Filed Under: "architecture"

Topical illustration (mechanical), tempera on paper, ca. 1961. Assignment, title, periodical, and publication date unknown. The Flora collection contains dozens of such illustrations of unknown provenance. The crosshairs at the corners are printer’s registration marks, used for aligning overlays and film plates.

Mount Adams ascension, one of a series of woodcut prints the young Flora rendered for the Union Central Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati’s August 1941 publication, Life Association News. The images accompanied an article entitled “Where to go … What to do … While you’re in Cincinnati.” These woodcuts have not been republished since their first appearance seven decades ago. The location of the original wood blocks is unknown.

Henry Ford in Cetara, rough pencil drawing found in 1991 sketchpad. Cetara is in Italy. There’s no refined sketches and no indication the sketch was developed into a finished work. Flora traveled widely and artfully chronicled his globetrotting. This sketchbook contains no other images of Italy, but does contain a letter handwritten in a Mexican hospital while Flora was being treated for “over medication and loss of blood.” On the preceding page was a journal…

Detail, The Big Bank Robbery, mid-1960s tempera on board. The bank displaying the signage at right isn’t actually depicted in the complete work, only a counter clerk with upraised arms holdup-style (not pictured in detail). We issued a limited edition fine art print of the work in 2009, and one-half of the print run has been sold. Prices increase as editions sell down.

Rowayton Remembered, detail of woodcut print, ca. 1974 My Brush With Historya series by the readers of American Heritage magazineJames Flora’s contributionFebruary/March 1997 (Volume 48, Issue 1) During the late 1940s I lived in Rowayton, a small Connecticut village, with my wife and two small children. I was the art director of Columbia Records, a job I dearly loved. In my work I had many opportunities to meet the musical celebrities of the day, Frank…

Partial scan (about one-third, with color checker card) of unpublished 1954 woodcut print Sheffield Island. The original block is in the Flora family collection. Only a handful of original artist prints exist. We are contemplating issuing a new limited edition run of the complete work next year.

Our newest Flora fine art print, G3 in Tampico, is available at JimFlora.com. The 1970 tempera (on board), titled by the artist in pencil on the reverse, sits in storage, previously unseen. The work had not previously been published or reproduced anywhere. Tampico is the main city in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas (and the birthplace of legendary Space Age Pop maestro Esquivel); however, the significance of the Flora title (the “G” and “3” elements…

Untitled Mexican motif, pen and ink (or tempera) on paper, 1967. The work was reproduced in our most recent book, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora.

One-half of an undated black and white business card (mock-up) from the 1950s. At the time, though he lived in Rowayton CT, Flora shared an office (and probably an art studio) at 21 East 63rd Street in Manhattan. A classic tempera painting from the period caricatures the neighborhood. No copies of the printed version of this card exist in the Flora collection. The discoloration in the upper right is an aging artifact.

This three-tiered montage appeared in Fortune magazine in 1947 as part of a 48-state series sponsored by the Container Corporation of America. Flora, an Ohio native, was commissioned to illustrate his birth state. A color version—as it ran in Fortune—was reproduced in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. Tearsheets turn up periodically on Ebay. The above greyscale version—presumably the original, described as “watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paperboard”—is in the Smithsonian collection, according to their…

Today we launch a new Jim Flora fine art print: Ferris Wheel Fireworks, adapted from Flora’s second kiddie book, The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957). The long-sought book will be reprinted this fall by Enchanted Lion. At that time we’ll issue a print of the book cover, which includes the artist’s fabulous hand-typography. However, during the image restoration process, Flora archivist/printmaker Barbara Economon saw the print possibilities of the book’s chaotic two-page (34-35) tableau. The…

Pencil sketch from the mid-1990s of a cryptic tableau later rendered as a tempera on paper entitled Bijou. The painting retained most elements and positioning, with minor changes. The cloud was omitted, the plane enlarged, and the vertical theater marquee which reads “Adelaid” was renamed “Bijou.” The painting is unpublished and uncirculated, and will be reproduced in a future anthology.