Album Covers and Music Illustrations

T he
High Fid
Jı m
F lora
t
r
A
elit y
of
Album Covers and Music Illustrations
IrwIn ChusI d
&
ba r bar a eConomon
d e s I g n by L au ra LIndgre n
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c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments 7
Wizard of the Square-Foot Canvas I r w i n
C h u s i d 11
Interview with Jim Flora 25
Interview with Robert Jones m a r t i n a
Album Covers
59
Columbia Records
Fine Art
Sc h m i t z 49
125
153
Sketches
167
Jim Flora Fine-Art Prints 178
About the Team 180
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Wizard of the Square-Foot Canvas
Irwin Chusid
T
he High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora is our fourth anthology of the artist’s work.
Our first two books, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora and The Curiously Sinister
Art of Jim Flora, contained extensive biographical details about the artist’s life. Both
books are out of print (a third, The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, remains in print
at the time of this book’s publication). Since many readers who have recently
­d iscovered Flora’s work might not be familiar with his backstory, we’re providing a
newly written, condensed profile of the artist. An interview I conducted with Flora in
1998 appears later in the book, published here for the first time.
R
James (Jim) Flora is known for his wild jazz and classical album covers for Columbia
Records (late 1940s) and RCA Victor (1950s). He wrote and illustrated seventeen p
­ opular
children’s books and flourished for decades as a commercial illustrator. Flora was a
one-man image factory. Few knew, at the time, that he was also a prolific fine artist
with a devilish sense of humor and a flair for juxtaposing playfulness, absurdity, and
violence. Cute—and deadly.
Flora’s album covers pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and
shark-fin chins, fingering cockeyed pianos and honking lollipop-hued horns. Yet this
childlike exuberance was subverted by a tinge of the diabolic. Flora wreaked havoc
with the laws of physics, conjuring flying musicians, levitating instruments, and
­wobbly dimensional perspectives. Taking liberties with human anatomy, he drew
bonded bodies and misshapen heads, inked ghoulish skin tints and grafted mutant
A bov e : Detail, Columbia Records advertisement for Horace Heidt
and His Musical Knights, 1943 (page 149)
o p p osi t e : Detail, retouched cover of Shorty Rogers Courts the
Count (page 93)
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Columbia Records staff, 1942 or ‘43,
left to right: Patrick Dolan, advertising
manager; James Flora; Alex Steinweiss,
art director; Ed Cushing (wrote program
notes for classical music albums);
Sid Asp, advertising department
production manager
l ef t: Jim Flora & Jane Sinnickson, February
1941, going to Cincinnati City Hall to
obtain a marriage license
o pp osi t e : Back cover illustration for Shorty
Rogers album Portrait of Shorty, RCA
Victor, 1958
appendages. He was not averse to pigmenting jazz legends Benny Goodman and Gene
Krupa like bedspread patterns. On some Flora figures, three legs and five arms were
standard equipment, spare eyeballs optional. His fine-art works reflect the same comic
yet disturbing qualities.
Born in the quaint village of Bellefontaine, Ohio, on January 25, 1914, Flora drew
pictures as a child, later recalling, “I specialized in pirates and their ships.” He was
trained at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1936–39), where he met his future wife, artist
Jane Sinnickson. After attaining certification from the AAC, Flora struggled as a
­commercial freelancer, with Procter and Gamble and the Union Central Life Insurance
Company among his clients. In 1941 Flora, a jazz buff since his teens, mailed a series of
hand-painted, prototype promotional booklets (reproduced in The Curiously Sinister
Art) to Columbia Records art director Alex Steinweiss, the man who had revolutionized
record packaging a few years earlier by inventing the illustrated album cover.
­Steinweiss was impressed, and in 1942 he offered Flora a job at $55 a week, prompting
James and Jane’s move to Connecticut. (At the time Columbia’s business offices were
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based in Bridgeport.) In 1943, after Steinweiss enlisted in the Navy, Flora was promoted to art director. During his brief (1943–45) tenure in the position, he revitalized
the label’s marketing image with his iconic style of cartoonish caricature, which was
featured in ads, trade brochures, promotional ephemera, and monthly new-release
booklets such as Coda and Disc Digest. In 1945 Flora was promoted to advertising manager, and a few years later to sales promotion manager. These positions, which entailed
business routines more than artistic expression, caused no end of frustration to the
Academy-trained Flora. “My time was taken up with endless meetings, endless memos,
and wrestling with budgets,” he later recalled. His successor as art director, Robert
Miller Jones (an interview with whom appears later in this book), assigned a number
of album cover illustrations to Flora to retain Columbia’s visual edge in record shops.
In 1950, his corporate despair having reached critical mass, Flora resigned, rented
out the family’s home in Rowayton, and moved to Mexico with his wife and two
youngsters, Roussie and Joel. Embarking on a fifteen-month expatriate sojourn, they
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e­ ventually settled in Taxco, where James and Jane lived cheaply while indulging both
their artistic impulses and their joie de vivre. They returned to Connecticut in 1951,
after which Flora launched a lengthy and prosperous career as a freelance commercial
artist. His old buddy from Columbia, Bob Jones, now art director at RCA Victor, commissioned a series of LP and EP cover illustrations from Flora beginning in 1954. In the
fifties, the Flora family flowered to seven with the arrivals of Robert, Caroline, and
Julia. Jim’s periodical client roster included The New York Times, Mademoiselle, Charm,
Look, ­Collier’s, Newsweek, Research & Engineering, Sports Illustrated, and Parade.
In 1955 Flora wrote and illustrated his first book for young readers, The Fabulous
Firework Family, published by Harcourt, Brace. He produced ten additional books for
Harcourt, under the aegis of legendary children’s book editor Margaret McElderry.
When McElderry left Harcourt and founded her own imprint at Atheneum, she brought
along Flora, who delivered six additional books, finishing with Grandpa’s Witched-Up
Christmas in 1982.
Throughout his career as a freelance commercial artist and juvenile storyteller,
Flora always found time for his fine-art impulses. He painted, sketched, created
­woodcuts, and made relief prints at home and during his travels. Even in retirement,
and particularly during the decade before his death in 1998, he created an enormous
body of work.
Flora once said, “All I wanted to make was a piece of excitement.” In much of his
work, he overshot that goal.
Opp osi t e : “A Musical Map, Summer 1956,” The New York Times
(original hand-rendered mechanical)
A bov e: Flora composing what appears to be a topical commercial
illustration, ca. 1950s
R ig h t: Spot illustration, Coda, April 1952
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