The mischievous and diabolic art of James Flora (1914-1998):
Glimpses of rare works from the archives
and news about Flora-related projects
Spot illustration for "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger," a short story by Robert Penn Warren which appeared in the January 1947 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. At the time Flora was employed at Columbia Records, but having been promoted out of the art department and focusing largely on bureaucratic tasks (much to his displeasure), he was seeking outside freelance work. His first assignment for Mademoiselle, for Robert Lowry's "Little Baseball World," had appeared in the September 1946 issue. All illustrative elements from "The Patented Gate" (and "Little Baseball World") were reproduced in our second anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.
Partial illustration, "What is Automation," Collier's magazine, March 16, 1956. Pull quote from the layout:Automation has been heralded by some as the threshold to a new Utopia, in which robots do all the work while human drones recline in pneumatic bliss.The complete two-tiered illustration—half-utopian (above), half-apocalyptic—was reproduced in our second anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.
Hot Stove League entry: illustration (one of several) from "The Big Leagues Are Killing Baseball," LOOK magazine, April 15, 1958. The above image is an original painting. Many of Flora's early commercial illustrations exist only as printed reproductions, the original art either kept by the magazines or thrown out. When I interviewed Flora in 1998, I asked him about the whereabouts of his commercial originals. "They would reproduce it," I queried, "but they wouldn’t think to give it back to the artist?" Flora replied, "Yes, they would—if the artist wanted it. But most artists didn’t even think of getting it back in those days. I didn’t, mostly."
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.
Page from 1957 sales brochure for Electromechanical Design magazine. Flora illustrated an unknown number of covers for this (now long-defunct) monthly. In the 1950s and '60s, he was often a go-to artist for science-related journalism, as evidenced by his work for Research & Engineering magazine.
This three-tiered montage appeared in Fortune magazine in 1947 as part of a 48-state series sponsored by the Container Corporation of America. Flora, an Ohio native, was commissioned to illustrate his birth state. A color version—as it ran in Fortune—was reproduced in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. Tearsheets turn up periodically on Ebay.
"Paradises Lost," illustration
The Newspaper Archive offers a massive online database of regional papers. It claims to have archived 895 million articles published in 747 cities over 240 years. In case you've run out of things to read on the web, here's a bottomless library.
I bought a ten-day pass to search for Jim Flora illustrations. Easy, right? Well, yes and no. NA's search engine uses OCR to find word strings in old newsprint that's been erratically scanned. It finds lots of "James Flora," but because there's no text correction, it probably misses the odd "Jannes Fiona" and "James F;ora." An imperfect process, but useful nonetheless. Aside from occasional local filler about Flora receiving an award or addressing a luncheon, most of the hits for our JF cited Sundays in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These turned out to be spot (and occasional feature) illustrations for weekly Parade Magazine supplements, which ran in hundreds of newspapers coast-to-coast. Parade seems to have been a meal ticket for Flora -- his illos often ran twice a month. We recognized some of the images because dozens of original mechanicals and tearsheets were retained by the artist and remain in the family archive. Newsprint does not store well, and because of the ephemeral nature of newspapers, existing copies in any condition are difficult to locate.
The tone of the Parade work is tame -- this is Flora during his transition from jazz hellcat to avuncular cartoonist. The change is reflected in all Flora's commercial work from the period, during which he was developing a new career as a children's book author/illustrator. His fine art from the 1960s retains an edge, but his public work appears to be laying the foundation for Bil Keane's Family Circus.
Detail, "Ohio," illustration for Container Corporation of America
Illustration, "The Challenge of Frontier Products Development"
