Howard Pyle

The illustrations of HOWARD PYLE (1853-1911) are as exciting now as they were a hundred years ago, while pictures by many of his contemporaries today look dated and mannered.

Several special qualities combined to make Pyle America's foremost illustrator. Pyle was interested in pictures, first of all, as drama. As a young man his initial reaction to a theatrical performance had made a great impression on him and influenced his point of view from then on. In his illustrations, Pyle sought to dramatize themes with universal appeal. The pictures portrayed basic human emotions: the ruthlessness of pirate greed, raw grief in the break-up of Lee's army after Appomattox, smug pride, humble petition.

Pyle's concept of a picture was never trite. He deliberately looked for new ways to tell a story and involved himself in his subject so thoroughly that his pictures make the reader and eye-witness to a vivid experience.

Having evolved his basic pictorial idea, Pyle developed his compositions; his pictures are fascinating to analyze. No area of a picture is wasted; each makes its contribution, through placement, line, tone or color, to the whole story. Through the details, the viewers eye is purposefully led toward the focal center.

Pyle wrote, as well as illustrated, many books himself. He did original research on the obscure subject of the buccaneers in the New World. It is from his famous Book of Pirates that our present-day concept of pirates has come. School children still read his Men of Iron, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and many other tales.

As a teacher, Pyle attracted a large number of students, inspiring them as much by his idealism as by the high standards he set for picture making. Over the years he taught at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, lectured at the Art Students League in New York, and eventually conducted special classes for gifted students at both Wilmington, Delaware and, during the summer at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. He made no charge for his teaching, and, in fact, built a set of studios for the students to work in. N. C. Wyeth, Harvey Dunn, Stanley Arthurs, and Frank Schoonover were among the beneficiaries of this instruction, and passed along to others Pyle's unique approach as they, in turn, became illustrators and teachers.

At the time when it was customary and fashionable to study in Europe, Pyle had a strong conviction that students should seek their training and inspiration in America. Many of Pyle's greatest pictures came from his intense and loyal interest in Americana. His renditions of the Revolutionary War period and of Civil War subjects have since become standard pictures in our history books, among them Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, and James Truslow Adams' History of the United States.

After Pyle's death, his students collected many of his original paintings as a nucleus for the present comprehensive collection of his work in the Delaware Art Museum. An excellent biography entitled Howard Pyle, was written by Henry C. Pitz and published in New York by Bramhall House in 1965.

Source:

- Walt Reed, Illustration House, New York

Howard Pyle has long been considered 'The Father of American Illustration' as much for his prolific and superb work as a writer and illustrator as for his commitment to teaching. In the 1890's, Pyle was well established as an illustrator and turned his mind to teaching others. He founded the first school in the nation for illustration at Drexel Institute (1894-1900) in Philadelphia. In that same year he published ninety-nine illustrations bringing him substantial fees, yet he never accepted money for his teaching.

Many of the greatest illustrators attended his classes at Drexel, and later at the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington (1900-1905, and in the summers alongside the Brandywine River at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Howard Pyle's school in Wilmington made that city the center of illustration in the twilight of the 19th century. Pyle had about two-hundred students during his teaching career of whom more than eighty were well-known and very successful, and two dozen more of whom were very famous and immensely successful.

Many of the students and subsequently, their students became known as 'The Brandywine School'. Some of the best known included Stanley Arthurs, Clifford Ashley, William Aylward, Arthur Becher, Anna Whelan Betts, Ethel Franklin Betts, Harvey Dunn, Anton Otto Fischer, Philip R. Goodwin, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Gayle Hoskins, Oliver Kemp, W.H.D. Koerner, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ernest Peixotto, Frank Schoonover, Jessie Willcox Smith, Henry J. Soulen, Sarah Stilwell Weber, C. Leslie Thrasher, and N.C. Wyeth.

A most extraordinary and little known fact was that Pyle's classes were about fifty percent female students,an unheard of proportion in those days.

Pyle was born into a Quaker family from Delaware and lived his whole life there except for two years at the Art Students League early in his career and a year in Italy, where he died. His family was not unhappy when he expressed an interest in studying art although such a thought was not on any Quaker agendas.

His first art teacher was Van der Weilen, but at the age of twenty-three, he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. He expected to gain an education as an artist, an easel painter for there was no specific education for illustrators, and his first thoughts was making art, not making a living. Like most of his students, Pyle later went into illustration to earn a living at his craft.

While studying in NYC, he was able to get small commissions illustrating for Century Magazine. Other commissions flowed from his initial projects including some from Collier's Weekly, Everybody's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly, Cosmopolitan, The Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's Magazine, Scribner's, Wide Awake, and St. Nicholas magazines. Each commission was more lucrative than the previous one, and each illustration was received enthusiastically by the magazine art editors and their readership. Pyle was in demand from the very beginning.

In 1879, Pyle returned to Delaware and produced a number of books, which he both wrote and illustrated, including Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, Men of Iron, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and for other publishers; Riverside Press, The Bibliophile Society, Century, Little Brown and Company, Scribner's, and Houghton Mifflin, Co., the most important publishers in the USA.

Howard Pyle was a master of all forms of media. He excelled in pen and ink, watercolors, oils, pencil, and charcoal, equally well. From his experiences as an art student, he realized that there was no training, which taught a young artist the difference between a cover illustration and an interior one. There was no lesson in the application of masthead lettering to an image for it took a certain design ability, which was more than the training of an easel artist approached, and so on.

He realized that there was a need arising to train illustrators with the advent of better publishing technologies. Most of those elements of illustration training he had learned from experience, by intuition, or by listening carefully to the myriad of magazine art directors whom he attracted to his door.

Additionally, when teaching, he tried to instill certain standards of behavior amongst his students to imbue them with his own precepts. He had the goal to train a generation, which could visually define this nation for itself through illustration. It was all ad hoc, and it worked.

Pyle recommended that his pupils look to their own country and their own lives for inspiration. He asked the students to train themselves hard, both spiritually and artistically, and to experience the environments they wished to replicate, to use authentic props in their paintings to enhance the images they created. Howard Pyle's influence is the most enduring influence on all illustrators, bar none.

His teaching methods were as bold as his paintings. His images of our national story have become commonplace in the nation's history books and in the artistic molding of what it means to be an' American'. It was said that Pyle had the fine faculty of transporting himself into any period of history and with his masterful brush; he turned historic figures into flesh and blood. His familiar works are images of rakish pirates, tough frontiersmen, and noble knights; they populate children's adventure novels, and remain paradigms, prototypes, stereotypes. They will forever remain our visual models. He captivated anyone who read his stories or viewed his images-in short, he was the best illustrator in his day.

Howard Pyle was born in 1853, at the most propitious time for an illustrator of great genius. It was a time comparable to Michelangelo's birth with its respective coincidence of the Renaissance and Medici rule of power. When Pyle was born, the American public was just getting interested in establishing our own cultural icons, and our American civilization had begun to flower. A young Quaker artist understood that the new magazines and progress in printing meant that a need for more images was at hand. Pyle's magical images came from a vibrant mind, which enhanced his notions with authenticity making fairy tales and fictional personages come alive in the reader's mind's eyes.

During his career, Howard Pyle produced illustrations for nearly three-thousand five hundred publications, and about half of those images illustrated books and articles he authored - two hundred magazine articles and nineteen books.

The Delaware Museum of Art was founded to house his art works.

Known as the man who revolutionized American book illustration in the late 19th century and described as "unquestionably the Renaissance man of American illustration" (Zellman 467), Howard Pyle did highly dramatic, detailed, and colorful illustrations of subjects ranging from American history to childrens' fairy tales. As a teacher, he had a significant influence on succeeding generations of illustrators including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Ethel Franklin Betts, Jessie Willcox Smith and Harvey Dunn.

Howard Pyle was born at Wilmington, Delaware, and showing early art talent, commuted to Philadelphia to take classes from F.A. van der Wielen, a Belgian painter. He wrote and illustrated a poem, and when this was published in 1876, he moved to New York City to be close to national publishers. There he enrolled in the Art Student's League*.

In New York City he gained attention for his skillful line drawings in the style of Albrecht Durer. In the 1870s, he began doing illustrations for the childrens' magazine St. Nicholas and then accepted a number of book commissions includingYankee Doodle and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott. He was author-illustrator of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883, and illustrated several other books tied to his interest in medieval lore. In 1902, he began illustrating his own version of the legends of King Arthur.

From 1894, he began teaching classes at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute* of Art, Science and Technology. The school authorities allowed him plenty of freedom with his teaching methods, which focused on students thinking in terms of the printed page rather than artwork on a wall and of placing themselves into their illustrations.

Four years later, he, established the Brandywine School of Illustration Art* on the Brandywine River near the Delaware/Pennsylvania border. This resulted from students having been given Drexel Institute scholarships the summer before to study with Pyle at his summer home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania near Wilmington. Attending these classes, N.C. Wyeth became aware of the charm of the region and subsequently located his family there.

Pyle's only visit to Europe was in the last year of his life, and he died unexpectedly in Florence, Italy on November 9, 1911, at the height of his career. More than 100 of his works are in the possession of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Source:

Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art

Leonard Pytlak- Pytlak studied at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at the Art Students League of New York. He has won many awards for his works throughout the years. Pytlak has successfully combined lithography and serigraph for his unique prints.

PYTLAK, LEONARD: Appointed for creative work in painting and color lithography; tenure, twelve months from April 1, 1941.

Born March 3, 1910, Newark, New Jersey. Education: Newark Art School and Art Students League.

Exhibitions: Exhibited at Seattle Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Museum, Albany Institute of History & Art, Philadelphia Print Club, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Museum of Modern Art, New York World's Fair, Paris Exposition, Montclair Museum. Awarded Philadelphia Print Club prize, 1937. Represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Newark Library.

Michael Rand-sensuality in Clay: Mike Rand's Ceramic Sculptures Colorado ceramic artist, Mike Rand, is only in his mid-thirties, so it might seem preposterous to say that he has three decades of work experience under his belt--but, none the less, it would be true.

"I started working in clay when I was five," says Rand, "my mother would kick the wheel for me, and I remember firing wood kilns with my father at about the same time."

Born in Leadville, Colorado in 1976, Rand attended school in Michigan but spent a good deal of his time each year in the Rockies. He lived in an A-frame cabin that his parents, artists themselves, had designed and built in Carbondale, not far from Aspen. This area was a fertile ground for a budding ceramic artist and as a child Rand was exposed to the work-and the work habits-of several significant potters and ceramic sculptors. Rand was particularly influenced by the late Thanos Johnson, a disciple of Shoji Hamada. "I learned raku from Thanos," Rand recalls, "and when I was a teenager, I was gathering tall grasses and using them in the firings." Also in the mix of influences at this time was another ceramic artist who worked nearby, the world renowned Paul Soldner.

Beginning in 1990 and continuing through '94, Rand, who was still in high school at the time, studied ceramics at Michigan State University while, in the summers, he attended workshops around Aspen. For his undergraduate degree in material engineering at University of Michigan, Rand was mentored by the ceramic sculptor, Sadashi Inuzuka. Rand then attended Southern Cross University in Australia and he earned his Master of Arts there. At Southern Cross, Rand studied with Tony Nankervis, a master of wood-firing. At the time, Rand's principle interest was developing what he calls "velvet clay" in which the iron oxide in the mixture comes back out of the solution when pieces are fired, creating what looks like glazes on the surfaces.

As may be surmised by this brief accounting of his extensive formal grounding in ceramics, Rand was early-on exposed to the Asian tradition, specifically, the Japanese current that dominated studio ceramics for most of the 20th century in the United States. As a result, up until the last few years, Rand created several bodies of work, divided between functional vessels, and sculptures that were vessel-based, all of which were derived from Japanese ideas.

Then Rand made a bold move in a new direction with the results, illustrated in this catalogue, revealing a marked change in his sensibility toward clay. Rand increasingly moved away from the Japanesque approach and began to embrace other traditions and to make them his own.

Early-on Rand had discovered the work of George Ohr, the so-called "Mad Potter of Biloxi" who worked a century ago. The smashed clay shapes and collapsed forms that Rand employs, owe their origins to Ohr's example. More unusual, given his grounding in aesthetics derived from the Japanese sensibility, is Rand's embrace of its countercurrent in the history of clay: the Mediterranean aesthetic. This is most obvious in his torso sculptures, that are meant to be self-portraits, and which have a Greco-Roman character, but is also evident in his more thoroughly abstract and surrealist confections that are meant to recall undersea life. His use of tendrils or spikes, for example, recalls the decorative flourishes of Italian modernist ceramics and glass.

The reconciling of Japanese ideas with Italian ones, which is easy to see in Rand's work, is a contemporary movement in ceramic sculpture with perhaps its best known proponent being Betty Woodman who worked in Colorado for nearly half a century. How Rand made this sudden turn can only be explained by his recent exposure to the masters of Italian craft during the time he worked in a gallery in Aspen. "It was Lino," Rand says by way of explanation, referring to Venetian glass master Lino Tagliapietro whose creations were a mainstay of the gallery.

Finally, there's an undeniable sexuality in the forms of these recent pieces. The torsos, depicting lithe and athletic men, are quietly sensual. The surrealist sea creature sculptures, on the other hand, are more thoroughly erotic, abounding in both phallic and vaginal imagery, though the referents are essentially subliminal and evocative, as opposed to being literal.

Mike Rand's most recent efforts featured on the following pages reveal the vast array of artistic forces that have guided him over the years. These courageous and technically ambitious pieces demonstrate the artist's longtime commitment to beauty and, at the same time, to endless experimentation.

--Michael Paglia

Art Critic, Westword, Denver, Colorado