Party Animals

Detail of untitled 1940s tempera casually referred to as "Tenement K," which contains quite a few enigmatic and disturbing tenants. The original work is owned by Keith McAllister, who extracted the above celebratory duo to produce a holiday card titled "Party Animals." No better way to ring in seasonal festivities than a curiously sinister Flora tableau.

domestic disturbance

Detail, "Furnished," Primer for Prophets alphabet series, 1954. We've issued 12 letters as limited edition screen prints, but "F(urnished)" is still in the deep freeze. The full print isn't as disturbing as the above detail suggests—the husband beyond the crop hasn't lost his cool. All shall be revealed by the time we complete the series.

tail wagger

Detail, "Raided," Primer for Prophets alphabet series, 1954. We've issued 12 letters as limited edition screen prints, but "R" remains on our to-do list.

balancing act

Spot illustration, dedication page, The Day the Cow Sneezed, now back in print thanks to Enchanted Lion Books.

The first review—favorable!—courtesy the For Immediate Release (Kids) blog:

I like his habit of calling attention to certain words by putting them in all caps, nearly on every page: POW! WHAMBO! and my personal favorite KA-BLOWIE-BLAM! I also enjoy the language he uses, specific phrases such as "scrunched as flat as corn flakes." It's just plain good reading paired with some spellbinding illustrations that make this a book you won't want to miss.

First National Bank Robbery

Detail, The Big Bank Robbery, mid-1960s tempera on board. The bank displaying the signage at right isn't actually depicted in the complete work, only a counter clerk with upraised arms holdup-style (not pictured in detail).

We issued a limited edition fine art print of the work in 2009, and one-half of the print run has been sold. Prices increase as editions sell down.

last Chance

Chance Encounter (detail above), a 1970 Flora tempera, was issued in a limited edition run of 20 in 2008. With last week's sale of print number 1/20, the edition is now sold out. It may later be offered in reduced form in print items such as cards, calendars or folios, or commissioned as exclusive, premium-priced, custom-formatted single prints produced privately at our discretion. But that's it for edition prints. Chance Encounter is our first sold out limited edition release.

"Mr. Flora, this is Aleksandr Kerensky"

Rowayton Remembered, detail of woodcut print, ca. 1974

My Brush With History
a series by the readers of American Heritage magazine
James Flora's contribution
February/March 1997 (Volume 48, Issue 1)

During the late 1940s I lived in Rowayton, a small Connecticut village, with my wife and two small children. I was the art director of Columbia Records, a job I dearly loved. In my work I had many opportunities to meet the musical celebrities of the day, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington among them, and I considered myself a fairly cool cat.

Fate had blessed me with Roussie, the world's most delightful daughter. At the time she was somewhere between four and six and my regular weekend date. Every Saturday we did the chores together, visited the post office, and wound up in the town's only drugstore.

Soybel's Pharmacy was a true drugstore—no greeting cards or eyelash curlers. In the rear of the shop the druggist filled prescriptions and sold patent medicines. The front was given over to a small, gaudy soda fountain with four or five stools. George Soybel's counter was a gathering place for the town cognoscenti, and the stools were almost always filled.

Detail of Rowayton street map by Flora, 1980, depicting drugstore. The large
(15" x 23") map was issued by the artist as a signed, limited edition print of 200.
The last remaining copy in the family collection was sold last year to a local.

One cold wintry Saturday Roussie and I had finished our errands and went to cap the morning with a visit to Soybel's. We were in luck. Only one stool was occupied. A gentleman in a heavy black overcoat and a natty Borsalino hat was nursing what seemed to be a ginger ale float. I sat next to him and hoisted my daughter onto the stool beside me. While she and I were deciding what to order, George Soybel emerged and greeted us.

"Jim, I want you to meet a new resident in Rowayton," George said. I turned to the stranger, who had a pleasant, angular face, and extended my hand. He took it.

"This is Aleksandr Kerensky."

ALEKSANDR KERENSKY!

Was this the Aleksandr Kerensky who had been the first premier of the provisional Russian government after the 1917 revolution? The Kerensky who had held the fate of the world in his hands? The man who could have ushered Russia into the twentieth century, avoided the murderous regime of Stalin, saved the world from the Cold War? Who might even have been such a benign and powerful influence on the 1920s and 1930s that Hitler could never have risen to power and World War II might never have happened?

As if he could read my thoughts, he smiled and nodded several times in confirmation. Pictures of the revolution flashed through my mind. Kerensky was thirty-six in 1917, and here he was, three decades later, wrinkled but recognizable, and rather handsome.

A dozen questions stumbled behind my tongue. Why had he not been more forceful when he had the reins of power in his hands? Why had he failed to prevent Lenin from entering Russia? Why hadn't he seized and imprisoned him? What should I ask first? I opened my mouth.

"How do you like Rowayton?" was what came out.

Kerensky proceeded to tell me how happy he and his American wife were in our town. He enjoyed the peace and quiet he found here and was finding time to write, et cetera, et cetera.

A woman appeared at the door.

"I'm ready," she said, and Kerensky hopped from his stool, shook my hand, and exited.

The trouble with history is that it has a habit of rushing by us so swiftly that we don't recognize it until we see the taillights receding in the distance.

Sheffield Island (partial scan)

Partial scan (about one-third, with color checker card) of unpublished 1954 woodcut print Sheffield Island. The original block is in the Flora family collection. Only a handful of original artist prints exist. We are contemplating issuing a new limited edition run of the complete work next year.

science geek 5

Detail, cover illustration, "Human Engineering: Tailoring the Machine to the Man," Research and Engineering magazine, February 1956. We reproduced the entire illustration here. Pure blacks are missing from the detail, an enlargement of a scan of a worn cover. Copies of R&E in any condition are difficult to find, and the original art has not been located.

Red Mike hunts the scissor boy

Detail from title page, Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys, Flora's third children's book, 1959. That's Charlie, snipping away at right; the villain with the lasso is Red Mike.

In the book, Red Mike is ... red. However, as with many illustrated books of the period, color pages alternated with black and white to make printing more economical. A number of Flora's kiddie books reflect this trend.

food chain 2

Detail, Sherwood Walks Home, Flora's eighth children's book, 1966. We won't reveal the outcome, but we suspect the cat is the most determined diner.

Love (and some of its aspects)

Detail, The Many Aspects of Love, tempera on board, mid-1990s (and pre-dated by a pen & ink drawing). Not a top-tier work, the above partial reflects the extended mayhem. While there's plenty of vestigial Flora mischief (note demons in the head at left), works like The Many Aspects veer perilously close to self-parody. The complete work has not been published.

circus cavalcade

Top half of 1948 Columbia 78 rpm two-disc sleeve, Come to the Circus. The complete cover and interior illustrations were reproduced in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. The 2004 book featured most then-known Flora covers from his Columbia and RCA Victor years. We have since discovered others, and are searching for a handful of strays that (based on archival clues) may or may not exist. Rather than include recent discoveries in our subsequent Flora anthologies, we plan to eventually publish a complete stand-alone collection that will include sketches and alternate drafts from the Flora archives.

Where Will It All End?

Quadruped of indeterminate zoological origin; detail, Where Will It All End?, tempera on paper (1993). The full work, previously unpublished, was reproduced in The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (page 66). The rest of the painting is no less disconcerting.

Flora was 79 at the time. Many of his 1990s works betray a wobbly hand. Bold ideas continued to flow from the artist's hallucinatory imagination, but the brushwork was less meticulous than in previous decades.

happy flower

Spot illustration, Portrait of a Great American, a 1943 CBS radio trade circular about singer Kate Smith's prowess raising money for war bonds. Most of the booklet's illustrations were reproduced in The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, but this perky flower was omitted.

Charlie Yup and pals

Detail from Flora's third children's book, Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys (1959). Charlie, who wields a mean scissors (his "Snip-Snap Boys" are paper cut-outs), is in the upper left astride Beezer, his "helicopter horse."

For fans—like us—of Flora's 1950s big-eyed figures, this was the end of the line, his last satisfying children's book on an artistic level. He wrote and illustrated 14 more, which sold well and charmed generations of young readers. But our favorites remain the first three (Fabulous Firework Family, The Day the Cow Sneezed, and Charlie Yup), all produced during the 1950s. His next book, Leopold the See-Through Crumbpicker, published in 1961, showcased an entirely different style of character illustration.

Charlie Yup is the rarest of Flora's books. It rarely turns up on Ebay or with antiquarian book dealers—and when it does, the price is lofty.

seaside setting

Detail (about two-thirds of the complete work) of an untitled, unpublished tempera on board, ca. mid-1960s. The collection contains a number of similarly composed maritime paintings from this period, though colors and figures vary. If you have our recent book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, compare this setting with Salt Pond—Block Island on page 54.

aspects (typography)

Flora loved experimenting with hand-typography throughout his career, from the 1930s to the 1990s. (Click on tag below to see previous examples.) He occasionally created anthropomorphic letters. The above detail derives from an undated 1990s-era painting entitled The Many Aspects of Love. The large-scale tempera is a lower-tier work reflecting Flora's libidinous streak with cartoonish figures, a recurring theme which usually makes us cringe. However, the lettering of each word in the tableau demonstrates Flora's playful approach to the alphabet. We'll publish the other words in subsequent posts.

good taste edifies

Absolute good taste edifies absolutely.

Cartoonist/animator Gene Deitch, in a 2003 interview with AllAboutJazz.com, about his then-new book, The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove:

AAJ: What is your favorite piece of album cover artwork?

Deitch: Any by James Flora.


Left: detail, Shorty Rogers Courts the Count (1955, RCA Victor)

Berber Camel Market

Detail (about one-sixth of the entire tableau), acrylic on canvas, 1992. On the back of the canvas the artist wrote: "Berber Camel Market (a plaque in Morocco)."