Art for TV: "Good art and selling are not incompatible in TV"

While researching last week's posts on cartooning, animation, and how the early days of television affected both, I kept coming across this handsome gentleman's image.



There's an awful lot that's interesting about Georg Olden. His biography at the AIGA website is a fascinating read. For our purposes however, Olden is noteworthy because he was such a singularly passionate advocate for the use of illustration on television during those early days. Among his credits, Georg Olden supervised the visual identities of programs such as "I Love Lucy", "Lassie" and "Gunsmoke."

Although known principally as a designer and art director, Olden was also a pretty terrific illustrator, as you can see below. (Maybe that's why he was so supportive of the idea of using illustration on tv)



The article below describes how, in his role as director of graphic arts for the CBS Television network, Olden convinced skeptical show producers to budget for the commission of title cards illustrated by both well-known illustrators...



... and notable new comers.






Whether Olden was successful in his mission is hard to say from my limited understanding of this esoteric niche market. If other television networks were convinced to follow Olden's lead, their efforts are not much in evidence in the industry publications of the day (at least not any publications that I have access to).



In the 1952 NY Art Directors Annual for instance, nearly every piece presented has Olden's name attached to it as either illustrator or art director.




Read the introduction to this 1955 article from Art Director & Studio News and it sure seems like Olden was a one man band in this regard.



But I'm fascinated by the thought of someone like Georg Olden, who clearly loved illustration, being in a position to incorporate it into this emerging new medium...



It brings to mind these times we live in - and the (relatively) recent emergence of another new medium - the Internet - and those of us who have lived through the transition from print to web. Its been a long strange trip...



... and I'm not sure we've arrived at a destination.



Maybe Georg Olden's fervent belief that illustration had a place on television was misguided. As a child of the '60s I don't recall ever seeing much in the way of illustrated title cards. I would guess that by the time my generation started watching television, Olden's experiment had ended in failure.

Maybe there really never was a place for the static image in a medium of constant motion.



But as a community we illustrators owe George Olden a debt of gratitude for his unwavering belief in our chosen discipline. And we ought to think seriously about what we ought to be doing to remain relevant in a post-print era.

* my Art for TV Flickr set.

Art for TV: Keep it Simple

Over the course of the last few posts readers have contributed some excellent insight and observation on the subject of how and why cartoon styles changed dramatically from the '40s to the '50s -- and whether the cartoonists influenced the animators or the other way around.

Two extremely important points were raised by commenters: that beyond the niche of cartooning, modern abstract (and abstract expressionist) art must surely have impacted how all commercial art was evolving...



... and that television (especially with the technical issues of those early broadcasts) required art with a greater degree of clarity and simplicity to ensure audiences could clearly see the visuals being presented and quickly grasp the message being conveyed.



All of today's images are from the 1952 New York Art Directors Annual. Based on the majority of pieces included in that volume, one quickly sees that the selection committee was drawn to images that emphasized those qualities.



Gone are the fully-rendered, painterly pieces, realistic representations, and traditional subjects.



The vast majority of images in that year's show would bring to mind words like "clarity", "simplicity", "modernity", "abstraction", "design" and "fine art".



Clearly the mid-century was a period of tremendous upheaval in the world of art and design. Drawing a straight line (if you'll forgive the pun) to determine the order of who influenced who seems next to impossible. Between advances in technologies (photography, television) and the changing tastes of an increasingly sophisticated post-war audience, it really seems as though everything was happening at once!



For the illustrator, "art for tv" looked like a promising new market - and not just in the field of animation.

Tomorrow - beyond cartoons

Cartoonists vs. Animators: "Keeps things exciting when artists try to outdo each other."

Here's a promo piece by Chicago advertising cartoonist Paul Pinson. It appeared in the 1947 NY Art Directors Annual.



Here's Pinson's ad from the 1952 Annual. His style changed quite dramatically in the space of five years, didn't it? You would hardly guess this was done by the same artist. Pinson has effectively adapted to what was then the very modern style of the times. What could have triggered such a radical change in his work?



In the last post we looked at how television - and the arrival of animators using simpler, modern styles - changed the look of cartoon art in print advertising during the 1950s. But wait: many cartoonists were already producing clean, simple, modern and stylized cartoons for print years before most people ever had access to a television set.

Jan Balet's work, for instance, began appearing around the mid-1940's.



Roy Doty was just a couple of years behind him.



Harry Devlin, already well established by the mid-40s as Collier's magazine's lead editorial cartoonist.



Here's another prominent 40's cartoonist, Harry Diamond, in an ad from 1946.



And let's not forget Jim Flora...



... John Averill...



... and of course, Lowell Hess.



That's just to name a few of my favourites.

All of these cartoonists' work was appearing regularly in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Life and Look, and many, many others. The prominence of nation wide exposure in print publications during that time simply cannot be overstated. In the years before television sets became a standard feature in America's living rooms, print was where the public got nearly all its visual popular culture. Millions upon millions of people saw the work of these cartoonists... and no doubt so did the animators who would be working on tv commercials in a few years time. I suspect many of the cartoonists who were working on national print ad campaigns during the '40s were influencing the animators who would, in turn, influenced them in the '50s.



There was nothing funny about the business of making cartoons for advertising... it was a serious business. A survey conducted among the members of the New York Art Directors Club and published in Art Director & Studio News in 1953 indicated that, of all types of art being purchased by ADs in '53, none showed a larger increase than cartoon art.








The back pages of the 1950s editions of the New York Art Directors Annuals feature many ads for art studios and individual artists offering cartoon illustration services - usually they include no identifying names...



... or the names are of amazingly talented artists I've never heard of.



While preparing the material for this week's series I came across a 1957 ad for the Famous Artists School. It was one of their "look how successful our graduates are" ads...



Right at the top of the page is a photo of a fellow named John Whitaker of Memphis, Tennessee.   Just look at that artwork hanging beside Whitaker's head.



Whitaker may have gone into syndicated cartooning but just think of who-knows-how-many others like Whitaker - artists who worked mostly without name recognition and found opportunities to create cartoon art for advertising and television animation. Artists like Harold Fisher, who placed third in the first annual Cincinatti Art Director's show with the piece below.



Or my friend David Broad, who was featured in Art Director & Studio News. during the '50s as an 'Upcoming Artist'.



Or this guy, whose signature of just the initial "S."... but wow, what a fabulous '50s style!



Here are a few more ads illustrated by anonymous cartoonists. We'll probably never find out who did these but aren't they wonderful!







My friend Harry Borgman was also featured back in the early '50s as an AD&SN 'Upcoming Artist" ...



Following up on our correspondence from the previous post, Harry added some additional insight. Harry, who did his share of cartoon ilustrations for Detroit art studio, McNamara Bros. wrote, "I don't recall seeing a TV set until about 1952.  They had a small one at Grey Garfield Lang, where I worked at that time.  Everyone probably was influenced by the great stuff that Doty, Balet and Flora were doing in print."



"When TV animation came along, other artists just developed everything a bit further and even simplified their styles more to work better for TV which was all black and white at that time. The results certainly influenced print advertising artists."



"It's great that this sort of thing happens, or I should say happened. Keeps things exciting when artists try to outdo each other."

* My Ads with Cartoon Elements Flickr set

1950s Cartoon Art: Who Influenced Who?

If you flip through some magazines from the 1940s looking for ads with cartoon elements, you'd very likely find quite a few that looked like this.



But during the 1950s the style of cartooning changed dramatically. Why?



TI list member John Norall, who was there when the change occurred, sent me a note the other day with some thoughts on the subject. John wrote, "I transitioned to TV in '55 and during those years when TV was really sweeping the world I saw a lot of sample reels from houses in LA, SF, and NYC. It seems to me that the animated tv spots in their B&W glory influenced print styling."



"Partly because TV budgets were ruling the budget roost and print campaigns were obligated to support them."



John continued, "And what style did the animators tend to use? It tended to be shapes that would animate easily and fast. There was the UPA group with "Gerald McBoing Boing" who were revolutionaries from the more demanding Disney style."



"No question about it, that simple style conveyed the stories just fine - but in their dominance at the time I think we lost a lot of line character and drawing quality in the world of cartooning."

Some interesting thoughts. And a quick check through my mid-'50s Art Directors Annuals seems to confirm John's observations...

From the introduction to the TV Art section of the 1955 AD Annual

I've spent a lot of time over the last few years researching what happened to the illustration (and by extension, the cartoon art) business during the mid-century period. The profound effect of television on the decline of print markets for illustration is more than clear. But how art produced for television fit into the larger picture of the industry transitioning is something I really hadn't considered. John's insight was a revelation. Still I have to wonder; did animators influence the look of print cartooning... or did more print cartoonists get into doing art for animated tv commercials?



Consider someone like Cliff Roberts -- his "Book of Jazz," done in a style so reminiscent of Jim Flora's work, was incredibly well received by readers of Today's Inspiration. Roberts began his career as a Detroit print cartoonist. In the early '50s he left Detroit to join the growing New York tv commercial scene. Roberts' old friend Harry Borgman told me, "Yes, the cartoon styles changed dramatically when the new TV commercials started running, and Cliff fit right in."



Harry continued, "Cliff just couldn't keep busy enough in the hard-boiled automotive-oriented art studio of Detroit. When he left McNamara Brothers Studio, where we worked together, he joined Jam Handy, a film and animation company where I think he met Gene Deitch, not sure, but he did work with Deitch somewhere."



How many others like Roberts saw the opportunities in this new emerging market, and how many abandoned print to pursue those opportunities? The back pages of all my Art Director Annuals are thick with ads for studios and artists' reps... and beginning in the early '50s, ads for a new kind of studio began appearing there - ads that offered services specifically to the television industry. and those ads almost always prominently featured cartoon art.



The November 1953 issue of Art Director & Studio News featured a two-page spread describing in detail how animation was changing the ad industry landscape.



A couple of paragraphs directly address the topic at hand, and again reinforce John Norall's first-hand account of the situation at the time...









All of which helps to explain why the look of ads with cartoon elements changed so dramatically during the '50s... but as for who influenced who, that remains unclear.



Tomorrow: Who drew all those awesome ads?

* My Ads with Cartoon Elements Flickr set

* My Art for Tv Flickr set