Filed Under: "1940s"

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)

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)

Flora would have turned 95 today. His centennial is on the horizon. The above tempera and pencil illustration on card stock, found in the archives, dates from the early- to mid-1940s, the original purpose unknown. The re-purposing is known: Happy Birthday, Mr. Flora. From “the editors.”

Our 2009 Jim Flora fine art print series kicks off with a limited-edition, archival-quality giclee of a classic Columbia Records album cover, Kid Ory and His Creole Jazz Band. The oversized (15-3/4″ x 15-1/2″) print image is larger than the original album cover. The album was released in 1947 as a 78 rpm four-disc set, and was part of Columbia’s Hot Jazz series. Trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory (1886-1973) was a legendary pioneer in the development…

photo by Don Brockway, May 15, 2006, Norwalk CT

hand-printed card, early 1940s

A celebrity in its own right, brags to the media about Benny’s awesome embouchure. Reporter doggedly chronicles sensationalistic account, anticipates major scoop. Detail, Columbia Records ad, Look magazine, 1943.

Part of Flora’s is alsopart of Columbia’s.

Spot illustration, Coda, June 1943

Untitled pen sketch, ca. early-1940s. This image was later adapted (along with more than a dozen seemingly unrelated sketch works) in a 1943 copper-engraved montage entitled Air of Panic. The white vertical skunk stripe is an artifact likely caused by long-term exposure to light; the white area was shielded from exposure while the rest of the paper became yellowed with age.

Flora woodengraving for short story “The 6.98 Jacket” by Robert Lowry, appearing in Hutton Street, published by Little Man Press, Cincinnati, 1940. Print run unknown, but all LMP chapbooks were extremely limited editions between 125 and 400. The booklet contains 18 meticulous woodcuts by Flora, none of which are known to have survived. If they were left in the custody of Lowry, he likely sold them or used them for kindling. The man was volatile….