“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted September 3rd, 2008)

This wonderfully colorful , amusing painting is by Fred Irvin. You can find an excellent appreciation of his work at Today's Inspiration . I have no significant information about the painting above , although from the style of the car and other details in the work, I assume it dates from about 1954, or roughly the same time as the illustrations discussed by Leif Peng in his essay on Irvin.

Irvin was one of many fine commercial artists of the late 1940's and early 1950's. They often worked with limited color reproduction (as can be seen in the illustrations from Reader's Digest reproduced by Peng), but the expressive power of their work was not impaired by this problem. Obviously, given full color, Irvin was capable of exploiting the medium well.

Distinctive to these artists, in contrast to those of the 1920's and 1930's, was a greater natural ease of line. (Compare the work of, say, Alphonse Erté).

In general, these commercial artists of post-World War II America tended to seek a relaxed, confident demeanor in their paintings; they worked as if sure of their ability to capture whatever needed capturing. In common with so many artists of the art moderne tradition, they tended to slight texture in favor of a comprehensively vigorous interplay of line and (when available) bold color.

Most of all, however, it is worth observing in these works a certain pedestrian, democratic quality of emotion. The painting above is humorous, but not at all surprising; it is a version of a common theme, that of the wife who picks up for her husband, the one that ought to have been strong, but is now exhausted by having had too much fun at the fair. This is a kind of gentle humor, not unkind at all; the illustrations in Peng's essay on Irvin are of a much more serious character, but the emotions are not complex or uncommon.

It is easy for us today to scorn this kind of work; yet it was one of the most powerful vectors that kept American popular culture centered in a moderately positive, forward-looking direction. The work seems, at first glance, to be apolitical, but it is not. There is, as with the humor, the style, and the emotionality of these works, a commitment to a kind of "average Joe" politics, a willingness to move forward, not too fast, but not too slow.

Yes. It is quite easy to sneer at Fred Irvin and artists like him. But it was exactly those artists that did the heavy lifting of art in their time; they were the ones who kept alive imagery and notions that formed the core of a highly successful, widespread kind of culture.

And no. For in the very flatness of their work, the slight deficiency of depth of emotion, lay the seed of destruction. They left open the possibility of profound dissatisfaction left unspoken. In a way, like so many artists of the middle way, they almost guaranteed that there would come a period of revulsion, a period of violent rebellion. In the case of artists like Irvin , that period was the extreme abstraction and "revolutionary" art of the 1960's, the "psychedelic" brilliance and the caustic, early post-modernism of Andy Warhol. Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather have Irvin, despite the faint aura of decay that lingers around his work.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me