Bernie Fuchs' was the Mad Men's illustrator. After the Rockwell era, he was, according to illustration historian David Apatoff in The Art of Bernie Fuchs (The Illustrated Press) "more widely admired—and imitated—than any other contemporary illustrator." At the age of thirty he was named "Artist of the Twelvemonth" by the Artists Guild of New York. By 1975,

he was the youngest illustrator e'er elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. His work was ubiquitous in national advertising campaigns for automotive companies and major brands, and in national magazines, including McCall's, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Tv set Guide and Sports Illustrated. Apatoff'due south book is the starting time major retrospective of Fuch's illustrations, featuring over 300 illustrations. Fuch'south work also prompted a shift in arroyo from representational to symbolic, or conceptual, illustration. I asked Apatoff to talk well-nigh almost his celebration of this pivotal artist.

Bernie Fuchs

You make quite a merits for Bernie Fuchs as a unique illustrator in the post-Rockwellian world. What almost his work took him to a new level?Several elements contributed to his success: a long, prolific career; natural talent; and the good fortune to work at a time when illustration was running wild with creative possibilities. Merely I call back his greatest nugget was his creative restlessness. Subsequently he developed a pop new await, he'd change directions again, leaving a flock of imitators backside. (A peer recalled, "All the art directors kept calling up proverb, 'I want Bernie! I want Bernie!' Just Bernie got tired of doing pictures of people holding drinks and just said,

'Shove information technology.'") In an era when his peers all used gouache or acrylic, Fuchs split off to invent new techniques in oils. He walked away from a secure career equally the richest car illustrator in Detroit to get-go over as a freelancer in New York.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Bernie Fuchs

Bernie Fuchs was certainly copied, equally yous bespeak out. Were there others who reached his tiptop of popularity?There were many great illustrators who came and went during those years, but I recollect Fuchs was the last "stone star" illustrator of the Mad Men generation, when ultra-absurd illustrators drove Porsches or Rolls Royces and shaped public taste using a mass media that was still relatively homogeneous. The Button Pivot artists or Bob Peak were other examples of hugely influential illustrators in the '60s. By the 1980s the media had fragmented and the function of illustration had diminished, making it more difficult for an illustrator to repeat Fuchs' "height of popularity."

How would you say Fuchs evolved his arroyo from the pristine accuracy of his Detroit style to the work he did in New York?Fuchs said that once he developed technical skill, "information technology took a long time to actually study and control looseness." Information technology helped that he experimented from a position of strength; he knew plenty virtually perspective, anatomy and technique and so he could choose what to abandon and what to retain.

Bernie Fuchs
Bernie Fuchs

You lot notation that using reference photographs was shunned. Why?Nearly a century afterwards photo reference was embraced past Degas, Cezanne and Lautrec, some commercial illustrators all the same felt guilty using photos. Phone call information technology an inferiority complex. Fuchs was a immature creative person working in Detroit when a Cooper Studio creative person visited from New York and explained that illustrators who didn't use photographs could never continue upward with the step and demands of the big city. Fuchs and his peers all started using more photography.

You also say that Fuchs' work was no longer as popular with the increased employ of photography; I argue that conceptual or "thought" illustration changed the field. What really happened?The quantity and profitability of illustration work dropped off precipitously as boob tube drained advertizement revenues from illustrated magazines such equally The Sat Evening Post, Life, Colliers and dozens of others. Some people suggest that conceptual or idea illustration arose partly as a safe refuge from the camera. But I do hold it changed the field. Fuchs was never an idea illustrator. He became an accomplished photographer and honour-winning filmmaker (he shot commercials for Mountain Dew and Puerto Rican Rum) and went on to go a gallery painter and illustrator of children's books.

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There is an argument you pose that the quality of drawn line went downhill with the newer generation (you lot mention Ed Sorel and Guy Billout). Exercise you have a belief that this diminished illustration? I would argue thought illustrations fabricated the the art more relevant and thought-provoking.My bias is that artists who elect to work in a visual medium should respect the challenges of form-creating work. Otherwise, why not become a writer? I love conceptual illustration—at that place's no bigger fan of Saul Steinberg, Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast. But the slap-up conceptual illustrators were role owl, part songbird. Equally the concept became increasingly important, the visual class began to wither. Today, "concept creative person" Richard Prince tin can neither describe nor pigment well, just he'll take someone else's illustration and reframe it with a copy of their published work. His conceptual contribution: to "redefine the concepts of authorship, ownership and aureola." Where I come from, that'due south neither an owl nor a songbird, that's a buzzard. Recently the trees seem to be full of them.

I think the radiant pictures in the Fuchs book are a bracing reminder of how much we've lost by devaluing elements such as design, color or a sensitive line. Fuchs was a songbird, and a highly gifted one. There'southward an excitement and potency to his pictures that I think is hard to equal with purely cerebral work.

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