Tuesday, September 29, 2009

odyssey of a drug

Feature illustration, "A Long-Playing Medicine"
LIFE
magazine, June 10, 1957

6 comments:

Matt said...

Excellent! Probably one of my favorite Floras of all time.

Ernie said...

Those animals look positively happy about being tested on. I don't see what PETA is so upset about.

MG said...

What medium was this dome in and what size is it? It is really a great one!!

Irwin Chusid said...

Mark, we don't know the media because the original art cannot be located. It was around this time (1957) that Flora began to save his originals—that is, to have them returned by art directors—but this work is not in the collection. The existing originals from the late 1950s are mostly tempera on artist board, and their size varies with the assignment. There are countless originals from the 1960s and '70s in the archive, but only a handful before 1955. Which is a shame, because it was in the late 1950s that Flora's commercial style veered towards cherubic figures and became less edgier, blander, less interesting. This illustration is one of the better late-1950s commercial works we've seen.

MG said...

I would hope that LIFE would be one of the better, more organized publications since it is so long standing... Let's just hope the original is sitting in some forgotten flat file somewhere waiting to be found. Does the Flora family have any activity in chasing down these types of unreturned originals? I can't even imagine what's out there if he didn't start saving them until '57. Wow!

Thanks for the info Irwin!

Irwin Chusid said...

Our experience in dealing with periodical archives is that most do not have original art (especially from 50+ years ago); they only have tearsheets, bound volumes, microfilm—or nothing. Sources which do store originals (e.g., academic archives) own them (usually by donation) and will not relinquish them (though they will permit authorized duplication).