Filed Under: "1940s"

Year Zero in the Flora Revival was 1992 when Michael Bartalos cold-called the 78-year-old artist to ask about his 1940s and ’50s album cover illustrations, which evoked a mothballed era to the robust, productive retiree. Recalling Mike’s curiosity, Flora later said, “I felt like a fossil that had just been dug up.” Thus began the archaeology, which continues to unearth ancient marvels. The above flashbulb-bleached vignette was snapped at A-D Gallery in June 1943 during…

Another early jazz legend revisited by Flora in his later years was New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory, composer of “Muskrat Ramble.” Among Ory’s bullet points: around 1918 he had the prescience to hire a promising teen trumpeter just starting a music career: Louis Armstrong. Here’s Flora’s classic 1947 Columbia Records 78 rpm album cover: Forty-six years later, Flora portrayed Ory shouldering a musical blowtorch: The above unpublished 1993 pen and ink rendering was actually the…

On one of his earliest album covers for Columbia Records, Flora, with typical anatomical perversity, endowed jazz drummer Gene Krupa with four legs and five arms, the better to swat a Mattel-sized trap set amid a lemon meringue backdrop. Krupa’s face also got a makeover—the red and black checkerboard skin tint was Flora’s way of proclaiming, “I can’t do likeness!” (The cover was featured in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.) FF to the early…

Untitled page from sketchbook (ca. 1940s, tempera and pencil)

Unpublished (and likely unexhibited) artifacts from Jim Flora sketchbooks Tempera on paper, early 1960s Pen sketch, early 1940s