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
.

Stumble It!

Illlustration: Tenggren Tell It Again Book 1942

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.


In my last post on the legendary illustrator Gustaf Tenggren, I discussed the stark change in Tenggren's style after leaving the Disney Studios. In the twenties, Tenggren had been paid handsomely for his work. But the wartime economy changed all that. Publishers were no longer able to pay him to work a week or more on a single painting. He was forced to simplify his style.

While at Disney, Tenggren chaffed under the bit of anonymity. It's said that Walt instructed his artists, "If you're going to sign a name to your artwork, spell it 'Walt Disney'." But Tenggren defiantly maintained his individuality, signing many of his key paintings for Pinocchio. He left the studio under unhappy circumstances, and was bitter about the whole episode. But he had learned one thing from Walt... the power of branding one's self.



Tenggren resolved that he would never again waste his skills building a reputation for someone else. He boldly built his name into the masthead of his first major publication after leaving Disney. No longer was it Andersen's Fairy Tales or Tales By The Brothers Grimm... It was The Tenggren Tell-It-Again Book. This led to a series of self-titled books sprinkled throughout his career... Tenggren's Story Book, Tenggren's Jack & The Beanstalk, Tenggren's Bedtime Stories, Tenggren's Farm Stories, and many others.

This particular book is amazing, because it shows Tenggen's thought process and refinement gelling into what would become the classic "Golden Book style". (Click on the Three Little Pigs images above for a vivid example.) He simplifies by going back to his roots... combining the character designs of his mentor John Bauer with the colored pencil and watercolor style of his successor on the Bland Tomtar Och Troll series, Einar Norelius. (See our earlier post on Bauer and Norelius.) It's fascinating to compare similar subjects and compositions with earlier Tenggren paintings or the work of other classic illustrators. Below a few of these images, I have added links to similar pictures and themes. See how Tenggren has distilled the essence of the earlier attempts into a clear and simple presentation that still has plenty of beauty and balance. To read the second half of this article, click through the link at the end of this post.




See also Tenggren's Grimm's Fairy Tales
and Arthur Rackham's Grimm



See also Tenggren's Grimm's Fairy Tales, John Bauer's
Bland Tomtar Och Troll, Einar Norelius'
Bland Tomtar Och Troll, and Arthur Rackham's Grimm




See also Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll


See also Tenggren's Sing For Christmas and Grimm's
Fairy Tales and Dulac's H.C. Andersen


See also Dulac's Tanglewood Tales and
Kay Nielsen's East of The Sun And West Of The Moon


See also Tenggren's Grimm's Fairy Tales, Kay Nielsen's
Hansel & Gretel and Arthur Rackham's Grimm




Read the conclusion of this article in this followup post... The Genesis of the Golden Book Style.

For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see 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
.

Stumble It!

Illustration: Tenggren's Sing For Christmas

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.


Around 1940, Gustaf Tenggren left the Disney Studios a changed man. It's said that he gathered together the paintings he had created up to that point, piled them up in the street and set fire to them. With this single decisive act, he marked a turning point in his artistic career. He never painted in the classic European book illustrator style again. He had resolved himself to create a new style.

I really don't know what brought him to that point. I'd love to know the full story. But you can clearly see the sharp dividing line between old and new in his work. In the first few years of the 1940s, Tenggren struggled to develop a new way of painting- a simplified style that depended on fundamental qualities like skillful composition, expressive texture and unique color harmonies, rather than photo-realistic detail and modeling techniques derived from classical easel painting. This book, along with its sequel Sing For America and the schoolbook reader Runaway Home would lead to the creation of the very first Little Golden Books... The Pokey Little Puppy, The Tawny Scrawny Lion and The Saggy Baggy Elephant. You know the rest of the story...

This book is far from representing Tenggren's best work, but it's an important example of a decisive turning point in Tenggren's career. I'll post some illustrations from Sing For America and Runaway Home soon.














For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see D'Aulnoy Fairy Tales and The Good Dog Book, Tenggren's Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Heidi, Wonderbook and Juan & Juanita, 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, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Meta: iPhone Wallpaper: Golden Age Illustration

These images are 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 just got an iPhone and you're looking for great images to use as wallpaper, download one of these linked archive files. They include 30 classic illustrations by Tenggren, Dulac, Parrish, Wyeth and Artzybasheff, ready to load onto your iPhone...



iPhone Wallpaper: Stuffit FIle (.sit)
(Stuffit Archive / .sit / Get Stuffit Expander / 1.5 mb)

iPhone Wallpaper: Zip FIle (.zip)
(Zip Archive / .zip / 1.5 mb)

Please tell everyone you know with an iPhone about this post. Help spread the word about ASIFA-Hollywood's Animation Archive! Let me know in the comments if you'd like me to put together more wallpaper sets from the archive.

If you'd like to see more great images like this and read about the artists who created these amazing paintings, browse through our Classic Illustration Index.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Illustration: Tenggren's D'Aulnoy and Good Dog Book

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.


Just in case you aren't convinced yet that Gustaf Tenggren is one of the most amazing children's book illustrators of all time, here are two more persuasive arguments. These two books were published in 1923 and 1924, a very busy period for Tenggren. He had recently relocated to New York City, and he illustrated no less than eight books in a very short period of time. Make sure to click through the links to our other Tenggren posts at the bottom of this article to see more of his beautiful work.













THE GOOD DOG BOOK






Lines and Colors posted a nice feature on Tenggren this week.

For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see Tenggren's Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Heidi, Wonderbook and Juan & Juanita, 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, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

Stumble It!