If you’re planning to attend the above June 10 exhibit — you’re 66 years too late. However, by historical accounts Flora’s first New York City gallery show, held in 1943, was fabulously successful. A few months earlier, Flora had been named art director at Columbia Records, replacing the man who hired him, Alex Steinweiss (at left with the artist in photo below). The whereabouts of the inscrutable petroglyphs on the wall? All will be revealed…

Tempera and pencil on paper, early 1960s. Another element of a large (16-1⁄2″ x 13-3⁄4″) work partially glimpsed here, and fully revealed in our forthcoming omnibus, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora. Above detail represents about one-sixth of the complete work.

An advance copy of our forthcoming third Flora anthology was delivered yesterday via FedEx courier from the printer. It’s quite lovely (the book, not the courier or the printer) and brimming with visual mischief. A street date has been announced by the publisher, Fantagraphics: first week of August. The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com now. Sweetly Diabolic features hundreds of rare and previously unpublished images from the Flora archives. The cover was designed by…

This untitled 1943 Flora tempera, casually referred to as “Jazz Quintet,” was our second limited edition fine art print, issued in early 2008. At the time, we were uncertain about the market potential of Flora works in archival-quality inkjet format, so we opted for a short-run edition of ten. We recently sold the sixth print, and the price for remaining prints has consequently increased (reflecting depleted supply). This is an iconic early Flora work, and…

This ship is part of a large untitled tempera harbor montage painted by Flora on a slab of masonite around 1951. How “large”? How much of a “part”? After isolating the above detail, I copied and pasted it horizontally and vertically over the full original to figure out how many elements this size could fit in the complete image field. Outcome: the above detail represents 1/52nd of the entire work.

Postman bites dog! Or at least appears to be attempting to turn the tables. Tempera draft from The Day The Cow Sneezed, courtesy the Dr. Irvin Kerlan children’s literature collection. Although the book was published in 1957, archival correspondence between Flora and his Harcourt editor Margaret McElderry indicates the book was being developed as early as 1955, the same year Flora’s first children’s book, The Fabulous Firework Family, was published.

Now available: a limited edition (25) fine art print of Flora’s 1947 Columbia album cover for Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5. This print was commissioned from Jim Flora Art by Hypergallery, a UK dealer who specializes in reproductions of classic album cover art, and is available exclusively through their website. The print was produced by Flora archivist Barbara Economon from a vintage printer’s proof sheet in the Flora collection. Each print in the edition was hand-signed…

There are five figures in this undated (late 1960s-early 1970s) Flora tempera, owned by Eric Kohler (who purchased it from the artist in the early 1990s). Two are extracted above. They—and their three unseen compatriots—will not be featured in our forthcoming third Flora anthology. There’s plenty of great unpublished images for volume four (target publication date 2012). Sorry if we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

We don’t generally post the work of other artists on the Flora blog, but we’re delighted to make an exception with Clara Gee Stamaty. Clara met Flora when they attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati in the early 1940s. Her late husband, syndicated cartoonist Stanley Stamaty (d. 1979), was one of Flora’s best buddies at school, and the couple remained lifelong friends with Flora. (Clara remarried in 1984.) To celebrate becoming a nonagenarian, Clara has…

Tempera illustration from Sherwood Walks Home (1966), part of the James Flora Papers in the Kerlan children’s literature collection at the University of Minnesota. A chapter in our forthcoming Flora book will be devoted to images from the collection (the above is not included) and a profile of Dr. Irvin Kerlan, patron saint of tot-lit. We’ve previously posted several drafts and sketches discovered in the Kerlan vaults.