KENNETH SMITH: I wanted to go back to your art education because of your fabulous lineage that you came out of.

JACK KAMEN: Oh. That was it -- my poppa.

SMITH: And in art school, you studied under Harvey Dunn.

KAMEN: Harvey Dunn was the last instructor I had. My first ones, my earlier instructors were George Bridgman and William C. McNulty, who is not very well known. He happens to be in the Metropolitan Museum as an etcher, but he was an illustrator. He didn't do any painting as an illustrator. His illustrations were only in black and white. Do you know the work of Gruger?

SMITH: Oh yes.

KAMEN: He was very close to Gruger. A good friend of his. He imbued every student of his with inspiration, but being as commercially-minded as I was, I thought he was pushing a dead horse because magazines were changing. They were printing in color. They were using very loose, very dashy type things. If they were realistic, illustrators then were using cameras. They were photographing their models, photographing their setups. They were really imitating photo stuff, which I started to do.

SMITH: Gruger's work was turn-of-the-century and so complex.

KAMEN: I'm so glad you know him, because you can write intelligently about him.

SMITH: Well, I love that whole period. I used to talk to Burne Hogarth about the sheer brilliance of the illustrators back at that time. You look at the way that they solve problems just naturally in the course of designing a piece.

KAMEN: There're a lot of illustrators -- I would say any good illustrator today -- just as good and maybe better than some of the ones that used to be in the old, golden days. But there's no market for it any more, unfortunately. Photography has really knocked them out. There were a lot of great painters. I call them great painters.

SMITH: You said that another student of Dunn's was Dean Cornwell. Were you in school at the same time as Cornwell?

KAMEN: No. Cornwell's a lot older than I am. Quite older. Cornwell had died when I was with Dunn.

SMITH: Really?

KAMEN: Yeah. He was gone already. Harold von Schmidt was still alive. And Mario Cooper was still alive. Well, you heard the story that I went to see him that time when the market for comic books collapsed.

SMITH: Actually, let's go over that for the tape. When you saw the end in sight for the state of comics, you said you went out and spoke with colleagues who were illustrators.

KAMEN: Don't call them colleagues. I didn't even know them.

SMITH: OK. Total strangers.

KAMEN: I just used total strangers - people who I admired and I know who had studied with Harvey Dunn. Some of the names you probably won't even know. Well, Mario Cooper you know. He eventually became president of the Watercolor Society and he concentrated on fine art.

SMITH: In the timeframe of the '50s, probably early '60s, the Saturday Evening Post was considered one of the top markets, perhaps the top market at the time.

KAMEN: Yes. Absolutely. This was my ambition. I couldn't get into it.

SMITH: So many of the League illustrators seemed to be directly allied with the Post. I mean, their styles fit right in.

KAMEN: The top men. There was no style, they were just the best. The Saturday Evening Post had the best in any category. If there was a category, an illustrator for a particular writer, they had him. Von Schmidt did Westerns. Collier's had a very good Western artist, too. He used two names. He used one name when he worked for the Post, the other name for Collier's. [Smith laughs.] God! It's a fact. On watercolors.

SMITH: You don't think about those complications.

KAMEN: I'd give you the name, but I'm losing it. I'm losing it, Kenny.

SMITH: So these, and the lineage that I was referring to when I raised all this is of course how it traces back to Howard Pyle and to the studios and Dunn being among them.

KAMEN: Howard Pyle is definitely the father of American illustration, even when they were doing pen drawings. If you remember, since you recall the work, they were always doing the engravings. Remember, they used to go to the engraver and he would do it. So when Howard Pyle began to do pen drawings, they didn't need the engraver any more. They could reproduce it in line. Then when color came out, why then the engraver was gone. They could no longer use him. Because when the color was available, then the Howard Pyle School really flowered. And then people like Dunn who carried on the tradition went further than that. Marvin Anderson's another one. I keep thinking of people. That's one of the reasons, when they had these Famous Illustrators in New Hampshire they included me and had some traveling show. I'll say this. I don't know how I strike you as a literary man, but I understand that when the gal was doing the academy, she said, "You know Mr. Kamen, you're the most intelligent artist." [Both laugh.]

SMITH: Well, you are very well-read and literate, articulate besides.

KAMEN: Yeah. Yeah.

SMITH: Did you know Hogarth? Did he go through the League?

KAMEN: No. No.

SMITH: He was not at that school? Because I thought at one time there was an influence of Bridgman on him.

KAMEN: Oh yes. A tremendous amount of Bridgman on him.

SMITH: But it wasn't from direct study with Bridgman?

KAMEN: No. I don't think so. I don't think Burne Hogarth studied with Bridgman. There was one other artist, by the way, who is very active today. He was in the same class when I was there at the time. He took over from Hal Foster.

SMITH: Oh, yes. Prentice. John Prentice.

KAMEN: No. The guy that's doing Prince Valiant is ... why can't I remember his name? He was in the class when I was there.

SMITH: Oh, John Cullen Murphy.

KAMEN: Right. That's the guy. Murphy was a Bridgman student. I know maybe you can't see it or not, but the only way that I can describe the difference is in Hogarth's Tarzan, physically, now picture this. If you picture Tarzan, you'll see rounded forms. In other words, when he did the chest, the pectorals, things like that, there's a physical, linear connection. And even when he does the abdominus rectus muscles, this pattern is very carefully rendered. Look at Murphy's work. Murphy is a lot closer to Bridgman than me. I think Murphy must be about 85. He's got to be a couple years older than I am. Because he was there at the time, he was also a monitor in the class and already getting work as an illustrator. I looked up to him, because he could do an imitation Bridgman drawing like ... if you know Bridgman's system, it's really great the way he started out.

SMITH: It's very sculptural.

KAMEN: Yes. If you know it, you can pass it on. And I have! I pass it on to a lot of students who had a lot of trouble with figures before that. I said, "For crying out loud! Just cut the figure in half." I said, "Use the Michelangelo measurements -- eight heads." Man, woman, four heads to the crotch, four heads down to the feet. Actually it's not. It's seven and a half. But that half a head makes a great deal of difference. You do a photograph of the model just standing up straight, you get a dumpy looking figure. But draw it as eight heads, and it's much handsomer. Then I also had a -- technically, you could write this down and it would be very, very interesting. I got this from McNulty, he would work from poses. To get familiar with the figure, he had rapid poses mostly, which used to annoy me because he did too much of that. With Bridgman, at least, you could study a piece of the figure. McNulty believed in action figures. One great thing was, we had one long pose that we did. What we'd do -- this would be toward the end of the session -- after that pose was finished, where we all did a very careful drawing of it, we spent a half-hour on it, the model would come out and repeat that pose with his clothes on. We took a piece of tracing paper, put it over the life drawing, and we could see where and how the drapery was influenced by the anatomy underneath. I did that with my class and, my God, you should see the response. Some of the slobs who couldn't draw at all suddenly began to draw well. Because they were confused by the drapery that they were looking at. And then they began to study drapery. I showed them if there's a seam, you gotta get a pull line. If there's a hang-off like on a trouser or a skirt, you gotta get flare that way.

SMITH: You are your father's son. You still have an eye for ...

KAMEN: I don't know. But if you notice, some of the students, some of the collectors say, "Boy, you really could handle wrinkles." I got that from McNulty. It was a combination of McNulty and Bridgman. Because I never drew figures, even if I had a live model -- like you sitting here right here now -- I would draw you nude.

SMITH: Right. To study the proportions.

KAMEN: Then I'd say, "Kenny, go in and put your clothes back on." Then I'd see all what makes you is these wrinkles and establish the volumes of your body. I don't care who you are, whether you're skinny or fat or intermediate. Whatever.

SMITH: I think it is notorious that people give an impressionistic rendering of how things drape.

KAMEN: Yeah.

SMITH: And they don't really realize the rhythms; it's a foreshortening problem in addition.

KAMEN: You don't draw, do you?

SMITH: Yeah. Once in a long while I do. That's how I figured it out.

KAMEN: That's why it rings a bell to you.

SMITH: I don't claim to be good at it, but I know how it ought to go.

KAMEN: Now it rings a bell. Say you're doing an arm. You see the drapery crunch up to where the elbow breaks, and then the flare coming off the shoulder seam down. Once you tell somebody this is what happens, why it happens, you rule supreme. I haven't used a model. I can paint a full figure, draped figure -- well, Dunn did that. The first thing that pleased me is that he took me into the class, because he kept it to nine. He wouldn't take any more than nine, and he wanted to see your work before. That's why a lot of people say, "Dunn wasn't such a good teacher because he only took professionals into his class." Which is correct. Unless you were a pro, you couldn't get into his class. The one thing I loved about this man is that he would take a figure, female or male, and drape it in a big sheet of muslin.

SMITH: Like a toga or a ...

KAMEN: Yeah. OK. Then he'd go around the room and he'd tap you on the shoulder and he said, "You know that drapery? You're doing fur." He'd go up to the next guy and he'd say, "You're drawing wool." Go to the next guy and he'd say, "You're drawing silk." And boy, that registers in your head. You go down there and you start drawing the same stuff. You can imagine with silk, you know, "I gotta put highlights on this, it's gotta slither, it's gotta be reflecting light." Drawing wool you wanna be puffy. That's why anybody who studied with Dunn could do the figure right out of his head. Because if you think fur, if you think silk, if you think wool, you can do it.

SMITH: It's making the connection with the anatomy that's so hard. Because you can look at the surface and you can tell what the difference is between silk and fur and so on, but it's got to be formed.

KAMEN: He got that from Pyle. Pyle taught for a while, when he started his teaching - this is his own history I'd read. I didn't know about this until I'd heard about it and then saw it confirmed in this book on the Drexel Institute. He taught at Drexel. That's where he came up with that. And he improved them. And another thing he said, "If you're having a pretty girl, you can never have too much hair." [Smith laughs.] He says, "Let the wind blow it." That was the kind of stuff I found very, very useful in teaching. Because if you plant this idea in a pupil's mind and their imagination, they don't know they can do it but they can. They're talented. If they have a particular talent and an imagination, they can do it.

SMITH: There's some little -- it's like the breaking of a bubble - between observing an effect and being able to reproduce it. The difference between appreciating a joke that somebody else is telling, and knowing how to tell a joke.

KAMEN: Yeah. That's right.

SMITH: Once you get the knack of it, then you know that this looks convincing. Because you put the appropriate elements behind it.

KAMEN: That's why, if you notice in biographies, they always say, "Oh, Jack was always telling jokes." They always have me there at these meetings standing up and telling jokes. You're absolutely right. You gotta dramatize it. You gotta be a little melodramatic. One of the stories I like to tell, and the way I tell it there's a little bit of hambone. It's about the guy, a typical genie joke. There's so many. The man's always walking along the beach and he finds a flask. Rubs the flask and the genie comes out and says, "I've been in here for a thousand years or whatever and you've released me and I'm going to grant you three wishes. What would you like?" The modern version is all sorts of things. But in this one, he wants a lot of money. I always say, "I would like to win the biggest lottery in the United States." So the genie snaps his fingers in a flash of light and thunder, and down comes a voucher for $50 million, from some state lottery. Genie says, "That's great. What else would you like?" He says, "I'd like a red Ferrari. They're really sexy cars." He snaps his fingers, flash of lightning and down comes this red Ferrari. Genie says, "Now you've got all this money and this red Ferrari," he says, "What else would you want?" He says, "I want to be what every woman wants." Genie snaps his fingers, flash of thunder, and he turns him into a box of chocolates.

SMITH: [Chuckling] Buy the premise, buy the bit.

KAMEN: That's right.

SMITH: Well, I think what ...

KAMEN: Don't get sidetracked. I'm having a lot of fun.

SMITH: Something we didn't really touch on much was, were you a big fan of newspaper strips and magazine illustration?

KAMEN: Oh yeah.

SMITH: You were digesting all of these things.

KAMEN: Always. I'd look in the magazines and not read the stories. I liked the work in Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. To me, this was my idea of great art.

SMITH: Some of those illustrators were people you got to know when you moved up into the profession.

KAMEN: Yes, I got to know some of them. They were very disappointing, but I would have loved to have studied with some of them. I remember in Dunn's class, Mario Cooper would still come in. Wednesday evening was very famous. I don't know whether you ever heard about them. Wednesday evening we always brought our work in for criticism. There'd be a spotlight, and you'd put the work up and then he'd do a critique in front of the whole class. We'd never know this, but once in a while, one of the famous guys would come in and bring in a piece of work and he'd put it up and he'd say, "This is only here so you can see what good work looks like." So Mario Cooper would come in and we had him one time. Von Schmidt came in one time. Myron Anderson came in at one time. Any number of his students who were already big shots.

SMITH: Did you know anything about Andrew Loomis? Was he before your time?

KAMEN: No. I don't know about Andy Loomis, but I loved him.

SMITH: Gorgeous work.

KAMEN: Yeah. Gorgeous work. I have his book.

SMITH: You would think a guy famous as that ... I know very little about his background.

KAMEN: I know very little about him either, except that when you read the book ... what the hell is the name of that agency? It was an outfit. To me they should all be in one space in Chicago. The name escapes me, but all these guys were together at one time. To me it's absolutely ...

SMITH: Powerhouse.

KAMEN: A real powerhouse. It was quite a bunch of guys in those studios. The other studio too that was very predominant in my mind was the one that just died, Bob Peak.

SMITH: Bob Peak died?

KAMEN: Yeah. Peak died.

SMITH: His comeback was so beautiful.

KAMEN: I didn't know. Peak was phenomenal though. I could almost see the advantage -- I never tried it. Peak worked on a number of jobs. He would never do one. He was very busy, but he found it very creative to have one board of a job here, one there, he'd go from job to job. He says it kept him on his toes. He also kept the jobs alive, because after working on something -- and I could see it happening -- and then going to the other one, which was completely different, you see things that you never did before.

SMITH: Like opening your sinuses.

KAMEN: Yeah.

SMITH: His work is really almost mystical. He did Apocalypse Now. Was that his movie poster?

KAMEN: Yeah. I tried once to do what he did in color and it was a big lie. The way he did it, it looked right. Anybody else does it, and it doesn't look right. It came out dead and lifeless. I gave that up. I really did try. Maybe the impetus was wrong, because I tried it after I didn't have pressured deadlines any more. Between Spencer, and these Mad ads, whenever I had a dull moment I could walk out of any one of these places and walk out with $1500 worth of work. I'd say, "What do you got for me?" "Well, we've got 30 or 40 drawings over here at $40-50 bucks a piece." "I'll take it." When you're fast ... that's the other thing about comics. It's a quick grasp. It's a great discipline. I used to tell my kids I think I was a success because I lived in fear of losing my family.

SMITH: There are a lot of people who'd rather have the lax time, the down time. But you like to keep your edge and always work with a short deadline.

KAMEN: I don't know whether it's a short time or not, but I have to work.

SMITH: Do you ever take work and retouch it?

KAMEN: No. No. If the idea's a good one, and I like it, I'll do another complete one and throw the other one away. The latest thing, I'm doing it for myself -- I just finished a couple. Looking at Degas' girls. Degas, the ballet ones. They're klutzes. I don't like them.

SMITH: They certainly don't have the spirit. The color is there but the spirit is not.

KAMEN: The color is great. The paint is beautiful. The casual ones are fine, but the movement ... I just don't like them. So I'm drawing a lot of ballet figures now. I'm a ballet fan, anyway. The New York Graphic Society put out a bunch of prints of ballet dancers, but they're frozen. They're not right. Not when I've seen ballet, and I know the poses. I think that's another hangover from my old man, because, as I say, he came to this country as a dancer. One of the things that I remember as a kid -- I don't know if you ever went to any Jewish weddings or Bar Mitzvahs. After the ceremony and dinner was finished, someone would always get him to do some kind of a solo dance. After he did three or four of these he was knocked out. I think my love for the dance and the human figure comes from that. When I started to draw ... are you familiar with New York?

SMITH: A little. Yeah.

KAMEN: OK. On Union Square, there's a number of art stores. This was also where the men's clothing industry was. Every time some kind of a new art material would come out, he'd come home with it. A new kind of charcoal. Charcoal used to be sticks. When they started putting it into a wood pencil form, he brought me home a box. Compressed charcoal was new then. I had it. Any kind of drawing material. I think pretty much my love for structure, of having respect for craftsmanship rather than pure painting. Because I see so much pure painting now. The guy doesn't know how to draw, but the color is the cover-up. To me, art is draftsmanship. I wanna see draftsmanship. I could be wrong. You could be a great colorist. But to me, it's not inspirational.

SMITH: Like a badly engineered house.

KAMEN: I want to see drawing. I want to see good drawing. I see a lot of good drawing in that Comics Journal.

SMITH: Yeah.

KAMEN: There's a lot of good drawing there. I'm very pleased to see it. These guys I think are suppressed ... look at Frazetta. Did you know that Frazetta won the Society of Illustrator's medal? They gave him a prize for that and he deserved it. It's a great piece of work. But an art critic looks at it and says, "Oh, the hell with that," and tosses it. None of these modern artists could paint it that well.

SMITH: No. Frazetta's a great example like Bob Peak. I mean, his art is like crossing into somebody's dream world. It's intense.

KAMEN: It's amazing, and the color and everything goes with it. They're great.

For the full interview, please see Comics Journal #240.