Another PM Newspaper for sale - February 3, 1941.
Price on this one is $US31.00 - if I bought this it would end up costing about AU$48.00 to get it here - expensive business this collecting!
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Another PM Newspaper for sale - February 3, 1941. Price on this one is $US31.00 - if I bought this it would end up costing about AU$48.00 to get it here - expensive business this collecting! |
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After some more in depth searches for PM Daily Newspapers, I have found more images and a total of 39 issues for sale on the internet. Prices for these range from US$15.95 to US$48.00 each - far beyond my price range, especially since I have no way of knowing if there is any of Jack Coggins's artwork inside. I will be contacting the sellers to see if they are prepared to check the issues they are selling for Jack's illustrations - maybe they will respond. Here are thumbnail images of the covers I have collected so far.
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I have found mention in several places that Jack was commissioned to do illustrations "for New York's short lived left-wing daily newspaper PM" during the early part of World War II. I have been unable to find any examples of this work, or even any copies of PM; however, during my search, I found some interesting information about involvement of Dr. Seuss with the same magazine in the early part of WWII. If you are interested in reading more, Click Here. If anyone can help me locate any copies of PM from New York during that era, I would be very interested. There were, and still are, several magazines using the name "PM" - the one I am looking for was published in New York between June 1940 and June 1948. Click Here to read more about PM in Wikipedia.
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Comment Received 20 June 2006. "It's amazing to think that Jack might have known Dr Seuss!! My son has some of Jack's books on his bookshelf and right next to them are many earlier favourites... "Marvin K Mooney", "The Thinks You Can Think", etc. Who would have thought there might be a connection between them... one degree of separation indeed."
Spot the difference between these two pictures of Jack's painting of US Mahan Class Destroyers.
Find it? The top image is from the 1989 exhibition catalogue from Mystic Maritime Gallery, which sold a lot of Jack's work. The second is the image which appeared on the cover of the Naval War College Review Autumn 2002. During the exhibition, the gallery contacted Jack and said that they had a sale for the painting (priced at $2500) on one condition. The buyer was a retired Navy man who captained a Mahan Class Destroyer number 364, and wanted his ship's number on the painting, rather than number 365. Jack complied, and the sale was made.
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We received a very interesting email from a collector in California about an unusual and unique item in his possession. It is an oil painting signed by Jack Coggins on a canvas scroll approx 2.5 feet (76 cm) high by 17 feet (5.2 metres) long!! He says that he bought it in the 80s from New York, and that it was from the wall of a house. He sent several images which I have stitched together as well as I could and the complete image is shown below (the strange lighting is a result of the stitching). It seems to be in rather poor condition and in need of restoration; the collector is trying to sell it for an amount which is well beyond our means. If anyone is interested I can send the contact details.
The painting is obviously of Hell and there are many allegorical literary references - one can sit for a long time just studying all the activity. The signature on the painting seems to be genuine, and while it is definitely Jack's style of painting, the subject matter is very unusual for Jack's work. We immediately noticed a striking similarity to the style of the famous Australian artist and author Norman Lindsay (two images of his works are shown below for comparison). We found that Norman Lindsay was well known in New York, and was actually in New York during 1931-32, at exactly the same time that Jack was at the Grand Central School of Art, so it is quite likely that Jack may have been influenced by Lindsay's work, or even come into contact with him, during his student days. If this is correct, this work may well have been executed as a student exercise.
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Comment received 15 June. "What a fascinating scroll. It certainly seems that Jack may have seen some of Norman's works prior to painting the scroll. The subject matter has some very 'Lindsay' like characters in it, that are very much out of sync with Jack's normal work. Norman's work was exhibited in New York at the Anderson Galleries from December 1927 to January 1928, that had a brief favourable notice in the New York Times. I am not aware of any exhibitions that were in New York during their visit at the end of 1931 as Norman was talking to publishers about books and publishing. I will try and track down some more information for you."
One of our correspondents sent some slides of her father and Jack during a trip they did to Alaska in the 50s. I have reproduced two of them here.
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