Burne Hogarth
|
|
Burne Hogarth (December 25, 1911 - January 28, 1996) was an American cartoonist, illustrator, educator, and author.
Burne Hogarth displayed an early talent for drawing. His carpenter father saved these first efforts and, some years later, presented them and the young Hogarth to the registrar at the Art Center of Chicago. Hogarth was accepted, aged 12, and thus began a long auto-didactic and piecemeal formal education that took him through such institutions as Crane College and Northwestern University in Chicago to Columbia University in New York City.
Hogarth began working at age 15 due to his father’s premature death. His drawing skills and art education brought him into contact with those in publishing, and it was with newspaper syndicates that Hogarth would earn a living, editing and creating advertising and panel illustrations. This work provided steady and, by 1929, crucial employment. Additionally, Hogarth’s first attempts at drawing a comic strip, Ivy Hemmanhaw (1933), met with some success.
As the Depression worsened, and at the urging of friends, Hogarth relocated to New York, continuing his work in newspaper illustration and editing as well as cartooning, drawing Charles Driscoll’s pirate adventure Pieces of Eight (1935). In 1936 came the assignment that was to define Hogarth’s artistic career. With Tarzan, Hogarth melded classicism, expressionism, and narrative into a new style of sequential art. He drew the Tarzan Sunday page for twelve years, from 1937 to 1945 and from 1947 to 1950.
Almost as long as he was a professional artist, Hogarth was also a teacher. Over the years, he was an instructor of drawing to a variety of students at a number of institutions and by 1944 Hogarth had in mind a school for returning World War II veterans. The Manhattan Academy of Newspaper Art was Hogarth’s first formal effort, and by 1947 he had transformed it into The Cartoonists and Illustrators School. This academy continued to grow and, by 1955, was again renamed The School of Visual Arts (SVA). It is now the world’s largest private institution of art. Hogarth designed the curriculum, served as an administrator, and taught a full schedule that included drawing, writing, and art history.
Hogarth retired from the SVA in 1970 but continued to teach at The Parsons Institute and, after a move to Los Angeles, The Art Center in Pasadena. During his years teaching, Hogarth authored a number of anatomy and drawing books that have become standard references for artists of every sort. Dynamic Anatomy (1958) and Drawing the Human Head (1965) were followed by further investigations of the human form. Dynamic Figure Drawing (1970) and Drawing Dynamic Hands (1977) completed the figure cycle. Dynamic Light and Shade (1981) and Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery (1995) explored other aspects relative to drawing and rendering the figure.
Hogarth returned to sequential art in 1972 with Tarzan of the Apes, the first modern permanent book of serious pictorial fiction. He followed with Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1976), integrating previously unattempted techniques such as hidden and negative space imagery into a harmonious visual narrative, a pinnacle of sequential art. These texts, in addition to Hogarth’s strip work, form the basis of a pervasive influence throughout the global arts community that continues today.
After attending the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 1996, Hogarth returned to Paris where he suffered heart failure, dying January 28, aged 84.es:Burne Hogarth