Frank Frazetta, Maestro Death Dealer

MAY 10, 2010: Frazetta has died

Returning home from a “Mother’s Day” meal, Frazetta complained of pain and was rushed to a hospital where he later expired. Cause of death is attributed to a stroke. Easily the preeminent fantasy book illustrator of the 60s and 70s, Frazetta is also famous for highly-regarded 1950’s comic book work and for a long string of covers for the Warren Magazines.

FRANK FRAZETTA APPRECIATION

This had been a tough past year for Frazetta Sr: his wife and de facto business manager Ellie Frazetta died of cancer in July 2009, and then in December son Frazetta Jr. staged a raid on the Frazetta Museum with the (apparently) dubious task of kidnapping the bulk of the Frazetta Museum artwork to put it into storage to keep it out of the hands of his three other siblings.
Besides the legal problems from this event, there was much news made of the fallout from claims and counter-claims being made within the family about a $1 million dollar sale of "Conan the Conqueror" to guitarist Kirk Hammett. In April Frazetta came out of a kind of exile at his home in Boca Grande island in Florida to get the family feud settled and to straighten out the tangle of legal deals surrounding the copyrights for Frazetta Properties corp.

I have been expecting a death announcement since last year with the completely non-clinical idea that most couples married fifty plus years typically do not long outlive each other. Having dodged a number of life-threatening health problems over the last two decades (severe thyroid problems, strokes), Frazetta probably had already outlived expectations. Nonetheless, he kept drawing (left handed after losing his right in a stroke) and touching up paintings. And there were periodically announcements made at the web site run by Frank Jr. for new merchandising deals based on his artwork.

FRANK FRAZETTA OBITS:

• Art Beat blog announces Frazetta's death - New York Times
• No mainstream outlet has followed the Frazetta family with the same dedication as the Pocono Record
• Frazetta dead at 82 -National Record Record
• Heidi MacDonald - The Beat

Though Frazetta the company had become an "intellectual property" marketer with T-shirts, clocks, posters and everything else one can sell with an image plastered to it, Frazetta the artist was a much-loved author of images that spanned from comics to books to movie posters, and he was (rightly) revered by artists for a technical ability and a compositional style that, whether you liked his art or not, influenced just about everything that followed in his wake. I have seen innumerable images on movie screens that were obviously related to specific paintings by Frazetta, or at least in style were only a generation apart from his artwork themes and styles.

"THE MICHELANGELO OF FANTASY ART"

Obviously similar to Michelangelo by possessing the same kind of anatomical obsessions, and for focusing his images into a kind of 'theology of the body' which Michelangelo held to, there are telling differences. Michelangelo Buonarroti was a trained anatomist who engaged in dissection on corpses under the supervision of medical personnel in order to learn as much as possible about the true functioning and shapes of muscles. In contrast, Frazetta trained himself using George Bridgman's famous guide "Anatomy for Artists" and he also employed an apparent photographic memory drawing from photographs, life drawing and his own imagination.

Whereas Michelangelo challenged his contemporary critics to find error in his anatomy (he was accused of making up parts of the bulging and twisting bodies he used in sculpture and painting) there was apparently no success in debunking him. Frazetta, though, readily admitted that he distorted and caricatured his figures to bring them into line with what he wanted to present.

FRAZETTA AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Though Frazetta claimed to not use reference photographs and to instead rely upon memory and his own talent for invention, this is of course not true for some of his most commercial work like the caricatured portrait of Ringo Star for Mad Magazine which got him the attention that led to his movie poster career and all of the likenesses he was called upon to expertly create.

Pop culture images were in his head and came out in many ways, for example DeMille's "Cleopatra" and other films, from King Kong to westerns and so forth. Illustrators like N. C. Wyeth traveled in the American West to gather first-hand the visual information he used for paintings of cowboys, but Frazetta's renditions of the same were based upon movies and television. But this is also where Frazetta's distinction comes out: his force in his artwork is from his personal understanding of the athletic shape and performance of a human body under stress, and getting the peripheral costuming correct is much less important, whereas it would be paramount in a trained illustrator like Wyeth or a Remington. Frazetta's focus transcended likeness, blandishments of even a specific culture, but went towards the universality of the human form, and this is what ultimately couples him with an artist like Michelangelo.

As an avid collector of cameras Frazetta certainly had the means and ability to use photos as tools. There are in print in Frazetta literature many black and white images which showed studies in contrast and lighting of either Frazetta himself or a colleague that appear to be instrumental in the black and white artwork he was producing in comic books in the 1950s. Frazetta educated himself in many ways and seems to have known how to assemble a seed bed of visuals to pull from for his own imaginative purposes.

But no reference image could exist for the way Frazetta depicted the fluid motion and the thrust of action he could bring out in his images. Artists use any number of "crutches" to get over not knowing how something looks in a certain situation, but only an imagination combined with a familiarity with athletic, physical action can account for figure motion like Frazetta.

FRAZETTA'S STYLE

Frazetta had the subtlety to dilute the brutality with other emotions on the canvas. His Barbarian scenes often show a sense of panic and dread by both the victor and the defeated. You can see attempts to mimic this style in the graphics of today's fantasy video games and the dragon games online that have become so popular. The effect is not quite the same, though.

There's some ambiguity about what's happening, though Frazetta wasn't adverse to throwing in a little editorial in the sides, such as the death figure leering at the leaping figure of a mounted Conan in "The Conqueror" painting sold to Hammett.)

Frazetta never made claims like Michelangelo did in that Florentines war with his critics. Rather Frazetta was interested in "knocking their eyes out" with his imagination and an embellishing style that only got better as Frazetta aged, even though his drawing talent had declined, and the action-oriented work that he excelled at like no other (like the 1960s Conan paperback covers) were replaced in the 1980s with a stiffer, posing imagery that was no longer trying to capture "the peak moment" (as Frazetta called it.)

DEATH DEALER

An example of this transition is his possibly most famous work, "Death Dealer" which is a beautiful, menacing artwork of a classic death image, but it is a still image that only implies all the mayhem and aggression that was found in much of Frazetta's earlier work. I think that during the 1970s, Frazetta had "made it" and this translated into his artwork: instead of the 'peak moment' of action, the figures frequently had already done the deed and were now basking in (or posing for) the accolades that followed. But, Frazetta had earned it, and so too his imagery.

In his later years Frazetta tinkered regularly with older images, sometimes improving, and sometimes not (or simply finishing them, Frazetta being famous for 24 and 48 hour orgies of focused labor, which did not always mean the most 'finished' of color illustrations during the 1960s). He only produced a handful or two of new images, instead he either copied his own work in variations (like Death Dealer running, Death Dealer Standing, etc) or he helped package older images for new merchandising applications.

Usually this tinkering made for a much better embellishing effect, but not always a better composition, or it would simply degrade the image as a piece of artwork. For example, he might rework an old paperback cover, changing the focus from being the fright of a woman facing a ferocious animal in the wild, to instead simply cheesecake with all the focus on a spectacularly rendered naked derriere, drastically changing the point of the artwork: cancelling one, introducing a shallower other.

But artists who live long enough often go back to "fix" older works, sometimes they get lost without a sense of what their younger self intended.

A DEFENSE OF FRAZETTA

If this sounds like simple criticism, remember Frazetta was still drawing and painting but only with his left hand, the right hand destroyed (for useful art purposes) by a stroke. Like Renoir who had to have his brushes bandaged to his arthritic hands (he couldn't hold them), Frazetta kept working even though he was long past the stage where he was needing to earn a living and feed a family. Even though he and his wife initiated a "Frazetta Museum" on their property to display the bulk of his work and to keep the original images within the control of his family, I am convinced that during the next fifty years these more famous paintings will get over the hurdle of "fine art" which barricades commercial illustrators from mainline museums, and we will start seeing his relatively small canvas and masonite images in the most staid and benign establishment arsenals of "officially approved" art.

When I see Frazetta paintings, especially the images he made in his prime working years after he was blackballed by Al Capp after Frazetta spent years on 'ghosting' the comic strip tales of Dogpatch, I don't just see a phantasy image illustrating a (often) second rate adventure-quasi-scifi tale. Instead I see the aggressive, often angry and fear-filled violence of an independent artist and illustrator fighting to make a living while dealing with art directors and the terror of the sink-or-swim reality of the commercial art market.

In fact, I think the viewer with an eye for the details of Frazetta's work will note the startling constancy that Frazetta's heroic figures typically resemble Frazetta himself (look at the eyes and cheek bones), and the women typically all resemble variations on his wife Ellie. Like American writer Edgar Allen Poe who seems to have regularly only been writing about himself in his tales, regardless of the actual character in a story, Frank Frazetta seems to have been regularly simply drawing and painting self-portraits.

This essay updated June 9 2010.

source : http://www.comicbookbrain.com/frank-frazetta.php