Thomas B. Allen: The Journey of an American Illustrator
Through Oct. 27
Ryman Auditorium
116 Fifth Ave. N.
Hours: 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. daily
$6.50 adults, $3 children 4-11
For information, call 254-1445
Retrospective exhibitions typically chart the course of an artist’s career over several decades. In the case of the Tom Allen retrospective at the Ryman, the works also serve as a visual autobiography of an artist whose creative journey has taken him from the small-town atmosphere of 1930s Nashville to the bright lights of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. Along the way, the colorful cast of characters in Allen’s life and in his art has included everyone from Mahalia Jackson and Flatt & Scruggs to Marilyn Monroe and Tom Sawyer.
Allen has created dozens of album covers for some of the greatest names in country, gospel, and jazz music, and he produced hundreds of illustrations and covers for Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and The New Yorker, as well as a number of children’s books. Some 75 of Allen’s original oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings that were reproduced as album art or magazine and book illustrations line the walls of the Ryman’s newly refurbished gallery, a window-filled space off the balcony level of the auditorium. Letters, photographs, passports to exotic lands, and other memorabilia fill the display cases below the artworks. One glance, and it’s obvious that it’s been a wonderful—if unexpected—life for this Hillsboro High School graduate who attended Vanderbilt University on a football scholarship.
”I didn’t plan to be an illustrator or work toward becoming one—I just discovered I was one,“ Allen says of the turn his career took after he left Vanderbilt to earn a degree in fine art from the Art Institute of Chicago. ”When I was 10 years old and taking art classes at Watkins [College of Art and Design], though, I remember declaring that I was going to be an artist.“
Allen had actually started taking private art classes at age 9 with the late John Richardson, the respected Nashville painter and former head of the Watkins art department. ”I studied with him on Saturdays at his loft studio on Fifth and Deaderick,“ the artist recalls. ”Later, when I was 10 years old, I took the streetcar into town from my house on Montrose Avenue to take figure drawing at Watkins.“
The certificate Allen earned in 1939 for completing that Watkins art course is among the memorabilia displayed in the Ryman retrospective. As a tribute to Allen’s early arts training, the retrospective opened May 17 with a concert at the Ryman featuring longtime Allen fans and collectors Marty Stuart and Earl Scruggs. A portion of the concert proceeds benefited the Thomas B. Allen Scholarship Fund at Watkins.
After earning his fine arts degree and serving a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, Allen headed for New York City in 1955. His arrival there coincided with a change in commercial illustration style that gave a boost to the young artist’s career. ”There was a big paradigm shift in illustration,“ Allen says. ”The focus went from sentimental and romantic to a realistic approach.“ That approach fit Allen’s own style, and he soon found work as an illustrator for Esquire, where the art director was Robert Benton, who would go on to become an Oscar-winning film director for Places in the Heart. ”He asked me to do a visual essay on country music,“ Allen recalls.
The result was a multi-page spread called ”Country Music Goes to Town“ that appeared in the October 1959 issue and focused on bluegrass acts like Flatt & Scruggs. ”I chose bluegrass over the honky-tonk sound because it grew from the same roots as the folk music that was beginning to be so popular then,“ Allen says. The original paintings Allen created for Esquire are part of the Ryman exhibition.
Allen also landed commissions from Columbia Records to create art for album covers for jazz artist Jimmy Rushing and gospel great Mahalia Jackson. Following the Esquire essay, he began a long association with Flatt & Scruggs, ultimately creating 17 album covers for the bluegrass duo. The original art for dozens of Allen album covers is included in the retrospective, along with the albums themselves.
Now head of the department of illustration at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., Allen continues to produce album art. Recent projects include Marty Stuart’s Pilgrim and Don McLean’s tribute album to Marty Robbins. He’s even more active these days as an illustrator of children’s books, with projects ranging from the Franklin Library editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to writing and illustrating his own children’s book, On Granddaddy’s Farm. Examples of his illustrations for children’s books are also featured in the show.
As a result of his work with Esquire, Allen became a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated for 20 years. ”Dick Gangel, the art director there, liked to use artists as journalists,“ he says. ”He’d send us all over to do visual essays on sports.“ Over the years, Allen created visual essays for the magazine on everything from sailboat racing and golf to football rivalries and the American West of artist Frederick Remington. On all of his assignments, Allen says, he was given full creative rein: ”The good art directors would give the artist the problem and let him deal with it.“ Allen also made portraits of jazz greats for The New Yorker for 18 years until, in his words, ”Rupert Murdoch bought the magazine and turned it into a different animal.“
Allen’s most glamorous assignment came when Esquire dispatched him to the Nevada set of The Misfits, the 1961 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. Allen sketched on-site for three weeks and also took hundreds of snapshots to work with back in his New York studio. His memories of Monroe remain as vivid as the photographs and sketches on display in the Ryman show. ”I was set not to be impressed with her,“ he says with a laugh. ”Then the first time I saw her, she was coming out of her trailer. She had that white hair and those red lips, and she was wearing a white dress with red strawberries. She was walking under this white umbrella in the white-hot sun on the Nevada salt flats and, wow, she glowed.“
Though Allen has rubbed shoulders with the superstars of film and music and traveled the world on assignments for the most respected magazines of the 20th century, he remains surprisingly humble about his career. ”Many times in my life, I’ve felt like an impostor and I’ve thought, ‘What am I doing here and how am I supposed to act?’ “ he admits. One look at the amazing collection of paintings, drawings, and sketches on the walls at the Ryman gallery is proof positive that as an artist, Tom Allen has always been the real thing.
