Painting the Bernie way

On page forty-five there is a 1959 ad for Ford's Edsel cars and I can remember tearing the page out of the Saturday Evening Post to keep in my illustration file. I liked the treatment of the people and the background rather than the car. Years later I found out that it was painted by Bernie Fuchs. The brief chapter on auto illustrations has ten car paintings from 1955 to 1960 and in these six years you can see how Fuchs developed his style from the typical Detroit car presentation to his own way of painting backgrounds, foliage, buildings and especially clothing.

The book is a handsome production with just over three hundred pictures and printed on nice matt stock with a 175 screen. David Apatoff contributes an illustrated essay of the artist's life over twenty-nine pages. He mentions that during the late fifties Fuchs and a few other artists moved away from representational pictures to a much more expressionist style and the chapter on Editorial Illustrations has forty-eight examples full of wonderful design ideas for paintings to illustrate fiction. There are a couple on page eighty of McCall's spreads from 1966 and '68, both show a very graphic design approach rather than the traditional presentation of art for magazine fiction. The chapter on Advertising continues the theme of original design paintings for major companies like Seagram's, Coke, Pepsi, Intercontinental Hotels and others.

The longest chapter has thirty-nine paintings, many one to a page, for Sports Illustrated from 1961 and into the eighties and this where Fuchs hit his stride with work that is way beyond conventional magazine work. There's a lovely few pages near the back of black and white drawings, this opens on page 199 with brilliant illustration of four people sitting round a meal table, another figure is standing and pointing to one of the sitters, the style looks very loose and casual but of course it's incredibly professional with the use of line, shading and composition...a typical Bernie Fuchs solution and this book is full of such visual wonders.