The art of jim flora




James (Jim) Flora concocted dozens of diabolic and hallucinatory album cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists, in the 1940s and ‘50s. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. He also took liberties with human anatomy, evoking bonded bodies, mutant appendages, ghoulish skin tints, and misshapen heads. He was not averse to pigmenting Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa like bedspread patterns.




THE MISCHIEVOUS ART OF JIM FLORA is the first comprehensive collection of album art by Flora (1914-1998), featuring over 225 images. The book contains most of his known covers, plus rarely seen 1940s and '50s illustrations from Columbia's Coda trade journal and some of Flora's magazine work from the period. The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora also presents the first-ever reprinting of his fabled Little Man Press illustrations (1939-1942)

Posted: Mon - October 4, 2004 at 04:51 PM        

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