double elegantly dressed Tarzan

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Here, in a quick lunchtime posting, is the elegantly dressed Baroque offering for this week, chosen topically because of the comments thread in my last post – the one that mentioned my great-uncle-by-marriage Burne Hogarth. (To you English who don’t understand extended families, this means he is my cousin Stephanie’s grandfather and thus a reasonably close relation, as these things go – that’s a kind of elegance.)

Drawing, in that it defines silhouettes and surfaces and light, shadow and colour, to say nothing of contours, is just as much a kind of clothing for the human form as is the little spotty beach cover-up our man is wearing above. We can see this from looking at nude paintings from different centuries, and seeing how the shape of the body seems to change with time. Certainly things like diet and exercise change, but anyone who has ever thought about it also knows that there are visual conventions and local ideals of beauty. There is, thus, no such thing as a real nude on paper or canvas. Voila! Elegantly dressed.

We were discussing, as I say, how Hoag’s drawings for the Tarzan comic strip in the 30s and 40s changed the way comic strip artists draw the body. This influence was extended into the classroom when, in 1947, Hogarth co-founded the School of Visual Arts in New York.

“The School of Visual Arts was a magnet for that next generation of comic book artists mentioned above. Hogarth’s considered approach to the adventure strip was made to order for comics. Al Williamson, George Woodbridge, Wally Wood, and a host of others drank from the well. What was so special about Hogarth’s approach is that he had thought deeply on the elements of action and the tensions it produced and translated his thoughts into a rigorous approach to foreshortening and shadows. He was able to pass these methods on to his students in the classroom and, in 1958, to the readers of his first book, Dynamic Anatomy,” says this website.

I love his drawings. They are intensely beautiful, always. And talk about dynamic! Just look at that one at the top.

But that’s enough education. Here’s some more elegance for you:

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