This episode takes a look at the life and career of illustrator Lynd Ward, a prominent 20th Century illustrator and godfather of the Modern Graphic Novel.
Lynd Ward hits all my favorite aspects of the mercurial world of art and design. Here is the son of a leader of the Methodist Church whose work unabashedly depicts the underside of the Depression Era city and the undead creatures of gothic horror (often in the buff). His work embodies the height of graphic narrative and the depth of pulp chunkiness. The elite halls of the gallery and chummy confines of the childrens’ library nook. Comfortable with brush or knife, his work carries an expressionistic zeal to it that would go on to influence comic books, illustration and printmaking well into the 21st. Century. Mighty impressive for a man whose work primarily consisted of no more than 2 to 3 colors per image.
TIMELINE
REFERENCES
Ward, Lynd (2009). Vertigo: A novel in woodcuts. Dover Publications, Inc.
Ward, Lynd (1974). Storyteller without words; The wood engravings of Lynd Ward. Abrams.
Ward, Lynd (2010). Six novels in woodcuts. Library of America.
Ward, Lynd (1965). Nic of the woods. Houghton Mifflin.
Jones, Stephen (2015). The art of horror: An illustrated history. Applause.
Intro:
This is Incomplete Design History: The Illustration Files, a podcast that explores overlooked and ignored topics in Illustration history. It is our goal to deepen and expand the knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of design history.
Because history is messy. It’s incomplete.
Thank you for joining us today, I am your host, Sam Washburn.
Lynd Ward hits all my favorite aspects of the mercurial world of art and design. Here is the son of a leader of the Methodist Church whose work unabashedly depicts the underside of the Depression Era city and the undead creatures of gothic horror (often in the buff). His work embodies the height of graphic narrative and the depth of pulp chunkiness. The elite halls of the gallery and chummy confines of the childrens’ library nook. Comfortable with brush or knife, his work carries an expressionistic zeal to it that would go on to influence comic books, illustration and printmaking well into the 21st. Century. Mighty impressive for a man whose work primarily consisted of no more than 2 to 3 colors per image.
Opening music
[Lead into episode’s content]
Overview, how he is known today
If you look up Lynd Ward today, you’ll find a strong contingent of images and think pieces based around his woodblock print novels. These books are a prominent set of material in his work, and highly influential to this day, particularly in the graphic novel and comics art forms. When folks like Will Eisner and Art Spiegelmann write glowing articles about you, or devote space in books to your work, you are granted a certain level of fame in comics and illustration.
Of course, what’s interesting is the majority of work he produced in woodcut novels was early on in his career. He was also highly successful doing more traditional illustration and became known for his spot and magazine work, which included frontispieces, article illustrations and children’s books.
The man’s background and life is mirrored in his work: a microcosm of several disciplines, several careers, and a body of work that spans across genres.
Born in 1905 to Harry Frederick Ward and Harriet May Kendall Ward, Lynd’s first real trace in the history books actually relates to his father Harry. Frederick was a Methodist Reverend, influential in the Christian Socialism Movement, who served as the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union.
This auspicious parentage gave Ward a unique set of moral values and traits that proved to be formative in his work and legacy. His early exposure to art was limited to the Dore bible and drawing on the sabbath, combined with the support of his parents, who encouraged his development as an illustrator while seemingly lacking a full understanding of the career.
They instilled in Lynd traditional Christian values that provided a strong foundation for his work life down the road. In his later years, Ward spoke of a trip he took with his mother to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the work of Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga. After seeing galleries filled with monumental scenes and figures, his mother, being a traditional Methodist, expressed disgust at the amount of nudity in the exhibit.
This conservative upbringing and early introduction to social justice and civil liberty had a profound effect on Lynd’s work. Being ever practical, he attended the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1922, where he met his soon to be wife May McNeer.
After graduation, he and May traveled across the ocean for Lynd to study at the Staatliche Akademie für Graphische Kunste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig, Germany. If his upbringing provided Lynd with his morals and work ethic, it was two artists in Germany, and the prevalence of German Expressionism at that time, that provided him with the inspiration for his most famous work.
The first was one of his instructors, the wood engraver Theodore Muller. Ward made a point of mentioning this teacher in his later years. He highlighted the benefit of Muller being a working artist who produced commissions in studio along with his students, which gave them an up close look at the profession. Little wonder then that Ward would adapt wood engraving as one of his primary mediums in his professional work.
While perusing a bookstore in 1927 Ward came upon the other major influence on his work that he would discover while in Germany: Frans Masereel, a pioneer in the wordless novel genre that would prove to be so prominent a factor in Ward’s early career.
Ward completed his studies in 1928, and he and May returned to the States, where he quickly started picking up freelance illustration work and a variety of commissions. According to May, “the man was a workhorse and this proved to be a major factor in his success.”
The Tools and the Work Ethic
Workhorse is a good way to describe Ward.
Illustration is noted as a career for loners- the long hours of toil needed to produce exciting imagery and the research involved makes most practitioners in the field virtual monks hacking away at a project in their office or studio. Ward made an artform out of this method, literally chipping and grinding away at woodblocks and paintings for up to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, working from 9 in the morning to Midnight.
The process of wood engraving and block carving is work intensive as it is. It involves the laborious carving out of negative space from a smooth wooden surface with sharp, mostly small tools. Combine this with the initial drawing, test prints, and inking of the wooden plates and you really get a sense for how hard Ward worked.
Of course, most of this work was done from home. He made it a point to own his own Washington Flat Bed Press with which to print his blocks, an expensive tool he used for the bulk of his career and kept well into his seventies.
It’s little wonder then that it was the woodcuts that ultimately have become what Ward is known for today.
The Wordless Novels
Many consider Ward’s woodblock wordless novels to be predecessors to the modern graphic novel, a fascinating circumstance when you consider that Ward produced all 6 of these early in his career. He abandoned the format after less than 10 years. Regardless, whether intentional or not, the books are influential, both in the images depicted and the effect they had on illustration and comics.
At their best they are time capsules of The Great Depression, and reflect the societal pressures and beliefs that Ward grew up with and experienced in real time. At their least, they are strong examples of American Graphic Narrative that predate the traditional comic book and have a major influence on that field.
They cover topics at home with the “great american novel” aesthetic of the time. They are mixtures of real world noir and limited fantasy. Imagine Silent German Expressionist movies like Nosferatu and The Last Laugh mashed together with American literature like The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men into richly dark and inky illustrations you start to get an idea for how the novels read.
There are no real heroes in these books, and very few winners. They fit the time they were made in, both narratively and aesthetically.
The novels also represent Ward’s interests and, to a certain extent, his reactions to and interpretations of his world at the time of their production. The first book, Gods Man, was published in 1929, soon after his return to the States.
It matches the expectation one might have for a first major work- the narrative follows an artist who is tricked by a mysterious stranger into accepting a magical paintbrush that brings success and all of fame’s attendant growing pains.
It’s a solid story, even though it has the sheen of predictability that comes from a story about an artist made by an artist. It’s the Stephen King syndrome: a writer making his character a writer and an artist making his character an artist is a bit navel-gazey.
Still, the book was a success, selling more than 20,000 copies despite coming out the week of the infamous Wall Street Crash.
The second wordless novel Ward produced was called Mad Man’s Drum, and incredibly, came out the very next year in 1930. The sophomore effort is perhaps the most difficult to follow and centers around generational sin and trauma. The narrative follows a European family made wealthy by the slave trade, and the eventual succumbing of said family to internal ruin.
Ward’s goal with this book was to expand beyond the singular focus of Gods Man and tell a story with more characters and a definite setting. The pictures in the book remain strong, with a mixture of cartoon-like figures and expressionistic compositions that shines beyond the narrative itself.
Wild Pilgrimage, published in 1932, is a reaction to the Great Depression itself, following a protagonist from the industrial city to the countryside and back again. Along the journey, the protagonist experiences a lynching, a strike break, tranquil farm life and more, which are interpreted by the protagonist in dreams and fantasies.
Ward used burnt sienna to depict these inner monologues, cueing the reader in to what is happening in the book. Ultimately, the lead of the novel becomes so enraptured with his dreams that he tries to stop a group of strike breakers and is beaten to death. The stark use of lights and darks is refined in this work, and Ward’s visual abstraction of the characters and forms gives it an emotional heft.
The next two novels, Prelude to a Million Years and Song Without Words, are the shortest of Ward’s narratives, and effectively set the scene for his final wordless novel, the one considered to be his most robust.
Ward considered Prelude to a Million Years to be something of a footnote to Gods Man. This makes sense as the narrative follows the day in the life of a failing artist. This time the main character is a sculptor, and he experiences a microcosm of social upheaval and debauchery present in 1930s America before returning to his studio in tears.
Song Without Words is the shortest novel, and Ward considered it a matter of prose at fewer than 30 blocks. Presented primarily from the point of view of a woman, this is easily the most surrealistic of the novels. It lacks a definitive setting and plot, almost like a woodcut version of one of the sequences from Fantasia, but with more nudity and gore.
Vertigo, published in 1937, was the final book, and is considered to be the most successful. It also took the longest to make, with its creation and production taking two years. The narrative examines the lives of three people: The girl, An elderly gentleman, and The boy, whose stories intertwine and intersect to tell a tale of greed, passion and striving.
Unfortunately, the only person to come out better from the plot is the elderly gentleman. He’s a business magnate who survives a sickness thanks to the exploitation of the other two characters, who are themselves disconnected lovers reunited at the tale’s end, unsure of what is next.
Visually the novel is a triumph. It demonstrates the height of Ward’s abilities at that time and his mastery of the medium and the aesthetic cultivated through the previous novels.
The sometimes unclear focus of earlier efforts like Mad Man’s Drum is refined here, and the use of chapter breaks and timelines helps to clarify a sprawling narrative.
The stories are clear, the characters more refined and the setting more established, creating a set of images that evokes comparison to works like Citizen Kane in grandeur and clarity. If Ward was going to go out on one singular effort, this is the one to do it with.
More than anything else it is these novels that convey Ward’s legacy to us today. Gods’ Man and Wild Pilgrimage were republished in 1966, and caught on with the counterculture aesthetic of the time. All of the sudden, this sixty-year old man who was best known for his award-winning children's book illustrations was the toast of the illustration world again for his woodblock work.
This resurgence has a domino effect. Not only does Ward get rediscovered, but he even starts to work more in the medium again, even attempting a new novel. Within the next 10 years, Abrams Books published Storyteller Without Words, a grand collection of all the novels, and several examples of other woodblock prints besides. Shows of the prints are put on, and at one of these shows in the early 1970s a young image maker named Art Spiegelman gets the chance to meet the aged Ward. Years go by, Ward passes away in 1985, and within a few years Spiegelman becomes one of the most revered graphic novelists of all time thanks to his seminal work MAUS. Fast forward a few decades, and Spiegelman edits a set of books containing all of Lynd Ward’s wordless novels.
More and more people become aware of his work and cite it as an inspiration. At this point the man’s work has been an inspiration for generations of illustrators and comic book artists. And that is just part of the story.
The Children’s Books
Ward had the kind of career in illustration that took off like a rocket after he returned to the United States. Even while he was working on his novels he found work in a variety of different venues, including spot illustrations for print clients like publishers and magazines.
As time went on, he found success in the growing field of publications for children. It was this area that actually made up the bulk of his life’s work, at least chronologically. Let’s move the timeline forward a bit to take a look at this fruitful time of production and how it essentially opened up a parallel career for Ward.
In 1943 Ward illustrated Author Esther Forbes’s Johny Tremain, which would go on to win the Newberry Award in 1944. This was the beginning of a fruitful partnership with Houghton Mifflin childrens’ editor Mary Silva Cosgrave.
Working with Mary, the 1940s through to the 1960s provided Ward with fruitful opportunities to work outside the medium of woodcut and rack up an impressive amount of awards and finished projects.
Ward was skilled in a variety of mediums, but outside of woodblocks, his work is probably best categorized into pen and ink drawings and Casein paintings. Interestingly, when working on his own material he seemed to prefer focusing on limited color palettes- sticking close to the one to two color palettes of his youth.
The pen and ink work was standard for the time period, and allowed for a similar approach, albeit in reverse, of the woodblocks. This work resembles the spot color illustrations ubiquitous to the period of the 1950s and 1960s. While the figures are not as expressive as those seen in the wordless novels, the compositions are bold and engaging. Consisting of black ink and a spot color, this work adorned books and magazines throughout that explosive age in the illustration field.
While skilled in mediums like watercolor and other methods, it was a specific type of paint called casein that was used by Ward in much of his book work. Casein, a seldom-used paint for production today, is a milk-based opaque paint that dates back thousands of years. A durable medium that allows for strong contrasts in light and value and also dries quickly, casein gave Ward the maneuverability of acrylics and the vibrancy of oils. This allowed his work in children's books to develop its own unique look- gone was the overt abstraction and expressionism; midtones and painted textures added to the artist’s arsenal and created a robust impression of weight and form in the images.
While he typically illustrated the work of others, there are three books he authored and illustrated on his- all of which had a unique effect on his life and work.
The first, “The Biggest Bear” was produced in 1952. The title tells you all you really need to know about the book- it’s about a Big Bear.
Ok, it’s about a young boy desperate to kill a bear who ends up adopting a cub who grows to massive size, and hijinks ensue. The book is extremely tame compared to the woodcut novels, but it fit the period and audience it was intended for- pint-sized baby boomers who were ready to grow up in America’s national parks and buy raccoon skin caps and pop-rifles to play at being Davey Crockett during the weekend.
The book would go on to win a Caldecott medal- a major achievement in childrens’ books, especially for what could be considered a freshman outing.
Twelve years later, Ward’s sophomore effort “Nic of the Woods” was released. This book, about a dog and his owners in the woods, is presented in the same rendered fashion as the Biggest Bear and Ward’s editorial work, but uses a duo-tone palette and substantially updated graphic design for the interiors. Positive and negative value relationships are presented in the imagery and design layout, with a rich, dark cyan used to enhance the grayscale values and hues of the drawings. Monumental forest settings and expressionistic (yet fully rendered out) figures are used to compose images reminiscent of earlier work, such as Vertigo. While not winning any awards, the book was a success, and combined with the re-publications of some of his earlier works, set the stage for the last picture book, which ultimately helped to return Ward to his beloved woodblocks.
The last of Ward’s author/illustrator books to see publication was “The Silver Pony” published in 1973. This book follows a young boy who imagines fantastical adventures with the fanciful title creature. The book acts like a bridge back to Ward’s early career.
There are no words in the book, and while it is rendered in paint and value, its subsequent success would catch the eye of Abrams Publishing, who would publish Ward’s “Storyteller Without Words” the following year, which contained reprints of all of Ward’s woodblock novels and a robust selection of woodblock prints besides as well as written commentary and reflections from the man himself.
Coming out shortly before his retirement, this final book closes the circuit on the man’s career- from avant-garde graphic storyteller to childrens’ book mainstay and back again.
If this was all that Ward was known for, and in many ways it is, he would still rank high in the pantheon of 20th century illustrators. But it’s not all that the man accomplished- his contribution extends out in both professional and human ways unique to his place in history. To close out this podcast, I want to take a look at some of the other innovations and professional points of activism that made Ward important outside the world of graphic narratives and children's literature.
Activism and Innovations
It’s important to remember Ward’s heritage: his father was a major figure in the progressive movement of the early 20th century and this affected how Ward approached his work, especially in the 1930s at the start of his career. So it isn’t surprising that peppered through his career, Ward made efforts to help his industry as well as his fellow humans.
He was either a founder or a member of several shops and/or organizations aimed at strengthening the artist as a worker and person.
The most prominent of these was the Equinox Press, which he co-founded with his wife and XXXXXseven others in 1931. A true mom and pop operation, the press operated out of the Wards’ apartment and studio, and focused on producing small print runs and specialty books. A believer in making affordable work, early on he adopted the practice of not numbering his prints, stating that his background as a Methodist made the idea of expensive series of prints anathema to his working method. The Equinox Press would keep running until 1938, when it was sold in order to put out a large print run of the book Woodcuts & Wood Engravings: How I Make Them.
This publication wasn’t Ward’s at all. It was the work of a fellow image maker named Hans Alexander Mueller and was conceived as a way to bring funds in for the cash-strapped refugee from Nazi Germany. Ward had helped Mueller and his wife flee Germany as the Nazis ascended to power, and used the Equinox Press as a vehicle to help his friend make money upon coming to America.
This progressive stance on service to the field and others was also manifested in Ward’s membership on various boards, including helping found the American Artists’ Congress, being named supervisor of The Graphic Arts Division of the New York Chapter of the Federal Arts Project, and acting as the first chairman of the Union of American Artists. For such a terrific output of creative work and professional infrastructure, one could be forgiven for thinking there must have been Lynd Ward clones running around in the 1930s.
In the years following the completion of his European studies and the publications of Gods’ Man and Madman’s Drum, while on the ascent as sought after illustrator in the early 1930s, Ward illustrated plates for new editions of books like Goethe’s Faust (1930) and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1934) that pushed the medium of woodcut into ever further surreal and expressionistic areas.
These works, heavily influenced by the same silent films and German expressionism that influenced his wordless novels, remind the modern viewer of the best work of someone like Jack Kirby or Tim Burton decades later. The Frankenstien illustrations, in particular, are still cited as masterworks of horror illustration, with contorted figures and gothic settings reminiscent of the later work of Pulp mainstays Virgil Finlay and Hanes Bok. I would argue that the images crafted for this edition of the book are the second most influential depictions of the story, right behind the Universal films released around the same time. There is a dynamism in these images that can only be achieved with the blunt tools of the woodcutter.
In 1937 Ward produced illustrations for the Haunted Omnibus, a collection of ghost stories edited by Ed Laing……… Unlike his other work at the time, these images came from linocut prints, a faster, somewhat less detailed variation of the woodcut technique that uses rubber and artificial material to make the plate.
Ward’s particular technique for this book mimicked the qualities of a mezzotint, allowing for an airy mix of blacks and whites in the images that convey a proper mood of horror and gothic sensibility for the stories. While not as precise as the woodcuts, the images convey an eerie aesthetic that elevates the writings. The technique predates the kind of mixture between light and dark values and steep contrasts mixed with gradual rendering that would come to define Science-Fiction book covers in the 1970s that relied on the advent of the airbrush system.
The work in the horror/fantasy holds up, nearly 100 years later, and remains a testament to Ward’s versatility in both subject matter and topic.
Outro
Lynd Ward was a man of his times, and few image makers crossed over as many aspects of the field or were as influential. Fewer still adapted the way that Ward did, finding success in the grit and grime of the 1930s and the sleek, comfortable confines of the children’s publication world of the 1950s and 1960s. Ward’s oeuvre, combined with his insane work ethic, an ingrained sense of humanity and compassion molded by his upbringing and the Depression, and a diligent spirit of exploration leaves a testament for the rest of us to reference and draw inspiration from going into the 21st Century.
Credits:
This episode was produced with the aid of a grant from the University of Central Oklahoma
Research & Writing credits for this episode are from – Sam Washburn, Assistant Professor of Design at the University of Central Oklahoma
With additional research assistance provided by – XXXXX
Story editing provided by Spencer Gee
Sound design/engineering – By the University of Central Oklahoma’s Center for eLearning and Connected Environments
Music by Christina Giacona and Patrick Conlon of Onyx Lane
Contact:
If you would like to contact me about this episode or about the podcast please email me at Hello@idh.fm That is HELLO@idh.fm
Our website can be found at idh.fm
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Closing music