Influential Illustrators From 1950-1960 James

Influential Illustrators from 1950-1960

James Elliot Bama (1926- )

Born in New York City, James Elliot Bama was heavily influenced by the art in popular comics. After showing initial talent as a kid in the arts, he attended the legendary High School of Music and Art in New York . From this great start to a prominent career, he further developed his technical skills at the Art Students League, also in New York. There, he studied under famous illustrator Frank Reilly, focusing primarily on commercial art. After school, Bama worked at Cooper Studios in Manhattan, where he "quickly established himself as one of the firm's leading illustrators, producing advertising images for such major clients as General Electric, Coca-Cola, and Ford," (Smith 2009). Bama also had art featured in Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, popular magazines. He also dabbled in working in film and television, producing background art for the series "Star Trek" and the poster for Cool Hand Luke. Bama eventually left the city and moved into a more isolate art in Wyoming where he produced more Realist paintings than his infamous illustrations.

Based on his long career in commercial art, Bama had a huge role in the creation of popular American culture and commercial representations of that culture. He helped create ads for major companies that represented typical staples of contemporary American life at the time of the 1950s. His ads for Coca Cola (see Image A) solidified the marketing campaign for the soda giant which dominated their marketing campaign for decades. Bama truly made commercial ads a real respectable art form. His Coca Cola ads are now collected today by various art collectors and appreciated more as popular art than simple advertisement. Thus, Bama had a huge impact on the formation of commercial art as a true art form rather than just a cheaply compiled sales pitch.

Tracy A. Sugarman (1921- )

Tracy A. Sugarman is a famous American illustrator who has had a long and provocative career in the arts. He boasts a career spanning over fifty years, producing great works within children's literature, album cover art, and socially progressive artistic statements. His work is featured in numerous children's books. Sugarman also highlighted life during World War II based on his own experiences there. He had served in the army in World War II and then turned his experiences to art. He also worked on major record covers, usually for Waldorf Music Hall Records; Sugarman created more than 100 covers. Many later albums and CDs still carried on the original designs in the decade of the 1950s alone. His work is also featured in major magazines such as Fortune and Esquire (Ask Art 2009)