I WAS prompted to write this article after I’d offered up a cartoon satirizing both Nigel Farage and Clacton, a seaside town which has offered welcoming berths for Tories, knights and baronet MPs since 1604, including the wonderfully named Sir Nathaniel Rich and Sir Harbottle Grimston.
Farage is merely the latest carpetbagging Europhobe to shoehorn himself into the seat, although there was, admittedly, a WTF moment in 1997 when Labour’s Ivan Henderson got over the line.
The cartoon in question satirised the great John Hassall’s famous “Skegness Is SO Bracing” poster.
Hassall, to me, was the UK’s Toulouse-Lautrec. The two were almost exact contemporaries, from the same social class, born at a time that guaranteed they would tumble into the late Victorian era that changed art forever — the era of Art Nouveau and the establishment of photography as a viable medium. Sadly, Toulouse-Lautrec barely made it into the subsequent Edwardian era, dying in 1901 of a surfeit of absinthe and syphilis. By that time, however, his artistic reputation had established itself.
The influences in the West, first of Japanese wood block printing, then Impressionism (the former informing the latter) had seeped through French and British art by the time of Toulouse-Lautrec’s passing, fascinating John Hassall, as well as every other artist who recognised that the 20th century had opened up a whole world beyond the requirements of wealthy patronage.
For others, an alternative, romantic image of the penniless artist of the Rive Gauche was born then, the tortured soul, nobly churning out indecipherable works against a background of semi-starvation, corpse-reviving absinthe and debt.
It wasn’t that photography, overnight, had rendered impotent the ability to paint things that looked exactly like things. Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” had been exhibited in 1874, nearly 30 years before Lautrec’s death. Impressionism was now well past being a Thing and had already achieved a split personality. Both accepted and derided, it attracted too many of life’s instinctive bohemians, less likely to strike a blow than a pose.
Hassall and Toulouse-Lautrec did not enter the art business to starve. Both were classically trained painters: Lautrec under Bonnat and Cormon, both ramrod-strict realists, and Hassall under the equally insistent classical realist Van Havermaet in Belgium.
Both were initially entranced by the brilliant poster work of the criminally underrated Czech Alphonse Mucha, and eventually rejected the strictures of realism for the freedom of what would be called commercial art. That is why the two are beloved of cartoonists and comic artists the world over. We’re jazz and blues rather than orchestral or military band players.
Poster design gave Lautrec the heady rock star celebrity status that evaded him in the world of canvas and easels. He gloried at the sight of his images adorning the grimy walls of Paris. They may have held a fragile, insolent impermanence, but they stopped people in their tracks, and they PAID. How different from his canvas and easel work.
Lautrec even gained commissions in England. There’s compelling evidence that at one stage in their careers Toulouse-Lautrec and Hassall worked merely 100m apart near Charing Cross Rd in London, both designing posters for the theatre.
Hassall and Lautrec shared a love for the risqué and the flamboyant. Lautrec’s passion took him down a darker road, but of course it did, he’s French. Just as the French comics scene today is multi-layered, ranging from Moebius and Asterix, through Sempe to outright porn, the Brit version was quickly dominated by the straight-laced behemoth that is DC Thomson and The Beano. In Britain, comics were condemned to be the province of children and/or adults in arrested development from the outset. Strangled at birth.
Japanese classical wood block artists who gained prominence in the West through another exact contemporary of Hassall and Toulouse-Lautrec, publisher Shozaburo Watanabe, tended to conform to a classical Japanese style, just as French and Belgian artists even in the 21st century will gain more commissions if they can ape the line of Albert Uderzo (Asterix).
Those Japanese left a signature that still appears in British comics today. Take the renderings of fingers drawn by artists as diverse in tone as The Beano’s Leo Baxendale and ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kunisada: one set may be reaching for a hot pie on the windowsill, and the other as relief for a masturbating courtesan, but they’re identical.
Kunisada made his name thanks to his amazing skill in capturing the likeliness of kabuki actors, creating promo material for theatre audiences. The thread, as you see, from simple Japanese pulp art through to Toulouse-Lautrec and Hassall is strong and unbroken. The appeal was not just artistic. So-called poster art put food on the table.
The rich legacy of John Hassall should not be confined to his Jolly Fisherman classic, but his vast oeuvre. He had an association with David Allen and Sons in London for over 50 years, (in one three-year period alone, he created over 600 theatre posters) and created innumerable upbeat, clean-lined, spare and irresistible illustrations for children’s books.
Hassall, Britain’s “Poster King,” should be remembered just as much for the great talent he mentored and who became significant figures in their own right: Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the WWI curmudgeon “Old Bill,” and the classic WWI cartoon “if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it”; Anne Harriet (Annie) Fish, Vanity Fair illustrator and cartoonist who brought a gently savage woman’s eye to satire; HM (Henry) Bateman, legendary Punch cartoonist; Harry Rountree, illustrator for PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle; Bert Thomas, Punch cartoonist and war artist whose work raised millions for soldiers relief.
Take this from a cartoonist who thinks another cartoonist, Ralph Steadman, is the world’s greatest living artist.
John Hassall is merely one genius who goes largely unheralded in a critics-rich art environment that descended into madness decades ago. I feel sure, however, that he’d feel distinctly uncomfortable accepting critiques from someone who gushes over a pile of bricks or soiled bedclothes. His applause, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Watanabe’s and Winsor McCay’s and Norman Rockwell’s and Banksy’s blows over direct from the man and woman in the street.
SO bracing.
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