Arthur Rackham (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arthur Rackham Harold Darling (bio) Gettings, Fred . Arthur Rackham. New York:Macmillan and Company, 1975. Rackham's reputation as a book artist has suffered from the craze for his pictures which swept this country during the 1960s and early 1970s and the consequent reaction. This is unfortunate because he was a very great illustrator. Fred Gettings' book is the most perceptive and useful work yet published on Rackham. Derek Hudson's earlier biography is little more than a laudatory life history. Gettings' work is less rich biographically, but in every other way it surpasses Hudson and other previous studies. This book includes a perceptive section on the development of Rackham's talent, a chronological survey of his career in which each of the major works is discussed in detail, a bibliography of Rackham's magazine and book illustrations, and lengthy discussions of his subjects, techniques, style and artistic strengths and weaknesses. Fred Gettings was a professor of art and this work demonstrates this strong grounding in art history and esthetics. He is chiefly concerned with finding and analyzing Rackham's special strengths, and he does a superb job of making us see and understand them. For example: Rackham clearly thought first of all in line, and only secondly in color, so that the majority of his plates may indeed be described (and not unkindly) as 'colored line drawings'. Those who bracket the work of Rackham with that of Edmund Dulac, who is essentially a colourist, fail to understand the real nature of Rackham's personal vision and technique. Rackham's background, training and temperament—even his actual technique used in producing the coloured plates—drove him to conceive the world around him in terms of line, and of illustrations as colored line drawings. This linearist attitude, which perhaps explains his penchant for trees, roots, wrinkled faces and all such things which may be represented in fluid line, is peculiarly revealed in his giving permission for another artist to colour some of his early line drawings for use in a book, (pp. 35-36) And "It is a classical urge to compose pictures and images within a rectangular frame, and it is one which has always been weak in English artists; it was certainly weak in Rackham, as the curvilinear gothic style seeks always to liberate itself from the restriction of frames. This is one reason why many of his early line drawings for Little Folks and other periodicals were so successful, for they were not composed into a border, but were relatively free within the setting of the page." (pp. 58-59) On occasion Gettings generalizes carelessly, but on the whole he is a wise and insightful guide. Arthur Rackham has nearly two hundred illustrations, some of them from his early and rare periodical work. They allow one to follow his arguments without reference to the books themselves. Those in full color are adequately reproduced. Harold Darling Harold Darling, Editor, Green Tiger Press, La Jolla, CA. 92038. Copyright © 1981 Children's Literature Association