RETURN OF THE CROSS HATCHERS

In the 20th century, illustrated magazines went from being smaller, primarily black and white publications with line art...

 
... to larger color magazines with lavishly painted illustrations.  By the 1960s,  magazines such as McCalls and Ladies' Home Journal featured huge, double page spreads in bold, bright colors.

The new printing technologies had opened up all kind of expressive capabilities for artists, making traditional pen and ink work appear stale and old fashioned. Cross hatching, stippling and other relics from the era of wood engraving all but disappeared.

It seemed that magazine pages couldn't possibly get any bigger or more colorful.  But just like a supernova shines most brightly as it collapses on itself and explodes,  magazines such as Collier's, Look, The Saturday Evening Post,  Life, and American Magazine all went out of business during this period, victims of television.   McCalls, Redbook and Ladies' Home Journal all began turning from illustration to photography.

As magazines became smaller and more specialized, markets for lavish illustration shriveled.  Budgets for color printing declined.  The demand for double page spread illustrations disappeared as magazines turned to spot illustrations.

Then there arose in the land a new generation of cross hatchers who went back to small pen and ink drawings.  "In the days of the frost seek a minor sun." The new generation didn't employ the vigorous, flamboyant lines of a Robert Fawcett, a Charles Dana Gibson, or a James Montgomery Flagg.  Instead they created dense micro-drawings, using cross hatching to create coruscating fields of value.

These artists included the great Alan Cober : 

The talented Brad Holland:

And the superb Jack Unruh:

Other cross hatchers that emerged in this era included Marshall Arisman...

...and Murray Tinkelman.

 Although the cross hatched illustrations were more compact and monochromatic than the illustrations of the early 60s, some of the new cross hatchers-- particularly Unruh, Cober and Holland-- achieved just as much potency through their powerful editorial content and the intensity of their cross hatching and other patterns.  They revived a medium that had been largely abandoned and adapted it to prosper for decades more in a changed marketplace.