Cartoon Modern

When writing the other day about the illustration work of Miroslav Sasek, I referred to it as a "classic, mid-century style." I was struck by the fact that I didn't have a name for it, and that I wasn't better able to describe its appearance.

Writer Amid Amidi calls the animated versions of this style "cartoon modern" in his beautiful book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. (Cartoon Modern blog here.)


According to Amidi, it was a "bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism into the realm of animation..." (page 7). Artists like Picasso, Matisse, Calder, Shahn, Noguchi and Miro, or illustrators like Saul Steinberg, R.O. Blechman and Ronald Searle were influential.


[Background painting from "Petroushka," directed by John Wilson for Fine Art Films, 1956. Reproduced from Cartoon Modern.]

Realism was abandoned in favor of visual interest. Backgrounds didn't need to be three-dimensional, and painting techniques didn't have to recede but could instead call attention to themselves.


[Background painting, artist unknown, from "Woodpecker from Mars," directed by Paul J. Smith for Walter Lantz Productions. Reproduced from Cartoon Modern.]

One really fine example of this type of work is the classic "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol," released in December 1962 by UPA studio. I first saw it some time in the mid-1960s, and watched it with my family every year on TV until it disappeared from syndication.

Boomer nostalgia does have its benefits sometimes, because fans of the show have caused it to resurface. I remember watching it with a bunch of other college students around 1980 when our college film club showed it. It finally made its way to DVD, and now there's a new book out giving all the details on how it was made: Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special by Darrell Van Citters (here's the website for the book).


For me, the visually arresting part of the show is not so much the characters as the backgrounds and objects. (I'm also a big fan of the music, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill of Funny Girl fame, but that's a subject for another blog post.)


This layout, by Shirley Silvey, transforms Scrooge's sitting room with a modernist vibe.


These vertiginous stairs (painting by Bob Inman, layout by Shirley Silvey) combine flat color and skewed perspective with decorative details.

As I remember them, the backgrounds from the theater and neighboring buildings where Mister Magoo appears as Scrooge would fit right in with Sasek's street scenes of New York.

I guess I'll be using cartoon modern from now on to label that classic, mid-century style.
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A current animator/illustrator whose work references cartoon modern is Ward Jenkins, who maintains an inspiring blog full of images from the past and present.

Cartoon Modern, Socially Backward

I'm never quite sure: Do illustrations from the 1950s and '60s appeal to me because they're bathed in that "everything was perfect when I was 8 years old" glow, or do they legitimately have some cheery artistic merit? I don't know, but I love cartoon modern drawings.

I found a boxful over the weekend while going through some family files.


These cards are great not just because of the art style, but also for the shocked laughter they provoke. Can you imagine a card like this today?


Sexist and racist -- a Daily Double!


So you're expecting another one! Wow.

This card had a length of heavy thread knotted at the center of the telephone. It ran through the seven other pages of the card, showing all of the people on the phone who were gossiping about you, the card recipient, and your latest pregnancy. (Because of the tightness of the thread, I couldn't open it up enough to get a photo.)


All those well-dressed ladies hanging out at home, leisurely taking a feather duster to their husband's framed photo. Oh yeah, as if that was ever a thing.


When she's not waiting lustily at the door....


...she's burning dinner in the age before smoke alarms.

There was an occasional card that had nice artwork without the reminder of how far we've come:


This one had raised thermographic letters and kind of a silk-screened finish. Not to mention a restrained color palette.


And I would be remiss if I left out the Sears freezer owners' guide, even though it uses photography instead of illustration. Don't we all stand around in our full-length dresses admiring our freezers?

Old Valentines, Out of Sync

My other half recently found a cache of valentines from first and second grade down in the basement, so I thought I'd post a few that were either good or bad examples of mid-20th century commercial art for children. They're probably from 1963 and 1964.

(There were at least 50 of them in the envelope, so I've saved you from most of the pain.)

First are the ones I liked the best:

Not surprisingly, these have elements of cartoon modern, so of course I like them. The surprising thing, to me, is that the vast majority of the valentines were not in what I think of as a cartoon modern style. They were instead in an early 20th century commercial vein from greeting cards of that era, if I had to label it.

I generally was not taken with the way that people (who were all white children, generally) were depicted on the pieces. These three were the ones I liked best:

The mailbox card reminds me of early reader books, with a valentine's message that's just a plain classic. The other two, while cute renderings, seem a little too romantic for kids, especially the second one.

But compared to the rest of these... they're fine. 

These are the bad and the truly odd, the ones that no one would even consider making (in an updated style) in recent decades:

Here we have the pyromaniac cat, the nuclear missile, the scary clown, and the only "nonwhite" person shown on any of the valentines, depicted with stereotypically broken English and costume.

The second set of the bad and odd isn't much better:

 

This one has an Asian-personified tea kettle and cup with pseudo-Chinese lettering, a boy hunting for a presumed girl's heart (ick), and a butcher with cleaver ready to chop his valentine into little pieces.

These valentines are out of sync with today's date (since it's late March), and many of them are out of sync a lot more than that. As part of the larger culture, they were teaching children things they likely still live with and express today.

This Is M. Sasek

Eight-and-a-half years ago, I posted about a children's book illustrator named Miroslav Sasek, who created books about cities around the world. His work is in the style now called cartoon modern.

A few weeks ago, I came upon a book about Sasek and his work, called This is M. Sasek (a reference to his book titles, which usually were phrases like This Is New York, This Is Paris, and so on.) From it I learned he worked for Radio Free Europe on their Czech-language broadcasts before he began the books in the 1950s, that he lived until 1980, and that it's a bit mysterious what he was doing during World War II (since he was born in 1916, he would have been the perfect age for military service then, but it's not mentioned).

It's fun to look for traces of the artists who influenced him (I see clear echoes of Picasso and Saul Steinberg, though it's hard to know if the latter influence was from Sasek to Steinberg or the other way around).

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the book.




This Is Paris was the first book in the series (which wasn't intended as a series). These two images show just how many ways you can render an automobile in cartoon modern style, and also what a blight cars — and particularly parking — are on a beautiful city.

Sasek's next book was This Is London. One cool thing shown is this study for a park scene:


Accompanied by the final art:


This Is New York came out not too long after that, which is the book I wrote about earlier. Here's an  illustration of Macy's that wasn't used in the book:


Several years and a number of books later in the series, he took on Hong Kong:


I love the use of colors in this cover...


...and the asymmetry and non-stereotyped depictions of these Hong Kong school children (each with a different airline flight bag).

If you were wondering what Sasek himself looked like, here he is in 1961:


Thanks to Martin Salisbury, Olga Cerna, and Pavel Ryska for getting this book published. Salisbury is an illustrator and professor of illustration at the Cambridge School of Art; Cerna is a librarian and author; and Ryska is an artist and historian of animation.

A Clue from My Childhood

I think my love of cartoon modern began with the Clue game board my sisters and I used when we were kids. I'm not sure when it was first designed, but clearly, it's from some time in the 1960s.

The outside of the box, with its giant magnifying glass, has a lot of visual impact.


And the character designs are so stylish.


I was fascinated by Miss Scarlet's dress (who knew a woman could be made from two triangles!), though it was probably Professor Plum who had more influence on my fashion sense.



P.S. -- This box isn't actually from my basement. I saw it at the Hixton (Wis.) School House Antique Mall. I love that store because it fills an entire small high school, including the linoleum-tiled gymnasium that also served as the seating area of the auditorium. It even fills the stage itself.

It makes me sad and glad to walk through the maze of rooms, looking at 20th century detritus, while imagining the students who spent the formative years of their lives there. I wish I knew where Hixton's children go to school now.

The Modern Illustration Archive

Somehow, I found out about this archive of modern illustration (1950–1975), collected by Zara Picken, an illustrator based in the U.K.

It goes on and on — just keep clicking to soothe your soul as long as needed.

Here are a few favorites I spotted that fit my mid-century and cartoon modern leanings.

Thanks to Zara for the joy.

I Have Been Alive a Long Time

I graduated from high school in 1977, so this Tom Tomorrow cartoon (This Modern World) has special resonance for me:

(Click the image to enlarge for readability.)

I don't know if 1977-me expected this kind of march of progress. More likely, I thought we would be a glowing pile of nuclear rubble. Well, at least 1983-me thought that. But I do sometimes wonder if there isn't an alternate universe that ours is the inverse of, which split off in 1980. (Wow, that's a terrible sentence.)

I got this cartoon a day or so before it published on The Nib because I'm a member of Sparky's List. Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) started the list after weekly newspapers started going out of business, depriving him of his main source of income.

With the Sparky's List email, you also get commentary to accompany the cartoon, and in this case some of that included these thoughts:

...the traveler is a bit manic, asking questions without waiting for answers. This was just a structural choice, but I guess it could be because he’s a sexist man of his era, so certain of the answers that he’s not waiting to let the woman get a word in edgewise. But there’s another possible explanation, hinted at by the tiny coke spoon he’s wearing around his neck. Who can really say?

And then in the final panel, the 2022 woman realizes she’s wasted a chance to save humanity, by being snarky. Maybe I spend too much time on Twitter but this seems like the most plausible aspect of the cartoon to me.

You can sign up for Sparky's List here.

Welcome to 1957

From the basement, the fall 1957 welcome edition cover of the Minnesota Daily,  newspaper at the University of Minnesota:


This cover makes me feel several things.

It calls to my nostalgia for that kind of cartoon modern illustration, and even just for the use of illustration on the cover at all. At some point someone did a focus group and decided audiences respond more to photography (especially if overlaid with yellow type), and since then covers have taken on a sad sameness.

The illustration also makes me appreciate the reality of diversity. In 1957, this illustrator and his (I assume his!) art director thought two white guys could represent the range of in-coming students as long as one of them looked like a studious nerd and the other like a jockish future frat boy.

What a set of assumptions underpins that decision. Oh, and neither guy looks remotely like an 18-year-old.

The items used to detail the frat boy are notable. He's wearing argyle socks and short pants (really?), while carrying a tennis racket and golf clubs. With a boutonniere, of all things. And (gasp) three changes of clothes. So many! Not to mention a Date Book in his pocket.

Though I fully appreciate the Zip-a-Tone used to create the patterns on their suits (another item you can find in the obsolete art supply aisle). And the way the green and red spot color inks are used. It's really a beautiful piece of work, frozen in its particular time.

Block Letters, Brush Letters

I can't face the topic I should be writing about (guess which one), so instead, I'm going to talk about some old lettering.




This type of brush lettering cries out "mid-20th-century" to me. The best-known typeface in this vein is Brush Script, but I've always felt that it was not quite right:


The Wm. H. Block lettering is a nonconnecting script, so that's part of the difference. It doesn't slant, either. Overall, it has a much more urbane, horizontal feeling that really seems as though it was done with a brush, while Brush Script has never felt brushy enough to me.

The Block lettering fits into the Cartoon Modern aesthetic that developed around the same time. It makes me smile, and that's something I value right at the moment.

Over Sixty Years of Chutes and Ladders

There's a style of illustration that was common in the 1970s, particularly on greeting cards. It wasn't as cool as the earlier cartoon modern, and, admittedly, it looks pretty dated these days. But when I see a nice example of it, it's refreshing.


One example is this Chutes and Ladders box (above), which I recently found in my basement. (Click to see it much larger.)


Aside from the art style, you can tell it's from the 1970s because not all of the kids are white.


Contrasted, of course with this board (above), which I would guess is from the 1940s...


Or this one from the 1950s.


The kids shown in the 1990s art are even more diverse, but the game seems less engaging.


In the most recent version, the kids are rendered with 3D effects and the level of activity promised by the cover illustration is beyond frenetic.

In looking around on the web for these images, I discovered that Chutes and Ladders is actually an ancient game from the Indian subcontinent whose name translates as Snakes and Ladders. Its no-skill, all-chance play is traditionally seen as representing the role of karma.

I was considering getting rid of the version I found downstairs. Maybe, I thought, I could hang the board on a wall as a piece of art. But then I found this example of a hand-made book bound with pieces of the board, and now I feel as though I should keep it for a future project. Or maybe I could donate it to some creative re-user.