintings from 1895 to 1900—was about to make some radical business decisions. Once publishers realized that the money was in selling advertising space and not in over-the-counter sales they began to target audiences with specifically designed written and visual content that would bring buying customers to its advertisers’ products. This principle continues to hold today.

By 1908, N. C. Wyeth—a Pyle protégé and the father of painter Andrew—announced that ...