The Paperback Art of Jim Avati
By Piet Schreuders and Kenneth Fulton
Hampton Falls, NH: Grant Books, 2005
200 pp. $40
It is both a truism and a godsend that good art is everywhere, though one must have eyes to see as well as catholicity in taste. Too, the artist must have a predilection for excellence, if not a pretention to greatness.
This is the lesson of The Paperback Art of Jim Avati, a paean to “The King of the Paperbacks,” U.S. artist James Sante Avanti (1912-2005), whose 40-year-career saw him illustrate popular covers for novels by William Faulkner, Ayn Rand, Alberto Moravia, W. Somerset Maugham, Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, Erskine Caldwell, and the first—and only—cover art for the first edition of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Authors Piet Schreuders (a Dutch graphic designer) and Kenneth Fulton, along with Avati friend, art historian, and fellow painter, Stanley Meltzoff, chronicle Avanti’s bio, examine his evolving aesthetic, interview surviving colleagues and family members, all to creating, in the end, an intimate portrait of the painter which is as captivating as any of his illustrations.
The coffee-table-sized, soft-cover book, published in 2005, is also lavishly illustrated with a hundred and more, full-colour reproductions of the paintings, many of them enlarged, so that details stand out dramatically. There are also black-and-white photos of the modelling sessions as well as snaps of Avati at home and at work.
The authors wish us to appreciate why novelist Jonathan Lethem sums up Avati as “the chiaroscuro master of paperback realism—part (Francisco) Goya, part (John) Cassavetes” or why others see him as complementary to Norman Rockwell, though less pleasing and playful in subject matter.
Indeed, Avati’s material is realistic, adult-oriented fact, suggestively sleazy, grimy, and down-to-earth. He is Charles Bukowski with a paintbrush, or Walt Disney on skid row.
Then again, his illustrations reflect the content of the novels that Americans wanted to read, with plenty of grit, dirt, sweat, and salt, or red-light-district blues and film-noir bloodshed.
Born the only son of a portrait photographer who had emigrated from Naples, Italy, to New York City, in 1905, and married a Scottish American woman who died shortly after giving birth, Avati grew up in suburban New Jersey, raised by a stepmother and supported by a rich uncle.
A ceramic designer and magazine illustrator before World War II, Avati took further training in art at a special G.I. school set up in Biarritz, France, in 1945. After returning to the New York/New Jersey area, he fell into painting covers for paperbacks, just as this form of publishing was skyrocketing in sales.
His career took off when he became the go-to artist for New American Library when that publisher broke away from Penguin. His hallmark was realism because it’s “legible: nobody has trouble recognizing what you are talking about.”
Soon Avati developed a recognizable style: “Almost invariably, his paintings, usually composed in dark color tones, show men and women in intense, emotional situations.”
Usually, there’s a bed or a porch or a road, a glance or a clinch, a man and a woman, solo or coupled, with one or both in a state of undress, distress, or dishevelment. Or there is candlelight, streetlight, shadows, or smoke. The palette is vivid streaks of colour—a red sash, a pink negligee, a blue dress, blonde hair—amid some drab or sombre background, Dante-dim ‘scapes’ where all light is mute (or moot).
Avati is particularly gifted at suggesting vice within purported paradise, or the grim side of what may seem (superficially) idyllic. His admiring biographers find that “each Avati cover manages to convey substance and sensitivity….”
Avati racked up at least 630 cover paintings over his four-decade-long career, and if there is psychological complexity in his commercial depictions of authors’ characters, it might have something to do with his de facto harem of wives and models, his brood of children, the suicide of one daughter, the premature death of his generations-younger love, and the at-first-grudging critical interest in his work.
Avati felt his paintings did not “compete with great art,” though he could see “how good they were.” Or they’re “great” in their own right.
