Not so long ago, our visual environment-by which I mean the non-stop urban theatre of billboards and posters, magazines, road signs and shop fronts-was dominated by a combination of typography and illustration. Today, typography still thrives, but the once-flourishing world of illustration has been cordoned off and left for dead.
Now photography is the preferred pictorial medium of both the advertising industry and the print media. Newspapers have decimated the ranks of their in-house illustrators. Only the most tradition-conscious magazines, such as the New Yorker and the Spectator (and occasionally Prospect) run cover illustrations. Today's advertisers utilise the talents of illustrators only when they are trying to look witty or quaintly old-fashioned. And serious artists would rather chop off one of their ears than admit to any connection with the world of illustration.
Throughout most of the 20th century, modern art's two most commonly invoked pejoratives were "decorative" and "illustrational." Gradually, the example of Matisse and the postwar supremacy of abstract art brought "decorative" values back into favour, but the word "illustrational" has not been similarly redeemed. Francis Bacon, in his legendary interviews with David Sylvester, declared illustration incapable of dealing with the "brutality of fact"-with everything about existence that was immediate and irrational. Illustration was mediated and rational, and thus a contemptible carrier of clich?.
But even Bacon knew that the line between high art and illustration was permeable and indistinct. "It is a very, very close and difficult thing," he said, "to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." He meant that illustration is a second-hand sort of medium, overly reliant on narrative. And yet, how breezily such thinking brushes aside an entire tradition of visual invention. Are we to dispense so easily with Gustave Dor?, the great French illustrator of the 19th century? Or Aubrey Beardsley? For that matter, what about the great illuminators of medieval manuscripts?
I recently sorted into chronological order several hundred New Yorker magazines from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s-purchased by my mother at auction for around ?20. It turned out to be a delicious experience, simply because the covers, in their sheer variety and originality, were captivating.
Saul Steinberg's pictorial metaphors on one cover would be followed on the next by an illustration of a field of flowers, a picture that distinguished itself purely by being clear-eyed and fresh. Some covers were saucy, some sombre, some celebratory, but almost all displayed inventiveness with colour, line and composition. They were sparkling essays in visual wit.
Illustrators pinch from high art and from other popular art. But far from trafficking in clich?s, most of these cover illustrations seemed inspired directly by life-life refracted through the prism of visually literate minds. They conveyed a high level of pictorial awareness-the kind of awareness that is fast being lost in our current culture.
It should be obvious that there is a robust thread connecting the worlds of illustration and fine art. Most of the great modern artists were unafraid to acknowledge this connection. Picasso's formative years were saturated in the vernacular illustrative traditions of Andalucia. Honor? Daumier and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec switched between cartooning or poster design and figurative fine art with supple panache, and Van Gogh and Munch flirted so closely with illustrative values that their work bends the fine art-illustration continuum into a beguilingly twisted circle. The same goes for Fernand Leger, Stanley Spencer, Salvador Dal?- and John Currin.
Most of the professional illustrators I know through my association with newspapers moonlight as "fine artists." Regardless of which branch of their practice they take more seriously, this creative doubleness is rarely a source of anxiety. Rather, each activity nourishes and enhances the other. Saul Steinberg remains an exemplary case. Almost uniquely, he used the "second-handedness" of illustration as a fertile subject for art. He distilled his delight in visual metaphor, clich? and semiotics into work of sometimes sublime clarity. From early on, he was attracted to what his friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, has called surrealism's "purposeful mingling of things seen and things dreamed."
The present situation, in which photography prevails so absolutely, is having a levelling effect which is reducing potential at both ends of the pictorial continuum. Published last year, David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge argued that lens-based ways of seeing have, over many centuries, come to dominate European art. In this, he was right: our visual environment is now saturated in photographic modes of seeing, and with each passing year the medium gets less and less interesting. Mechanistic, homogenising, reality-distorting, ubiquitous: photography is all of these things, and we know it. And yet it continues to blinker and brainwash our roving eyes.
