Showing posts with label caricature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label caricature. Show all posts

Saturday, September 2, 2023

A Spanish caricature of Louise Brooks

Here is a scan of one of my new treasures, which I decided to share.... a Spanish caricature of Louise Brooks dating from around 1931. I found it for sale on a Spanish website and decided to purchase it, as I had not seen it before. The text at the bottom references a couple of Brooks' American silents, like Love Em and Leave Em and Rolled Stockings, as well as her role in Prix de beaute. I like it, don't you!


THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2023. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Monday, May 3, 2021

Louise Brooks illustration in Jonathan Edwards book

Tipped off by a Facebook post, I emailed Welsh artist / illustrator Jonathan Edwards about his book, One hundred and thirty one faces: sketchbook vol 7. This 124 page book features pages from Jonathan's sketchbook as well as a few finished pieces. Most are in color. Among the book many subjects are author James Joyce, singer Francois Hardy, musician John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michael Basquiat, and many others. . . including Louise Brooks. Below is a quick flip through of the book, in which Brooks is one of the first personalities seen.


I emailed the artist, and asked why he included Brooks. He responded, "The portrait was originally drawn for an online B&W drawing competition that a friend of mine, Kunikazu Noguchi - a Tokyo based caricaturist, organises. I couldn’t resist drawing Louise Brooks. She’s such an icon and a gift to draw especially in pure black and white." 

 

Brooks was caricatured a number of times during her career in film -- in the 1920s and 1930s -- and she has also been caricatured a number of times in recent years. I have seen many if not most all of the caricatures from then and now, and this one is a favorite. Like other depictions of the actress, this one is stylistically angular, which I feel depicts a certain hardness in Brooks -- which is true. 

Jonathan Edwards work first appeared in 1993 in Deadline and Tank Girl Magazine with strips such as Dandy Dilemma, Simon Creem, The Squabbling Dandies and one pagers about Scott Walker, Sly Stone, Nancy Sinatra, Kraftwerk and The Beach Boys. Since then he has worked for the Guardian, Mojo, Q, Mad, The Black Eyed Peas, A Skillz & Krafty Kuts, The Jungle Brothers, The Glastonbury Festival, etc. His comics include Aunt Connie & The Plague of Beards, A Bag Of Anteaters (with Ian Carney) and Two Coats McWhinnie (also with Carney). He has also been a regular contributor to the Guardian since 1999, and illustrated the Hard Sell weekly column in the Guide from 2002 - 2011. His character design work includes collaborations with partner, Louise (AKA Felt Mistress), and his vinyl toy, Inspector Cumulus, is available from Crazylabel toys. For more details about the Felt Mistress collaborations (including our Selfridges Christmas window display) please click HERE.

Jonathan Edwards book, One hundred and thirty one faces: sketchbook vol 7, can be purchased HERE. Also available on his website are other books, prints and posters.More about the artist and his work can be found HERE.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Hollywood Panorama caricature of Louise Brooks from 1971

I just acquired a copy of a 1971 book, Hollywood Panorama, by Bob Harman. And, remarkably, it contains a caricature of Louise Brooks! That's rather early in her story of rediscovery. It is a few years before the Kenneth Tynan article in the New Yorker, and more than a decade before Lulu in Hollywood was published.


Harman's book features some 1,000 different stars, with Louise Brooks twice depicted among them in both black & white and in color. Nutshell biographies in the back of the book describe Brooks as "A vivid vamp of the twenties -- distinguished by her cold and classic beauty." Here is the page featuring Brooks in color. She can be found in the lower left corner. (In a way, her depiction evokes Al Hirschfield and anticipates David Levine.)


I wasn't able to find much information online about the artist, but according to an informative and illustrated blog by the cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman, "The late artist Bob Harman took ten years to create Bob Harman's Hollywood Panorama a 5x9 foot full color montage of 1001 caricatures of vintage film stars set against a background of famous movie sets and Hollywood landmarks. It was published in book form in 1971 by Dutton. Many of the caricatures created for Hollywood Panorama were also reprinted in B&W in the book The MGM years", also from 1971." Here is the 1971 newspaper article which led me to track down this book.



Harman also contributed caricatures to various magazines, including the cover for an issue of Focus on Film, a magazine to which Brooks once contributed.



Harman's Hollywood Panorama was not his only book, and not the only one of his books which included Brooks. His 1991 book, Enchanted Faces, which was self-published and which I just ordered a copy, also contains a rather fine portrait of Brooks. Here Thelma and Louise face one another. The image below is from Drew Freidman's blog.

Harman also drew paper dolls, and published another book, this one from 1990. I ordered a copy of it as well. Hopefully, as it focuses on the stars of the silent screen, it may have some images of interest. I like his style.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

David Levine, painter and illustrator, has died


The New York Times reports that David Levine, "a painter and illustrator whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 83 and lived in Brooklyn." The NYT article can be found here.

To fans of Louise Brooks, Levine is well remembered as the creator of an especially charming and pointed caricature of the silent film star and memoirist. He drew her for the NYRB at the time Lulu in Hollywood was published. That likeness, among Levine's finest, was reproduced countless times on the subscription cards inserted into thousands and thousands of newsstand copies of the publication. (I know I have one of those somewhere in my files. I just can't lay my hands on it right now.)

Levine's likeness of Louise Brooks was also reproduced on the cover a book of postcards of the illustrator's art which was published a few years back. That book is pictured above.

Levine's reputation is quite high. According to the write-up in the New York Times, "Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast."

As a book lover and longtime reader of the New York Review of Books, I saw many of Levine's caricatures. They stood out. They were distinct. And, his caricature of Brooks is one of my favorites. I am even fortunate enough to own a signed limited edition print of the image, which I obtained from the artist. It can be seen in the image below. Brooks is just over my right shoulder, along with a few other treasures at "LBS headquarters."




Levine's death was breaking news. I expect the New York Times will run a full obituary sometime soon. That will be worth looking for.
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