Mischievous Art of Jim Flora

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Overview

Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature "Flora." In the 1940s and '50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was...

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Overview

Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature "Flora." In the 1940s and '50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. As Flora confessed in a 1998 interview, "I got away with murder, didn't I?"

This is the first collection of the marvelous, mischievous album art of Jim Flora (1914-1998). The book contains most of Flora's known covers (around 50), which command high prices on eBay. The gallery includes rarely seen illustrations and covers from Columbia's new release monthly, "Coda" (1943-1953), and some of Flora's post-WWII commercial magazine work. The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora also presents the first reprinting of Flora's fabled Little Man Press work (1939-1942). LMP was a small publishing imprint started by literary nutjob Robert Lowry, who recruited Flora as his graphic co-conspirator. Their LMP editions were printed at home in small runs of 125 to 400 copies. These books served as artistic rites of exorcism for Flora, as the budding illustrator's images veered from childish whimsy to disturbing freakishness. The book encapsulates Flora's life with a biographical profile, interviews, photos, autobiographical reminiscences, and tributes from Alex Steinweiss, Gene Deitch, Shag, R.O. Blechman, Tim Biskup, and others who knew Jim and/or were influenced by him.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781560976004
  • Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
  • Publication date: 11/8/2004
  • Pages: 178
  • Product dimensions: 11.00 (w) x 10.00 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Irwin Chusid, based in Hoboken, NJ, is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described “landmark preservationist” who has salvaged the careers pf previously overlooked but now-celebrated icons as composer/bandleader/electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel, the Langley Schools Music Project, and Jim Flora. Since 1975, Chusid has been a DJ on free-form radio station WFMU in New Jersey. A radio personality since 1975, he is the author of Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. He has produced landmark reissues of the music of Raymond Scott, Esquivel, and the Langley Schools Music Project.

Jim Flora was born in 1914 in Ohio and passed away in 1998 in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

The mischievous Mr. Flora 11
Foreword : a flora renaissance 25
Preface : the mischievous art 27
Gallery : Columbia album covers 29
Jim Flora interview 43
Finding Flora : a reminiscence 55
Gallery : RCA Victor album covers 59
Autobiographical reminiscences 88
Flora did it like nobody else 100
Interview with Alex Steinweiss 102
Gallery : Coda publications 109
I was brazenly imitating his style 120
The Little Man Press 122
Gallery : the Little Man Press 125
Adventures south of the border 146
A visit with James Flora 148
Gallery : commercial work 161

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