He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s.
Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips.
His gently satirical drawings depicting a carefree and exuberant era appeared on dozens of national magazine covers as well as inside periodicals and newspapers. His distinct style of work even made it to the book jacket of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age.
Then came the stock market crash. Held turned 40 in 1929, lost a lot of money, suffered a nervous breakdown, and found that his once-constant and highly lucrative artwork commissions had mostly dried up.
He was now free to do what he came to New York in 1912 for: to pursue the fine arts and become a watercolor painter.
In the Depression of the 1930s, when the city’s new skyscrapers might look to some like tall gray husks, Held depicted them as magical and luminous—radiant under the lavender, pink, blueish-white skies of dawn and dusk.
They’re a radical departure from his work a decade earlier, which featured stylish youth drawn in exaggerated angular proportions that suggest motion and energy. His watercolors, on the other hand, depict no people at all.
“From 1934-1936, Held’s view of the world turned more sober,” states the art website Arthur.
“The upper stories of a building on Sixth Avenue near Central Park afforded Held a high vantage point. From this perspective, the artist transforms the massive New York skyscrapers into flat patterns of right angles and colored shadows.”
The writer behind the website describes Held’s work as wistful. I think wondrous might fit as well.
Held spent the last years of his life on a farm in Belmar, New Jersey and died from cancer in 1958. He returned to the city for good; he’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Tags: John Held Jr. Jazz Age Cartoonist, John Held Jr. New York City, John Held Jr. watercolors, Manhattan Skyline 1930s Paintings, New York artists in the 1920s, New York Painters in the 1930s
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