Leon Bix Beiderbecke was born today in 1903. Beiderbecke, a cornetist (caricatured above left by Flora in 1947) and pianist, was a stylistic catalyst in the formative years of jazz. Bix and trumpeter Louis Armstrong were the two most pivotal horn players of the 1920s, though their approaches differed markedly. Beiderbecke has been described as the first real modernist in jazz, though that doesn’t explain his enduring appeal. (Each year when the calendar flips to…

Detail, Grandpa’s Ghost Stories (Atheneum Books, 1978). Yes, this little mise en scène is from a lighthearted book for young readers. Fun for the whole family! Bone apetit!

Woodcut print accompanying Robert Lowry‘s short story, “March Morning,” page 36, Hutton Street (Little Man Press, 1940). This 7-1/2″ x 5″ chapbook contains 18 meticulous woodengravings by Flora. Whereabouts of the original blocks is (ahem!) unknown.

Our latest Jim Flora fine art print is White Block Quadrupeds (an informal name for the above untitled work). WBQ is an uncirculated, early 1940s Flora painting which depicts an inscrutable panorama of disconnected facial features, headless quadrupeds, and a fanged horse. The original was painted in tempera on a thick rectangular block of wood the artist had first swathed in a coat of white. The stylized figures echo motifs found in the artist’s work…

Spot illustration by Flora Columbia Records Coda booklet, June 1943 Production still (actor Tommy Rettig)The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. Tthe only non-animated motion picturebased on characters created by Dr. Seuss(who was born on this day in 1905)

Detail, The Day the Cow Sneezed, tempera draft, 1957, courtesy the Dr. Irvin Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota. A gallery of early Flora roughs and overlays from the Kerlan collection will be included in our next Fantagraphics book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (target publication date September 2009).

Detail, Primer for Prophets booklet, 1954

pen & ink with pencil outline, detail, sketchbook,ca. 1950-51, when Flora was living in Mexico Here’s an undated forebear: Distant relative, from a 1948 Columbia Records ad(fully reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora)

Spot illustration, “College: Whether to Go / Where to Go,” Mademoiselle, 1953

One of a quartet of 5-1/2″ x 6-3/4″ temperas on artist board, each identical except for color scheme, presumably entitled Mardi Gras, based on figure studies by that name. The undated studies (sketches and refined tapestry) and the other three variants, which reflect Flora’s early 1950s style, were reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The spots on the above image indicate moisture discoloration, sometimes euphemistically referred to as an “aging artifact.”