JOE DE MERS AND THE "BIG HEAD" SCHOOL

 

Jim Silke has written about the style of illustration "derisively called the 'big head school of illustration,' a name derived from the fact that every picture was dominated by a huge close up of a beautiful woman...."  These 1950s illustrations, often painted on a plain white background, were sometimes viewed as less ambitious than the fully painted scenes from previous years.  Illustrator Al Parker explained the popularity of this style:

Readers demand pretty people in pretty settings forming a pretty picture. The larger your audience, the more limited its taste. It prefers subject matter to design and girls to men. It wants no message other than girls are cute and men like cute girls.

But take a look at the details of this original painting by the great Joe De Mers  and you will see how much wisdom and talent and even audacity went into some of those "simplified" paintings.

Note the bold palette and abstract brushwork in the woman's hair.  Note the wild difference in hue between the shadows beside her nose and in her nostril; this is an artist who knows what  he is doing.

At first glance that hand looked tightly painted, but study it in isolation and you'll see that De Mers conveyed accuracy using loose and spirited brush strokes.  These hands frame the face but they are not painted as tightly or realistically as the face, lest they t distract the viewer from the focal point of the painting. De Mers understood priorities.

 

Ahhhh...

The three top illustrators in this genre-- De Mers, Coby Whitmore and Joe Bowler, were each brilliant in their own way, and were very close friends.   They worked together at the famous Charles E. Cooper Studio, learned from each other and stayed close after retirement. 

A friend recalls that after De Mers died, his two comrades Whitmore and Bowler got together and looked through all his artwork.  They concluded that De Mers had been the best among them.

You can put De Mers high on my list of under-appreciated illustrators who are long overdue for a renaissance.