Illustration: The Genesis of the Golden Book Style

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping examples of classic illustration.


If you are a fan of the Golden Book style, you'll be very interested in today's post. They say a picture is worth a thousand words... Well, using a few pictures and fewer words, I'm going to show you how Gustaf Tenggren developed the Golden Book style for the first time and what inspired him to create it.

If you haven't seen my previous post on Tenggren's Tell It Again Book, take a look at it before you read this one. It will fill you in on the back-story of Tenggren's unhappy experience working at the Disney Studios and how he resolved himself to reinvent his style to suit a new market for children's book illustration. Tenggren was searching for a way to simplify and streamline his style. You can see his experiments with stylization and more basic rendering techniques in these examples...








For inspiration, Tenggen goes all the way back to his roots... the work of his mentor, John Bauer. Here is one of Tenggren's illustrations...


And here is one by Bauer from the Swedish Christmas annual, Bland Tomtar Och Troll...


He also appears to be familiar with the work of his successor on the Bland Tomtar Och Troll series, Einar Norelius. Here is Tenggren...


And here is Norelius...


But halfway through Tenggren's Tell It Again Book comes a huge breakthrough in design. Instead of the full page plates, Tenggren begins to float his characters over the white of the page, wrapping the text around the compositions. Background elements are reduced to small islands on the page, rather than extending out to the edges of a square bounding box. When I first got this book, I wondered why Tenggren had changed format halfway through. Clearly one reason was to save time and streamline the work of producing so many illustrations for a single book. But there was an aesthetic precedent to it as well. The answer has been hanging on my bedroom wall since I was a little boy!

Like Tenggren, my Grandmother was Swedish. In the early 1920s, she took my father to Sweden to visit his Grandparents. It was the only time he was able to meet them, since he lived in Peterborough, Canada, a very long sea voyage away from their farm in Goteborg, Sweden. My great grandparents gave my father a gift to take home with him to remind him of the visit- this Swedish folk art picture...


When I was born, my father gave it to me to hang in my bedroom, and it's been there ever since. Notice the similarity between the forward pitched perspective, the staging of the characters in clear profile silhouettes, and the simple rendering of the figures over the white of the paper on this print and the Tenggren illustrations that follow...










Tenggren had discovered a way to simplify and refine his illustrations even further. Instead of busy backgrounds full of details, he used just enough information to place the characters, and focused his attention on composing the figures. Immediately after publishing this book, Tenggren produced The Poky Little Puppy, the book that was the model for the hundreds of Little Golden Books that followed over the next seventy years. By going back to his roots and synthesizing his Swedish cultural upbringing, Tenggren invented a style that now seems to us to be quintessentially American.

This is a perfect example of how immigrant artists of all kinds suited their artistic voice to their new lives in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Carlo Vinci's Italian heritage resulted in a superhero mouse who sang opera. Bill Tytla's Eastern European roots helped him create a monster in Fantasia. And Milt Gross' Jewish upbringing expressed itself in comic celebrations of the ethnic vitality of New York City.

The melting pot of American culture sure is rich with cartoons!

For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see... Tenggren's Tell It Again Book Part One, D'Aulnoy Fairy Tales and The Good Dog Book, Tenggren's Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Heidi, Wonderbook and Juan & Juanita, Sing For Christmas, and Small Fry and the Winged Horse.

See also... Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive
.

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