Willy Pogany

 

Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, George G. Harrap & Co., London, 1909.

 

 

Standard trade edition, Quarto; hardcover, decorated boards with gilt spine-titling and decorated endpapers; unpaginated (174pp.), untrimmed and top edge gilt, with extensive decorations and 24 full-colour, tipped-in plates. Some mild softening of the spine extremities; top corner of the lower board somewhat scraped; some mild embrowning of the page edges, especially the pages containing the plates; some minor offset to the verso of the plate pages. Dustwrapper is heavily chipped at the spine extremities: from the head around to the middle edge of the upper panel, and at the tail; the bottom corner of the lower panel is also missing, but overall there is no loss of images or text. Very good.

 

“This name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable with a slightly shorter ‘o’ and the ‘gany’ is as the French: ‘gagne’. The ‘y’ is silent."

-Willy Pogány

Vilmos “Willy” Andreas Pogány (1882-1955) was on his way to America when he was delayed in London. Fortunately for us, because it was in London that he did some of his best work. Born in Szeged, at that stage part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he aspired to be an engineer in his youth, before deciding that he enjoyed art far better. He spent six weeks at the Budapest Technical College before making his first important sale – a sketch bought by a wealthy patron for US$24. After this, he travelled from art school to art school across Europe, stopping in Munich and Paris before reaching London in 1906. By then he had already illustrated a collection of Turkish fairy stories and he was in the right place at the right time to make a splash. Between 1907 and 1915 he illustrated some of his best works, including his 1909 Rubaiyat.

Many commentators claim that Pogány’s finest accomplishments are his Rime of the Ancient Mariner and his Wagner tryptich – Tannhäuser, Parsifal and The Tale of Lohengrin, which many consider to be even better than the versions produced by Rackham. That being said, Pogány’s Rubaiyat is a sumptuous work in the Art Nouveau tradition: the individual plates are sometimes considered to be tentative, or lacking dynamism; however, they were designed to be viewed in the context of the book as a whole, alongside its Orientalist borders and page decorations, not to be judged separately. In my opinion, the only production of the poem that is better than Pogány’s 1909 edition, is the one he did in America in 1942, which is a complete reversal of the style he undertook in his first endeavour.

 

Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in English Verse by Edward FitzGerald, illustrations by Willy Pogány, David McKay & Co., Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1942.

 

Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titling and decorations; unpaginated (128pp.), with a monochrome frontispiece, 17 illustrations and page decorations, likewise. Slightly rolled; spine sunned; some minor stains to the boards; softening of the spine extremities; some tape stains to the endpapers. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

Pogány’s early works (including the Rubaiyat) have a naive kind of quality to them; his adult figures don’t seem particularly real, but then he was always more at home depicting the denizens of Fairyland rather than actual people. In regard to his first Rubaiyat, he deliberately chose to mould his style closer to that of the Persian miniaturists, and that work has a dedication to a “Dr. Julius Germanus” who advised him, in this regard: in this instance, his strange, doll-like figures are completely in keeping with the project. The 1942 set of images has a more confident draughtsmanship at work, although his figures – while definitely more mature – are still somewhat unearthly.

By 1915, Pogány had finally made it to New York and his reputation preceded him to good effect: in the list below, from that year on, his publishers are predominantly American ones. He resisted a siren-call to Hollywood for quite awhile, but eventually, in 1924, accepted some contracts to work as a set designer, first credited on the movie “The Devil Dancer”. This would lead to bigger challenges including the role as art director on 1932’s “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff (one of my favourite films – I knew I liked this guy!). He relocated to Los Angeles and from then on divided his time between books, film and magazine illustration, working for Metropolitan Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Weekly, Hearst's Town and Country, Theatre Magazine and American Weekly. He also penned a number of books teaching the reader how to draw - Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons, Willy Pogany's Oil Painting Lessons, and Willy Pogany's Water Color Lessons, Including Gouache - treatises that backed up his own new role as an artistic educator.

All up, Pogány created three sets of images for the Rubaiyat: the first for George Harrap in 1909 (24 images plus decorations); another set for the same publisher in 1930, covering FitzGerald’s 1^st and 4^th translations (12 images plus decorations); and the David McKay 1942 set (18 images plus decorations). I, myself, don’t have a copy of the second set of illustrations, but it’s something that’s definitely on my radar. Like many illustrated versions of the Rubaiyat, later publishers have re-used the original images in later editions, like the following:

 

Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, nd. (c.1960).

Octavo; hardcover, with decorated upper board; unpaginated (96pp.), top edge dyed green, decorated, with 16 full-colour plates. Retailer’s bookplate on front pastedown; previous owner’s inscription on front free endpaper; minor offset to endpapers; text block edges faintly spotted. Price-clipped dustwrapper is lightly rubbed and slightly chipped at the head of the spine panel. Very good.

 

Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, Bloomsbury Books/Godfrey Cave Associates Ltd., London, 1988.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; unpaginated (112pp.), decorated, with 16 full-colour illustrations. Some minor stains to the boards; text block and page edges lightly toned. Dustwrapper is lightly edgeworn and sunned mildly along the spine. Else, very good.

(This is actually the very first Rubaiyat I ever obtained; the one that got the ball rolling!)

Aside from book and magazine illustration, and his film work, Pogány left his mark in many other areas: he was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and won medals in Budapest and Leipzig for his paintings; he designed the murals for the August Heckscher’s Children’s Theatre for which he won a medal from the New York Society of Architects; between 1917 and 1921 he designed costumes and sets for the New York Metropolitan Opera; his status as a commissioned artist for William Randolph Hearst led to his portrait work for the Barrymores, Enrico Caruso, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Carole Lombard and others. His murals may still be seen in New York City, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on 45^th Street, and at the Museo del Barrio Theatre at 1230 Fifth Avenue.

The only real dark spot on his biography came in the form of a legal contest which he lost badly. In 1952, Whittaker Chambers, a reformed Communist spy and whistleblower to the US Government, published an autobiography (Witness) in which he identified “Willi Pogany” (sic.) as the brother of Joseph Pogany, a Communist commissar under Stalin, based in Hungary. Chambers explicitly identified “Willi” as a scene designer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, but he was completely mistaken in assuming that there was any connexion at all between the artist and the spy. Pogány sued Chambers for defamation to the tune of 1 million dollars, but the court found that Chambers “had not maliciously implied that Willy was closely associated with a Communist leader and spy” (Time magazine). Given his working relationship with Hearst and the Hollywood community he was working amongst, you can’t blame Pogány for kicking back so hard against the slur; although I wonder what the trial’s outcome would have been under different circumstances?

By today’s standards, Pogány certainly seems to be a candidate for the most successful illustrator of his day, and by no means was he uncomfortable in his latter years. However, compared to the sheer earning power of those other great artists of the “Golden Age of Illustration” – Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac – he was definitely struggling. On the other hand though, his is definitely the candidate for the most colourful life amongst that very colourful crew.

 

Books illustrated by Willy Pogány:

Kunos, I., Turkish Fairy Tales, Burt 1901

Farrow, G. E., The Adventures of a Dodo, Unwin 1907

Thomas, W. J., The Welsh Fairy Book, Unwin 1907

Ward, M. A., Milly and Olly, Unwin 1907

Edgar, M. G., A Treasury of Verse for Little Children, Harrap 1908

Goethe, J. W., von Faust, Hutchinson 1908

Dasent, G. W., Norse Wonder Tales, Collins 1909

Hawthorne, N., Tanglewood Tales, Unwin 1909

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Harrap 1909

Coleridge, S. T., The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Harrap 1910

Gask, L., Folk Tales from Many Lands, Harrap 1910

Young, G., The Witch s Kitchen, Harrap 1910

Wagner, R., Tannhäuser, Harrap 1911

Gask, L., The Fairies and the Christmas Child, Harrap 1912

Wagner, R., Parsifal, Harrap 1912

Heine, H., Atta Troll, Sidgwick 1913

Kunos, I., Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales, Harrap 1913

Pogany, W., The Hungarian Fairy Book, Unwin 1913

Wagner, R., The Tale of Lohengrin, Harrap 1913

Pogany, W., Children, Harrap 1914

Pogany, W., A Series of Books for Children, Harrap 1915

More Tales from the Arabian Nights, Holt 1915

Swift, J., Gulliver’s Travels, Macmillan 1917

Bryant, S. C., Stories to Tell the Little Ones, Harrap 1918

Colum, P., Adventures of Odysseus, Macmillan 1918

Olcutt, F. J., Tales of the Persian Genii, Harrap 1919

Skinner, E. L., Children’s Plays, Appleton 1919

Colum, P., The King of Ireland’s Son, Harrap 1920

Colum, P., The Children of Odin, Harrap 1922

The Adventures of Haroun El Raschid, Holt 1923

Newman, I., Fairy Flowers, Milford 1926

Flanders, H. H., Looking Out of Jimmie, J.M. Dent 1928

Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dutton 1929

Pogany, W., Mother Goose, Nelson 1929

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Harrap 1930

Anthony, J., Casanova Jones, Century 1930

Pogany, W., Magyar Fairy Tales, Dutton 1930

Burton, R. F., The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, McKay 1931

Huffard, G. T., My Poetry Book, Winston 1934

Pushkin, A., The Golden Cockerel, Nelson 1938

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, David McKay 1942

 

Filmography of Willy Pogány:

Set designer, “The Devil Dancer”, 1927

Set decorator, “Tonight Or Never”, 1931

Set designer, “Palmy Days”, 1931

Set designer, “The Unholy Garden”, 1931

Art director (uncredited), “The Mummy”, 1932

Director (uncredited), “Kid Millions” – Technicolor sequence, 1934

Set designer, “Flirtation”, 1934

Art director, “Fashions of 1934”, 1934

Art director, “Wonder Bar”, 1934

Art director, “Dames”, 1934

Technical staff, “Dante’s Inferno”, 1935

Art director, “Make A Wish”, 1937

Animator, “Scrambled Eggs”, 1939