Ronald Searle's Sunset Strip is an unusual illustration for the artist, a dizzying commercial landscape unpopulated with any figures or even automobiles. It was created for TV Guide in the 1970s and the original art was listed by Taraba Illustration Art as early as 2012.
 |
Ronald Searle
Sunset Strip
Original art
TV Guide |
 |
| Detail |
 |
Ronald Searle
Taraba Illustration Art, LLC
Accessed November 18, 2012
|
Fortunately for us, contributor David from Manhattan was able to sort out the TV Guide publication history. He writes:
Searle illustrated an article, "Sunset Strip—Decline of a Legend" back in June 22, '74. Not TVG's finest hour with how it was cropped. Dimensions are 13 3/4 x 10, paper laid on board. He wrote a caption at bottom, and applied his handstamp on back, but not signed. Which leads to a question for you. Amidst the urban jumble, there appears to be what looks like a large "RS" with an arrow pointing to it. A bit of sly humor on the artist's part, or is the current owner getting carried away?
Here again is the art:
 |
Ronald Searle
Sunset Strip
Original art
TV Guide, June 22, 1974 |
What irritates me most about TV Guide's reproduction is actually not how severely the image was cropped—I think it was created with that possibility in mind—but rather how much of Searle's exuberant detail was muddied in the printing process.
 |
Ronald Searle
"Sunset Strip—Decline of a Legend"
TV Guide, June 22, 1974 |
|
TV Guide's crop line cuts directly between these two towers. Even in the preserved right half, the drawing's frenetic energy was largely lost anyway in the process of printing:
 |
Detail
|
 |
| Is there a hidden RS? Anything's possible. |
 |
| In Searle's handwriting |
 |
| Yes, Searle's American agent John Locke had a prestigious BUtterfield-8 phone number. This prefix was culturally immortalized by the John O'Hara novel and subsequent movie of that name. Locke typically would answer his phone by saying, "8010." |
Note: Thanks to David from Manhattan for all the scholarship he puts into his contributions here. This is David's thirty-sixth contribution to Attempted Bloggery.
For more on Searle's TV Guide work, tune in to Matt Jones's 2007 post "Magazine Illustration Part 1: TV Guide" on Perpetua, the Ronald Searle Tribute blog, here.
Ronald Searle's centenary will be celebrated on Tuesday, March 3. As any fule kno.
Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:
03184
No comments:
Post a Comment