Filed Under: "magazines"

Illustration detail, “What is Automation,” Collier’s magazine, March 16, 1956. The optimistic take: “Automation has been heralded by some as the threshold to a new Utopia, in which robots do all the work while human drones recline in pneumatic bliss.” There was a counterbalancing pessimistic view, but in observance of the current summer heat wave, we’ll stick with the sunshinier forecast.  We’re still looking forward to consumer helicopters with open-air cockpits.

Spot illustration, promotional brochure for trade journal Electromechanical Design: Components and Systems, 1957. Flora illustrated a number of covers for the monthly from 1957 to 1960.

Commercial spot illustration, ca. 1960, magazine and article unknown. The theme is obvious: agriculture, broadcasting, and oil moguls attempt to steer public policy by channeling self-interest through a politician’s bully pulpit. Pen & ink with black tempera on vellum with printer’s markings.

Commercial spot illustration, 1961, magazine and subject unknown. Pen & ink, watercolor and Liquid Paper on artist board with printer’s markings. Time-traveler Buster Keaton found himself in a similar predicament in the legendary Twilight Zone episode “Once Upon a Time,” which aired the same year.

The miserable family road trip. Commercial spot illustration, 1958, magazine and subject unknown. Pen & ink and watercolor on artist board. Three additional thematically unrelated spot illos were arrayed on the board.

Spot illustration for “The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger,” a short story by Robert Penn Warren which appeared in the January 1947 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. At the time Flora was employed at Columbia Records, but having been promoted out of the art department and focusing largely on bureaucratic tasks (much to his displeasure), he was seeking outside freelance work. His first assignment for Mademoiselle, for Robert Lowry’s “Little Baseball World,” had appeared in…

Partial illustration, “What is Automation,” Collier’s magazine, March 16, 1956. Pull quote from the layout: Automation has been heralded by some as the threshold to a new Utopia, in which robots do all the work while human drones recline in pneumatic bliss. The complete two-tiered illustration—half-utopian (above), half-apocalyptic—was reproduced in our second anthology, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

Hot Stove League entry: illustration (one of several) from “The Big Leagues Are Killing Baseball,” LOOK magazine, April 15, 1958. The above image is an original painting. Many of Flora’s early commercial illustrations exist only as printed reproductions, the original art either kept by the magazines or thrown out. When I interviewed Flora in 1998, I asked him about the whereabouts of his commercial originals. “They would reproduce it,” I queried, “but they wouldn’t think…

Detail, cover illustration, “Human Engineering: Tailoring the Machine to the Man,” Research and Engineering magazine, February 1956. We reproduced the entire illustration here. Pure blacks are missing from the detail, an enlargement of a scan of a worn cover. Copies of R&E in any condition are difficult to find, and the original art has not been located.

Page from 1957 sales brochure for Electromechanical Design magazine. Flora illustrated an unknown number of covers for this (now long-defunct) monthly. In the 1950s and ’60s, he was often a go-to artist for science-related journalism, as evidenced by his work for Research & Engineering magazine.

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…

Nine Jim Flora illustrations, album covers, and details found their way into yesterday’s UK Telegraph Sunday jazz supplement (print edition). We were approached by one of the paper’s art directors two weeks ago and provided dozens of vintage Flora music images (several previously unpublished). Their selections give the finished layouts a visual syncopation. A pdf of the five pages can be downloaded here. (The pages will be online at Telegraph.co.uk shortly.)