American Chronicle: J. C. Leyendecker's Icons of Time

Abstract

As Christmas approached, the San was transformed. The halls were decked with ground pine and holly, a twentyfoot tree appeared in the lobby, everywhere you turned there was a spangle of tinsel, crepe paper and mistletoe. Dr. Kellogg had always made good and provident use of the holidays, from Groundhog Day to the Fourth of July, doing his utmost to co-opt the spirit of the day and turn it into a triumph of health advocacy, but at Christmas he outdid himself....It was all part and parcel of the Battle Creek experience. (Boyle 167) T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction, The Road to Wellville, captures a sense of time in the first decade of the twentieth century. As always, we seek calibration and registration of time's passing, an acknowledgment that one day is different from the preceding and the next. The holy calendar long provided such a chronicle, identifying the passage of time by holidays of special importance as well as by specific association. We observe in most parts of the world seasonal change, but we also need the inflection of times that stand out and serve as benchmarks, references and remembrances to the past both personal and collective. Early twentieth-century America observed the accelerated pace of social change and modern life from the vantage of an old calendar and one that remembered with a poignancy and keen sense of the bygone and of the present that we may have lost. Such a chronicle was provided by the mass-circulation periodicals that celebrated holidays with a fervor like that of Dr. Kellogg. Not only the covers and editorial content of many of the magazines such as Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post marked the rhythm of time, but even the advertising, then frequently synchronized to the schedule of holidays. Time's passing was not a dour calibration. Rather, it was a celebration, allowing for a joyful differentiation of the days even as life was becoming more modern-and, perhaps, more quotidian. Among all the tokens of early twentieth-century time, one of the most compelling and one of the most cheerful is J.C. Leyendecker's suite of images of the round of the year as magazine covers for Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Hearst Sunday newspaper supplement, The American Weekly, in a span from 1906 to 1950, years in which Leyendecker not only kept tempo with America, but also allowed for a cycle of remembrance, celebration, predictability, and renewal. This American artist knew how to treasure time in its transience and to give time a distinction even for a secular and modern world in which community might be established by an exultant sense of sharing occasions and concepts in the common place of time. Leyendecker created both distinct icons and winsome narratives for the many occasions that he celebrated. His most famous is the convention he established for the new year. In fact, Leyendecker did not invent the imagery of a Baby New Year and Father Time, but he became the preeminent artist of the image for The Saturday Evening Post covers for nearly forty years. Beginning with the December 29, 1906, cover, Leyendecker poses a Baby New Year, first anatomically uncertain and awkward on the orb of the world, writing out resolutions. This first child has wings as does her successor, the Baby New Year of December 28, 1907, accompanied by the stork. On the December 31, 1910, cover, Leyendecker records the new year-in this instance, with the Baby New Year in a kind of internal rhyme as a delivery boy for The Saturday Evening Post. Leyendecker's simplifying and icon-making glee eliminates Father Time thereafter, except for the return of this same image swiped from this image for the Post's in-house journal for its paper boys in 1913. The modification of the initial image refers both to the incorrigible Leyendecker choice for perceiving the positive, but image, even a traditional one. The unfailing adaptability of Leyendecker's image-and his personal propensity toward only the most optimistic in the icon-testifies to the artist's resourcefulness. …