Leyendecker, Joseph Christian

The early years

Joseph Christian Leyendecker (J.K. or Joe) was born in Germany into the family of Peter Leyendecker ( 1838 - 1916 ) and Elizabeth Leyendecker ( 1845 - 1905 ). He had an older brother Adolf A. ( 1869 - 1938 ), an older sister of Augustus Mary ( 1872 - 1957 ) and a younger brother Franz Xavier ( 1876 - 1924 ), later known as Frank X. Leyendecker also became an illustrator. In 1882, their family immigrated to Chicago . As a teenager, J.K. worked at the J. Manz & Co. "

With the money he earned, he studied at the Chicago Institute of the Arts ; his first serious work was illustrations for the Bible commissioned by the Powers Brothers Company. After studying drawing and anatomy at the Chicago Art Institute, J.K. and his younger brother Frank enrolled in the Julian Academy in Paris. There they got acquainted with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec , Jules Scheret and Alphonse Mucha .

Career

In 1899, the brothers returned to America. In May of that year, Joseph Christian received his first cover order for The Saturday Evening Post . Thus began a forty-four-year collaboration with the country's most popular magazine, Joseph completed 322 covers for him. The illustrations he created gave rise to many American images and traditions: a baby personifying the New Year - a postcard character, the image of a bearded Santa Claus in a red suit, the tradition of presenting flowers for Mother's Day and blowing up fireworks on Independence Day .

In 1900, Joseph, Frank, and their sister Mary moved to New York , a center for commercial art, advertising, and the publishing industry. Over the next ten years, the brothers successfully collaborated with companies such as Interwoven Socks, Hartmarx, B. Kuppenheimer & Co ”,“ Cluett, Peabody & Co ”. In 1905, Leyendecker met his most famous and regular customer - Arrow Collar (Arrow Collar). He created for them a successful advertising image, the model for which was his life partner Charles Beach. Numerous orders made Leyendecker a prosperous artist, in 1914 he built himself a luxurious studio house in New Rochelle ( New York State ), where he moved with his brother and Charles Beach. There he lived until the end of his days. During World War I , in addition to magazine covers and advertising posters, Leyendecker also painted posters calling for service for the United States Armed Forces.

The 1920s became in many ways the pinnacle of Leyendecker's career. His most famous works were completed at this time. Modern advertising has achieved official recognition, and Leyendecker was regarded as one of the prominent American advertising artists. This popularity extended to the personal life of Leyendecker: he and Charles Beach held large celebrations attended by people of different circles. The receptions that they hosted at their home in New Rochelle were important social events.

As the 1920s marked the pinnacle of Leyendecker's success, the 1930s marked the beginning of its decline. Around 1930 - 1931 , Cluett, Peabody, & Co stopped using the Leyendecker illustrations in advertisements, as collar manufacturing seriously decreased after 1921 . At that time, the already shy Leyendecker became an even greater recluse, rarely communicating with people, with the exception of his sister Mary Augusta and Charles (Frank died in 1924 from an overdose of drugs). Perhaps in contrast to its popularity in the previous decade, or as a result of the new economic reality after the stock market crash of 1929 , Leyendecker began to receive less and less orders. In 1936 , George Horace Lorimer, editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post, was replaced by Wesley Vinance Stout ( 1937 - 1942 ), and then by Ben Hibbs ( 1942 - 1962 ), who rarely gave Leyendecker orders to illustrate covers.

The latest illustration by Leyendecker for The Saturday Evening Post was the cover of January 2, 1943, depicting New Year's Baby. Thus ended the most profitable and famous series of orders. New proposals continued to come, but sluggishly, mainly from the military: portraits of the command staff of the American forces encouraging the purchase of military bonds; covers for The American Weekly; and the newspaper supplement for Hearst. Leyendecker died July 25, 1951 in his possessions in New Rochelle as a result of a heart attack.

Personal life

The biographers of Leyendecker, Lawrence and Judy Cutler, describe his lifestyle in adolescence and youth as openly homosexual . In an era when such sexual orientation was banned, the media did not write about Leyendecker’s personal life, emphasizing his fame as an artist. Leyendecker achieved obvious success in portraying a uniformly male environment: locker rooms, clubs, changing rooms, as well as handsome young people in poses expressing interest or exchanging mysterious looks. Leyendecker may have tried to mask the homoerotic content of his drawings by the presence of women who adore handsome men. A few illustrations are more overtly homoerotic, such as Gillette advertising posters in which leanly dressed men show each other how to use a razor. He never married and spent most of his adult life with a man, his lover and manager, Charles Beach. Their relationship began in 1901 , when the boy was fifteen years old. The beach was also the model for Arrow Collar posters.

• Flagg, James Montgomery
• Pyle, Howard
• Rockwell, Norman
• Gibson, Charles Dana

• Schau, Michael. JC Leyendecker. - Watson-Guptill Publication. - ISBN 0823027570 .
• Steine, Kent. JC Leyendecker Collection, The. - Collectors Press. - ISBN 0963520296 .
• Cutler, Laurence S. JC Leyendecker: American Imagist. - Harry N. Abrams. - ISBN 0810995212 .
• Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. - Routledge; London, 2002 .-- ISBN 0-415-15983-0 .
• The JC Leyendecker Poster Book . New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1975.
• Leyendecker, JC "Keeping Posted." Saturday Evening Post , October 15, 1938, 108.
• Martin, Richard. "Fundamental Icon: JC Leyendecker's Male Underwear Imagery." Textile and Text 15, no. 1 (1992): 19-32.
• Martin, Richard. "Gay Blades: Homoerotic Content in JC Leyendecker's Gillette Advertising Images." Journal of American Culture 18, no. 2 (1995): 75-82.
• Martin, Richard. "What Is Man !: The Imagery of Male Style of JC Leyendecker and Giorgio Armani." Textile and Text 13, no. 1 (1990): 3-27.
• Meyer, Susan E. "JC Leyendecker." In America's Great Illustrators , 136-59. New York: HN Abrams, 1978.
• Rockwell, Norman. My Adventures as an Illustrator as Told to Thomas Rockwell . Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1960.
• Segal, Eric Jefferson. "Realizing Whiteness in US Visual Culture: The Popular Illustration of JC Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and the Saturday Evening Post, 1917-1945." PhD Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2002.

• Leyendecker works on the site "archive of American art"
• Leyendecker works on Flickr