Filed Under: "1950s"

click for panoramic magnificence Flora created the woodcut RAILROAD TOWN in 1951, during his 15-month family sojourn in Mexico. It’s a manic mural, crammed with sinister figures interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork. Pictured above is a 2007 relief print, with black ink on 280g archival-quality Rives BFK cream. The block measures 11″ x 22-1/4″, and the full print (with border) measures 18-3/4″ x 30″. Working with Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress of Knoxville, we will produce a limited…

This is a print detail of Railroad Town, a 1951 Jim Flora woodcut. What you see above is approximately one-tenth of the entire 11″ x 22.5″ work. The rest is equally outrageous. Barbara and I just returned from Knoxville, where we oversaw proofs for numbered, archival-quality limited edition relief prints of this iconic Flora work. All prints are restruck from the original Flora-cut block, and the edition will be produced by Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress. Prints…

Jim Flora passed away in 1998, one year after the TV debut of SOUTH PARK. We don’t know if he ever watched it. Yet there is incontrovertible evidence that Flora telepathically transmitted artistic ideas to series creators Matt and Trey. Exhibit A: In the New York Times, March 15, 1959, Flora depicted the stork delivering a litter of South Park denizens: Forty years later, the above figures would have reproduced in sufficient quantities to populate…

From The X-Ray Eye of Wallingford Hume, a proposed children’s book, 1943. Project abandoned, images unpublished.

‘Tis the season to Pete Jolly! A new silk-screen print has been introduced to our growing line of iconic Jim Flora merch—the artist’s swirly 1955 RCA Victor EP cover for the Pete Jolly Duo. This sleeve rarely turns up on eBay, and Floraphiles have been known to liquidate 401(k)’s to own battered copies. We don’t know much about pianist Jolly or his bassist, but apparently they couldn’t quit bopping long enough to sit still for…

That’s not what this work is titled. It has no title, and it’s a detail from a larger, possibly unpublished pen & ink mid-1950s cityscape. But it’s typically, Florifically, curiously sinister. And while alligators don’t really live in urban sewers, we have it on good authority that giant gophers burrowed the NYC subway system.

This three-tiered illustration appeared in the January 25, 1955, issue of Look magazine, accompanying an article by Fletcher Knebel entitled “The Welfare State is Here to Stay.” It reappears in our new book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The Nanny State storyline caught the attention of our friend, economics blogger (and Floraficionado) Donald Luskin, who asked permission to post it at poorandstupid.com. The original illustration has not been found, and most likely wasn’t…

Flora + cats + the mambo = a 1955 record cover that bags beaucoups bucks on eBay and nobody even cares if there’s a disc inside because they aren’t bidding for the music. We can’t sell you copies of this rare LP, but if you’d like a 20″ x 20″ limited edition, numbered, archival, acrylic silk-screen print of this iconic Flora design, click here. If you don’t want it on your wall, but prefer it…

A portion of an illustration for Park East magazine (June 1952).

Choo-choo, woo-woo! Another small segment from a larger work (also featured in its entirety in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora). No date attributed to this work, nor is it titled, but its whistle has a familiar refrain. Jim Flora’s affinity for the railroad yard and its denizens dates back to the mid-1930s when he returned to his home state of Ohio after exploring a brief scholarship granted to him by the Boston Architectural…

We’ve posted several complete Flora works below. However, one mission of this blog is to post details of Flora’s complex artistic madscapes. There are several reasons, not the least being our desire to spark surprise when we publish complete works in future books. Details serve as teasers. However, in a Flora mise-en-scène the details are “complete” works unto themselves. Isolating figures provides an opportunity for closer scrutiny. A typical image-dense Flora montage so overwhelms the…