Mischievous Art Of Jim Flora TP

Description

James (Jim) Flora concocted dozens of diabolic and hallucinatory album cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists, in the 1940s and '50s. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns amid hyperactive peripheries splashed with droplets seemingly shot from a confetti cannon. Geometric doodads float willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone antigravitational. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. He also took great liberties with human anatomy, evoking bonded bodies, mutant appendages, ghoulish skin tints, and misshapen heads. He was not averse to pigmenting Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa like bedspread patterns.

This is the first comprehensive collection of album art by Jim Flora (1914-1998), featuring more than 225 images. This book contains most of his known covers, rarely seen illustrations from Columbia's CODA trade journal, and some of Flora's commercial work for magazines of the period. THE MISCHIEVOUS ART OF JIM FLORA also presents the first-ever reprinting of Flora's fabled Little Man Press illustrations (1939-1942).