A Thoroughly Modern Primitive

Hot off the presses of Fantagraphics Books comes Irwin Chusid's lovingly assembled catalogue raisonné The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

By the 1950's, the decade of draftsman / designer Jim Flora's greatest activity, bebop had become only one idiom within "modern jazz". Kenton blare, the cocktail hour gavottes of the more prosperous cool combos, and the innovations of musicians such as Thelonious Monk were all proof to listeners then that jazz had ceased to be happy, or happy-go-lucky, and had instead gotten, well, complicated. Of all the talented artists of the era (Paul Bacon, Reid Miles, Tom Hannan, William Claxton, Burt Goldblatt, the artists of Guidi / Tri-Arts), Flora and David Stone Martin bore the best witness to these changes and to have given us enduring images of them at work. And yet these two designers could not have been more different. Flora worked primarily for the major labels Columbia and RCA Victor, designing covers for classical releases and records by largely Caucasian "West Coast" -- i.e., more pop-oriented -- jazz ensembles. Martin made his reputation working with Norman Granz and his various impresario ventures, from JATP to Verve Records and its incredible roster of jazz talent: Bird, Bud, Diz, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, and on and on. Flora was a brilliant cartoonist given to the kind of overstatement than can be mistaken for grotesquerie or even surrealism, while Martin was an illustrator with a rare gift for portraiture. Flora favored bold lines and amiably garish colors. Martin's drawings are spider-web delicate and often tinted in a sympathetic pastel (especially his Billie Holiday covers). Although both men drew inspiration from the same 20th Century sources, such as Picasso, Klee and Miró, Flora had an obvious affection for Leger and early Gottlieb, giving us Frankenstein-ian big band leaders (Sauter and Finegan) whose bones and squishy internal organs have been replaced by trumpets and saxophones. Meanwhile, Martin's subtle, fluid deformations of the human figure owe a great deal to Ben Shahn's "modern populist" approach to his subjects. Abstraction serves as a backdrop in Martin's designs, whereas in Flora's points, arcs and hash-marked squiggles reminiscent of Kandinsky's painterly notations of Schoenberg et. al. penetrate or circle his imps like anthropomorphized lines of force. If Martin was, as his design for the Charlie Parker Jam Session indicates, the master of the frieze, his eye trained upon the interval separating one happening from the next, Flora was more akin to a cave painter, his compositions jangling with the asymmetry of any static depiction of many independent elements in hypnotic motion. (In fact, the figures in the cover for Short Rogers' Courts The Count could almost be petroglyphs.)

If a typically proto-psychedelic, Halloween-hued, bratty Jim Flora album jacket looks as if it should adorn a box of very sugary breakfast cereal (complete with "marshmallow treats"), an urbane David Stone Martin design is more what one pictures on the front of books carried under the arms of those strolling along the Left Bank. This is another way of saying that Martin's sobriety is quite overt and follows from neo-Classical principles honoring both the inherent drama of the pose and the candor of repose. Meticulously set down in all its veins and sinews, the meaning of an individual "Martin" is always apparent. This is not to say that there is any belabored obviousness here. But you know what it is? There's just too much immortality, too much of the encomium and of the moment made eternal, in Martin's depiction of his fellow artists.

Flora's works, by contrast, are so hung over with excitement that they are incapable of taking themselves that seriously. Nor do they ever stop slithering and wobbling around long enough to become "art objects", not even when reproduced in a book. It is worth noting that Flora liked to juggle his cartoon musicians through various states of suspension and / or flight. Exaggerated. Animated. High as kites. So that, for me anyway, Flora's designs possess the same extremism with which the best bebop pulsates. As John Litweiler has written (in his The Freedom Principle), "a deadly fall to earth is ever possible" (14) in such instances. Martin acknowledges the precariousness, but Flora flaunts it, expanding the edge along which others dance into a field in which he can play.

In our Age of Nausea – your saliva thickens, exhaustion greases your eyeballs, and either you're unwell because the world looks the way it does, or the world looks the way it does because you're sick, sick, sick -- the publication of The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora is more than a little overdue. Its appearance is sure to delight anyone with an interest in vintage graphics, record collecting, the current state of the graphic novel, or Pop Art's ability to sublimate the obscene and have it return to the collective consciousness as the neurotic.

~ Joe Milazzo