Andersen Library
Charles Mikolaycak: Illustration in an Art Historical and Decorative Arts Context
Written by Edward Leffingwell
Table of Contents:
An Overview
- The Hero of Breman
- Orpheus
- Babushka
- The Man Who Could Call Down Owls
- The Surprising Things Maui Did
- The Boy Who Tried to Cheat Death
- A biographical note
Charles
Mikolaycak and Design
Motifs
- Bearhead : A Russian Folktale
- Tam Lin : An Old Ballad
- The Rumor of Pavel and Paali:
A Ukrainian Folktale
- - Voyages : Poems by Walt Whitman
- The Twelve Clever Brothers and Other Fools: Russian Folk Tales
Charles Mikolaycak
[Click photo for a larger view]
Charles Mikolaycak (1937-1993) was a book illustrator, designer and sometime teller of stories of a very high order. On occasion he addressed the influence of film and theater on his work. In the transcript of a talk given in 1991 at the Sacramento Literature Symposium, he spoke of his enthusiasm for theater and film and the impact advertisements for movies had on his development as an illustrator. This was a thoughtfully developed talk, and he began by addressing an object of assumed interest to his audience: “Where do the pictures come from?” He acknowledged the text to be illustrated as the first claim to the illustrator’s attention, the ideas that stem from that regard. But he continues to ask why the illustrations come to look the way they do. He acknowledged his interest in the camera’s point of view and the use of image cropping, a photographer’s device. Mikolaycak concluded his talk with the projection of slides of his work interspersed with movie stills, adding with a caveat that his work differed from the movie still. “But the connections are there, and they are real.”
But there is another story to tell: one of the lineage that can be traced through Mikolaycak’s interest in art history and the role that interest played in the expression of his work. He told his audience at Sacramento: “We have centuries of art and art history that document information, style, color and form.” He went on to list Renaissance frescoes, the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists, the moderns and post-moderns, and names as his “fellow illustrators” a list of artists that range from Michelangelo to Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Howard Pyle, Dean Cornwell, Norman Rockwell, and Arthur Rackham. In such company, Mikolaycak’s work is distinguished by its truth to nature, clarity of line and color, and a convincing and consistently high level of draftsmanship that is as complex as it is modern and legible. The discussion that follows addresses specific art historical sources that appear to have influenced him or served him as a resource in his work: Pieter Bruegel "The Elder", Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch, among others.
A consideration of these sources provides an opportunity to more fully enjoy the complex nature of Mikolaycak’s contribution to the field of illustration, suggesting how an art historical awareness can inform an appreciation of an artist’s work while underscoring the value of visual literacy in its own right. Of additional interest, Mikolaycak demonstrated remarkable familiarity with the practical and decorative arts, including domestic furnishings, carpentry, architecture, woven and embroidered textiles, traditional costumes, and other decorative arts traditions, many of them drawn from the long and rich cultural history of North and Central European cultures. The published works considered here are chronologically arranged beginning with the most recent.
Mikolaycak: The Hero of Breman book
cover
Bruegel: "The Beggars"
"Although Mikolaycak’s drawings picture Hans with heartfelt sympathy, the details of clothing and posture may derive from the amputees of Bruegel’s "The Beggars"
Mikolaycak: Colored pencil
illustration
Mikolaycak: Colored pencil illustration
"The map is correctly embellished with the coat-of-arms of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, a silver key on a red field."
Mikolaycak’s interest in art historical precedents seems evident in his neoclassical design for the front cover of the dust jacket for his retelling and illustration of the hero and musician of Greco-Roman myth, Orpheus, completed in 1991, but published in 1992, the year preceding his death. His illustration closely resembles a 19th-century painting by Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin, "A Young Man Sitting Naked by the Sea" by the Seaside (1855 Musée du Louvre, Paris). In both, a nude figure is seated on rock in profile, his knees drawn up as though for solace or self-protection, a physical language that invites the construction of a narrative. Flandrin himself draws on the neoclassical influence of his predecessor, J.-A.-D. Ingres in a painting, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1805-25, Musée du Louvre). In effect, Mikolaycak has the entire history of classical art for his study, including Bronzino’s Portrait of the Grand Duke Cosimo I de’Medici as Orpheus (1537-39, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the marble Orpheus of Antonio Canova (1770s, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). The photographs of Baron von Gloeden taken in Sicily c. 1900 also come to mind.
Keenly interested in the long history of his subject, in an afterword to the book, Mikolaycak offers a litany of works by artists who have portrayed aspects of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. They include the dancing Orpheus of Victorian neoclassicist, John Macallan Swan (1896, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK), which to some degree recalls Mikolaycak’s opening spread of the narrative. The rest do not: Jean Delville, who depicted the head of Orpheus floating on the water, (1893 in a private collection), and Odilon Redon, who shared interest in that macabre theme (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1903). He also mentions Corot and Poussin, whose paintings are in the landscape tradition, and notes that the sculptor Auguste Rodin made sculptures and drawings on the subject of Orpheus. This book is the very modern Mikolaycak demonstrating his linkage to the Golden Age of Illustrators.
Mikolaycak: Pencil study of cover
Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin: "A Young
Man Sitting Naked by the Sea" [Larger image not available]
Mikolaycak: Colored pencil study
for cover
Mikolaycak: Colored pencil study
Mikolaycak: Colored pencil study
Throughout his prolific career, Mikolaycak was drawn to fables from the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. Among them is Babushka: An Old Russian Folktale, “retold” by Mikolaycak in 1984. In the opening spreads, Babushka seems grounded in the denuded trees and snowy village landscape of Bruegel’s "January: The Return of the Hunters" (1565, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Babushka is retold by Mikolaycak, his interest inspired by an early edition he was given as a child. Historically, Babushka is associated with an Italian story: the legend of La Befana, celebrated on the 6th day of January, the feast day of the Epiphany, from which her name derives. Babushka is also the secular equivalent of Father Christmas, Santa Claus and Kris Kringle.
In his illustrations, Mikolaycak pictures the centuries as they pass from the event of the Three Kings. Like her cognates, Babushka ages but never dies. Babushka’s woven “babushka” shawl with floral decorations, traditional blouse and patterned dress are drawn from traditional Russian designs. The torch-bearing soldiers accompanying the Magi are dressed in medieval coif hoods out of Bruegel and Celtic chainmail tunics and leggings, and the Magi are fancifully dressed. When Babushka takes to the road in pursuit of the Epiphany, she grows old, but never wearies of her search. A street scene includes plus-fours and a calèche, and in another, she enters a New York subway with people costumed in the style of the 1920s (a snap-brim fedora, a cloche hat). She visits modern Prague with a map of the city in hand, and finally, a city with a castle on a hill and tile-roofed houses bristling with television antennas. Mikolaycak’s characteristic generosity in his engagement with the placement of text on the page suits the development of the story. This book is packed with devices designed to indicate the passing of time through a program of cinematic collage.
1994: The Man Who Could Call Down Owls
Mikolaycak: pencil & colored
pencil illustration for cover
Mikolaycak:
pencil illustration
"He pictures his apprentice as a singular boy in eyeglasses, cap, scarf, jacket and patched trousers. The costumes are based on a broad sweep of historical models, from the era of Bruegel to post-Soviet Russia."
Bruegel: "Return of the Hunters"
Mikolaycak: pencil illustration
1979: The Surprising Things Maui Did
Mikolaycak transposes the lush style, clear line and bold color of Paul Gauguin from Tahiti to Hawaii for The Surprising Things Maui Did (1979), a myth of the creation of the island of Maui as told by Jay Williams. The hero of the story, Maui, takes his leisure while his brothers cast nets for fish. He drums birds and their songs onto the island, lengthens the days, makes them warm, and learns the secret for making fire. The cover is banded by the figure of Maui spinning on a starry arc of rainbow with an exotic bird, the ocean’s surf, and in the foreground, the red bracts of anthuriums. A woman dressed in a sarong appears in profile in the upper left corner of the initial double-page spread, sheltered within the embrace of a waterfall, cradling the infant Maui in her hands. Mikolaycak’s illustrations recall Gauguin’s graceful, simplified depiction of the body in Two Tahitian Women (1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the panoramic allegory of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Perhaps to simulate the rustic sackcloth Gauguin used as support for his paintings, Mikolaycak consistently employs a regular, corrugated patterning that serves as a shading device and suggests the sensual solidity of the figure and tropical landscape. The corrugation reappears in a wash of white accent on the cresting waves. Maui wears a white sarong, and one of his brothers wears a red sarong with a pattern of plumeria, the lei flower. Birds, palm fronds and vines are treated with the same fanciful enjoyment of color and line. In one spread, Maui swims, accompanied by colorful tropical fish in art nouveau ribbons and swirling abstractions of wind and surf. Each of the elements of the creation myth are introduced by recurrent, grisaille vignettes of sky, water, palm branches, the blossoms of the datura or trumpet flower, and plumeria. The final spread is a cumulative arrangement of tropical fish, flowers, birds, a shell, and the surf. Maui appears for the last time, his head crowned by a map of the island that bears his name.
"The final spread is a cumulative arrangement of tropical fish, flowers, birds, a shell,and the surf. Maui appears for the last time, his head crowned by a map of the island that bears his name." Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women
Mikolaycak:
colored pencil & pencil illustration for cover
Mikolaycak: colored pencil & pencil
illustration
"The hero of the story, Maui takes his leisure while his brothers cast nets for fish."
Mikolaycak: colored pencil & pencil
illustration
1971: The Boy Who Tried to Cheat Death
Mikolaycak: Cover illustration
"A somber subject for the reader, young or old, on the book’s dusk jacket, the Boy of the title appears as a bearded young man shadowed by the personification of Death."
Mikolaycak: Oil glaze
and pencil illustration
"The swirling, decorative elements of Mikolaycak’s landscape and sky, the depiction of a bridge, and a reiterated theme of the deathbed watch recall similar passages in the work of Norwegian symbolist painter and print-maker Edvard Munch (1863-1944)."
Edvard Munch: "The
Scream"
"A roadway and bridge tilting up through a receding landscape under the whorls of sky recall the sweeping compositions and wood-railed bridges that figure various Munch landscapes, including "The Scream" (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo)."
During Charles Mikolaycak’s tenure as a book designer for Time-Life Books, he and his wife Carole Kismaric published their first collaborative effort in 1971. The Boy Who Tried to Cheat Death is a variation on the Faustian theme of the consequences of an ambitious young man’s pact with Death, adapted from a Norwegian folk tale collected by Peter Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. Mikolaycak represents the youth of the title and most other characters in an abstracted but realistic manner. The swirling, decorative elements of Mikolaycak’s landscape and sky, the depiction of a bridge, and a reiterated theme of the deathbed watch recall similar passages in the work of Norwegian symbolist painter and print-maker Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Munch himself had been affected by the Fauvists and Art Nouveau and Jugend styles, and consonant with the theme Mikolaycak develops, Munch often portrayed suffering, sickness, and death.
A somber subject for the reader, young or old, on the book’s dust jacket, the Boy of the title appears as a bearded young man shadowed by the personification of Death. Mikolaycak introduces several motifs here adapted from Munch. One is a kind of Art Nouveau aura that follows and joins the contours of figures and elsewhere formally echoes the branches of a tree and the tendrils of a young woman’s hair as she reclines on her death bed. Throughout, the Boy and Death are bound together by variations of the motif, representing their fatal compact. In Munch, the aura appears in the painting, "Madonna" (1894-5) and a related lithograph, and in "The Dance of Life" (1899-1900, both in the collection of the National Gallery, Oslo). If Munch suggests that the moiré patterns of the night skies are an abstraction of the aurora borealis, Mikolaycak elsewhere nominates a factory’s smokestacks as the source. He imagines a landscape that draws on that of Munch. A roadway and bridge tilting up through a receding landscape under the whorls of sky recall the sweeping compositions and wood-railed bridges that figure various Munch landscapes, including "The Scream" (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo).
Mikolaycak’s direct quotation of an image rehearsed by Munch ties them more closely together: the presence of a full moon close to the horizon, reflected in a body of water like an ideogram for Norway. Mikolaycak rehearses Munch’s near calligraphic motif on the book’s dust cover and again in a dramatic, double-page spread that focuses on the boy and Death seated before a simple church in a graveyard populated by marble slabs and crosses. In Munch, the ideograph occurs in "The Dance of Life," where a brilliant moon hovers over water, reflected in a vertical path concluding in a few lozenges of rippling light. It appears again in precisely the same manner in "The Mystery of a Summer Night" (1892, National Gallery, Oslo), again in "The Dance on the Shore" (1900-02), in a drypoint, "The Women," (1895), and in a colored woodcut, "Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones" (1899, Munch Museum, Oslo). The full moon is said to be a favorable omen for lovers and hunters, especially in the near endless light of a Norway summer when the full moon hangs low on the horizon, creating a lunar twilight. In the long, dark winter, a full moon can also dominate the display of the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.
Edvard
Charles Mikolaycak’s keen eye and prodigious
talent served him well through the decades of a distinguished
career. This investigation
intends a greater appreciation of the depth and pleasure of his
labor, and a means to a deeper consideration of the spectrum
of his work
in full. - Written by Edward Leffingwell 1991: Bearhead : A Russian Folktale "Mikolaycak adds a newspaper
banner in Russian. The loveable Bearhead sports a military
cap of green cloth and leather brim ornamented with the Soviet
red star." "The goblin who appears with
the body of an eel and the arms and head of a frog wears
a hat that seems intended as an aside to the “Cat in
the Hat” topper of Dr. Seuss." "Mikolaycak follows Jane Yolen’s
cues in the selection of his palette: green for the camouflage
of Jennet’s cape, and red for the rose that is emblematic
of the heart . . . On the front cover, the lovers
are swathed in tartans against a full-blown rose." "A single-page illustration shows a frog and a snake emerging
from an undergrowth of briars, and there are grass-green borders
around
the illustrations as a framing device. The ruined castle is in
the distance." The complex
iconography of Mikolaycak’s illustrations for Jane Yolen’s
revisiting of Tam Lin : An Old Ballad (1990) ornament
one of his most highly regarded collaborations. Briefly, the story:
on her sixteenth birthday,
Jennet MacKenzie, a beautiful Scottish girl, swears to reclaim
her family seat, an abandoned castle held for generations by the
fairies.
On the way she encounters Tam Lin, a handsome young man who was
the childhood friend of her great-grandfather, who has been held
suspended in time as a prisoner of the faerie queen. Only love
can save
him, and on the Halloween following Jennet MacKenzie’s
birthday she challenges the forces of evil and saves Tam Lin. Mikolaycak follows Jane Yolen’s cues in
the selection of his palette: green for the camouflage of Jennet’s
cape and red for the rose that is emblematic of the heart. On
the cover
is a vignette of a briar branch (the rose) and on one twig two
gold rings entwined. On the front cover, the lovers are swathed
in tartans against a full-blown rose. Facing the dedication page
is a red rose on a thorny stem, just opening. A single-page illustration
shows a frog and a snake emerging from an undergrowth of briars,
and there are grass-green borders around the illustrations as a
framing
device. The ruined castle is in the distance. A single red rose
appears when Jennet meets Tam Lin in his tartan of black and white.
Mikolaycak orchestrates a careful interplay of color, form and
text. When Jennet returns she wears a mantle of green over a blood-red
skirt and bodice so that the faeries won’t see her. Tam Lin
turns into a serpentine creature with gray-green scales that seem
to emerge from his tartan, but then becomes a lion. Jennet bests
the queen. Tam Lin’s clothing has been burned away. She covers
his nakedness with her costume. At the end, Tam Lin’s black
and white tartan is now embedded with a plaid pattern derived from
the “MacKenzie” plaid, the lovers surrounded by roses
in bloom. Carole Kismaric provides
the retelling of The
Rumor of Pavel and Paali: A Ukrainian Folktale which Mikolaycak
dedicated to his twin brother, John, Jr. who died in the spring
of 1937 several
months after their birth. Throughout this handsomely illustrated,
episodic and violent tale of a good man’s debasement at
the hands of an evil twin, and the good twin’s eventual triumph
over evil, Mikolaycak integrates the geometric abstractions of
textiles into the fabric of his illustrations. His design of the
title spread and the dedication page suggest the decorative elements
of Gustav Klimt, attributable to their shared attraction to similar
sources. Each of the story’s episodic blocks is framed in
black and bordered at one or both edges with a multi-patterned
strip or banner and dother period details, including a newspaper
in Cyrillic type, a device also used in Bearhead : A Russian
Folktale.
Banners of clouds appear throughout the daytime spreads, above
a landscape distinguished by the architecture of the houses, the
pine trees and other details. The evil Pavel dons decorated riding boots, while
Paali wears gaiters and slippers made of rush. The jumble of household
objects
is an inventory of the time: patched embroidered and woven linens,
an Orthodox icon of the Madonna, an adz and a hoe, a copper vessel,
side chairs, the poor things of Paali. Pavel’s relative wealth
is communicated through an inventory of rich things: a decanter,
upholstered side chairs, elaborate candlesticks. The blinded Paali
is reduced to begging by a large fir tree at the crossroads, eyes
bandaged. A carpenter goes by toting boards, carrying a satchel
filled with carpenter’s pencils, a mallet, a ruler, some
string, a T-square, a saw. In a later spread, the figures echo
the heroic, smiling figures of Soviet Realism, and in the following
spread, Mikolaycak faithfully rendered but abstracted the
murals of the ceiling of a church. When Paali receives the gifts
of his neighbors, Mikolaycak took the opportunity to depict a
complex inventory of goods, including glass tumblers and cups,
a copper kettle, a bottle, and a samovar, recalling the household
inventory of Bearhead : A Russian Folktale.
Charles Mikolaycak and Design
Motifs
Mikolaycak: Jacket cover for Bearhead
Charles
Mikolaycak’s Ukrainian and Polish heritage served as a continuing
source of inspiration to him. His illustrations of Central European
folkloric costumes, decorative devices and the landscape itself
can be traced to his abiding interest in his own Central and East
European cultural history, but historically accurate depictions
of costume and design seems a hallmark of his oeuvre. In 1991,
Mikolaycak illustrated Eric Kimmel’s fable, Bearhead
: A Russian Folktale, using pencil, colored pencil and water
color. In these handsome illustrations, the device of a solid red
line outlined by thin black lines recalls the agitated thin red
line defining the perimeters of his illustrations for Babushka.
The book is filled with disparate allusions, including individual
spreads ornamented with geometric and folkloric patterns. A tiled
tray decorated with a pattern that resembles Royal Copenhagen china
also appears in Mikolaycak’s illustration for "Six Impossible
Things Before Breakfast" (1977) for the story, I Saddled
My Unicorn. Mikolaycak adds a newspaper banner in Russian.
The loveable Bearhead sports a military cap of green cloth and
leather brim ornamented with the Soviet red star. The goblin who
appears with the body of an eel and the arms and head of a frog
wears a hat that seems intended as an aside to the “Cat in
the Hat” topper of Dr. Seuss. Mikolaycak offers a vignette
as a frontispiece that is a silhouette of Bearhead on a red disk,
a red star badge at its center, placed on a field of pine branches.
The emblem seems to draw on the iconic image of Che Guevera.
Mikolaycak: pencil, color pencil
and watercolor illustration
Mikolaycak: pencil, color pencil
and watercolor illustration
Mikolaycak: pencil and color pencil
illustration for cover 
Mikolaycak: pencil and color pencil
illustration
1988: The Rumor of Pavel and Paali: A Ukrainian
Folktale
Mikolaycak: pencil and color pencil
illustration for cover
Mikolaycak: pencil study
"The evil Pavel dons decorated riding boots, while Paali wears gaiters and slippers made of rush. The jumble of household objects is an inventory of the time: patched embroidered and woven linens, an Orthodox icon of the Madonna, an adz and a hoe, a copper vessel, side chairs, the poor things of Paali. Pavel’s relative wealth is communicated through an inventory of rich things: a decanter, upholstered side chairs, elaborate candlesticks."
Mikolaycak: pencil and color pencil
illustration
"The blinded Paali is reduced to begging by a large fir tree at the crossroads, eyes bandaged. A carpenter goes by toting boards, carrying a satchel filled with carpenter’s pencils, a mallet, a ruler, some string, a T-square, a saw."
ca. 1988: Voyages : Poems by Walt Whitman
Mikolaycak: pencil illustration for
cover
Mikolaycak:
pencil illustration
Fritz Eichenberg: cover illustration for Rainbows are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg
These poems were selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins. Mikolaycak pictures Whitman’s lyrical line, “out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” with a youth standing, rocked by an old woman in a bonnet through the feathered troughs of the sea like a surfer. He is adorned with the attributes of his early trades: the hammer and saw of the carpenter, a newspaper just visible in a satchel that also contains a T-square. The sky at sun down is enlivened with the abstracted stars and stripes of the American flag, derived from Frederic Edwin Church’s Mountain Landscape (Our Banner in the Sky) (circa 1861, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). Throughout, Mikolaycak ornaments this book with oval vignettes consisting of various emblems in the manner of woodcuts: a cannon firing, blocks of single letters for typesetting, a cluster of lilacs – some of them more arcane, all with the striated lines passing horizontally through that intend a reference to woodcuts. This book seems a visual homage to Mikolaycak’s teacher and mentor, the illustrator Fritz Eichenberg, who in 1982 illustrated Rainbows Are Made : Poems by Carl Sandburg.
1979: The Twelve Clever Brothers and Other Fools: Russian Folk Tales
Mikolaycak’s drawings for Mirra Ginsburg’s The Twelve Clever Brothers and Other Fools: Russian Folk Tales (1979) are in pencil with an abstract, folkloric border in red that runs throughout. [A version of such borders appears as a running band along the top of the text pages of Sister of the Birds and Other Gypsy Tales (1976) and Nine Crying Dolls (1980). Their geometric, pick-up, red-weave patterns have been found in the region since the Stone Age. Due to the cultural influence of the Slavic peoples, cross stitching and other simple stitches, usually in red and black or white and black, proliferated, and the apron became the most important element of the Lithuanian peasant woman's costume. It was considered improper to appear in public without one
Mikolaycak’s interpretations of traditional costumes for The Twelve Clever Brothers are vividly patterned and often imagined as roughly patched, solids on checks, dots and traditional Slavic plaids on stripes. He lines traditional folkloric shirts with patterned embroidery trimming the cuffs and neck, the places where the decorative patterns might be seen from underneath a jacket. Each brief tale is introduced by a drawing of great detail appropriate to the text.
Mikolaycak: pencil illustration for
cover
Mikolaycak: pencil illustration
"He lines traditional folkloric shirts with patterned embroidery trimming the cuffs and neck, the places where the decorative patterns might be seen from underneath a jacket. Each brief tale is introduced by a drawing of great detail appropriate to the text."
- Written by Edward Leffingwell
The Charles Mikolaycak / CLRC website is
courtesy of the Carole Kismaric bequest.
Permission for reproduction
of studies from the executor of
the estate.
Federal Depository
Library Program