Filed Under: "1940s"

Spot illustration, Portrait of a Great American, a 1943 CBS radio trade circular about singer Kate Smith’s prowess raising money for war bonds. Most of the booklet’s illustrations were reproduced in The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, but this perky flower was omitted.

Flora woodcut print reproduced in Murderpie, a chapbook written by Robert Lowry, published by their struggling Little Man Press, Cincinnati, 1939. Many Little Man publications featured bizarre, meticulous cuts by Flora, but none of the original blocks are known to exist. This is one of the few extant signed LMP-era prints. From Lowry’s text: I WILL HAVE TO BAM THEM NOW, he said. He began to push them down with his two hands. He pushed…

James Flora was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on this date in 1914. Legend has it he passed away on July 9, 1998. However, some refuse to acknowledge his departure. We see evidence of Flora’s presence every day, so perhaps they’re onto something.

The full title of this undated (early- to mid-1940s) work is The Rape of the Stationmaster’s Daughter, a tempera on paper, titled in pencil on the reverse. It was reproduced in our second Flora anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, and its anatomically absurd actors were adapted by designer Laura Lindgren for the cover. In 2008 we issued a fine art print. A customer purchased a print last month and expressed admiration at…

Detail, Okeh Records retail banner for then-new (1943) 78 rpm disc “Born To Lose” by Ted Daffan’s Texans. The grieving beau has an odd tic: crying out of one eye, thereby expressing semi-sorrow over the loss of his gal. The full banner was reproduced in our second anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

Flora explains how the brain reacts to stimuli—it’s all cogs, pulleys and tiny hammers. Another (see below) illustration from the November-December 1944 issue of Columbia Coda.

Illustration, Columbia Coda, November-December 1944. The pianist is … we’ll get back to you on that. The clarinetists and violinists, forced to perform incognito due to union regulations, were represented on the session by essential anatomical components attired in boots and bowties.

Dummy pages, Gene Krupa and his Columbia recording orchestra, demo booklet, 1941, part of a series of homemade samples prepared by Flora for the Columbia Records art department. Most pages from the booklets (which earned the artist a job at Columbia) were reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora; three of the above four pages were omitted due to space constraints. We posted another unpublished page from the series here and more Flora…

Here are two tempera illustrations discovered in an early- to mid-1960s sketchpad in the Flora collection. The more refined of the two works has a title: Bessie Smith, presumably a vignette of the soulful, bawdy 1920s and ’30s Empress of the Blues. The pianist (great hat!) is unidentified, and we can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of Smith performing with her nipples exposed: The second work, pages away in the same sketchpad, is untitled but…

Flora rendered the above woodcut for the cover of a collection of short stories by Alvin Frederick Levin, published by Little Man Press in 1940. New Directions Books has just issued Love Is Like Park Avenue, Levin’s “unfinished novel,” which includes the “Little Alvin” vignettes and a reproduction of Flora’s woodcut. You’ve probably never heard of Alvin Levin. Neither had we. The intriguing rediscovery of Levin is chronicled by New Directions Senior Editor Declan Spring…

A draft and a refinement of a common theme. This barrelhouse piano player was roughly rendered for a series of demo booklets the Cincinnati-based Flora crafted in 1941 as a job pitch: “Columbia Records was reissuing old jazz records without much fanfare,” the artist (and jazz aficionado) later wrote. “I had the temerity to make these small booklets to try to point out the error of their ways.” His temerity paid off. In early 1942…

Get to know them — Flora-style! Individual letters culled from various works by the funky font master himself.