Marine Corps in 1946. Unable to get into the course he wanted at New
York’s Art Students League, he took a job with the former promotion art
director of Fortune,Hal Zamboni, who had started his own Bauhaus-
influenced studio in Manhattan. Bacon was given a $30-a-week job making
laborious scratchboard drawings of, among other mundane items, bottles of
pills for advertisements. However, from doing such tasks he developed a
better-than-average drawing style, along with a certain stylistic flair.
At the time, a friend’s father—who had written a book titled
Chimp on My Shoulder,about venturing into Africa to round up monkeys
for the Dennis Roosevelt Chimpanzee Farm in Florida—asked Bacon to
do the illustrations. The witty, impressionistic drawings were, Bacon recalls,
“pretty good for a novice”—good enough that the art director for E. P.
Dutton, the book’s publisher, requested that he do the jacket, too. The
jacket, a photograph with type, is “nothing to send to the Hall of Fame,
but it got me started,” he says.
But Bacon’s real passion was jazz, certified by his membership in
the Newark Hot Club, a hyper-serious bunch of fans that included Alfred
Lion and Frank Wolff, founders of the legendary Blue Note Records.
Bacon had known the two before the war and soon started designing 10 "
album covers for their label. He simultaneously wrote record reviews for
The Record Changermagazine, edited by Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews,
who eventually started Riverside Records, for which Bacon also designed
albums. Today, many jazz aficionados know Bacon exclusively for his
contemporary-looking record sleeves.
But record albums alone did not insure a viable living, and during
the early 1950 s, Tom Bevins at Simon & Schuster gave Bacon a quirky
grouping of titles to work on, including an album of cartoons from Punch
and some science fiction novels. It wasn’t until the Compulsionjacket,
however, that Bacon realized that books were going to be his lifelong
vocation. The S&S advertising people liked the idea of using an icon or a
logo on a jacket as opposed to the conventional treatments of just type or
literal illustration. And Bacon discovered he was good at “finding
something that would be a synthesis graphically of what the story was
about.” Moreover, since he had had no formal training in illustration, he
felt free to explore in this realm. “I was not encumbered by having to work
from models,” he says. “Many of the things I did, I just did strictly from
memory and without any reference at all. Unless I needed something
specific, like a German airplane or something—then I’d look it up. But it
was very liberating to realize that I didn’t have to do something that looked
like Norman Rockwell did it.”
If he was decidedly not Rockwellian, neither was he a follower of
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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