11:28 AM

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire by Russel Patterson

Russell Patterson was a celebrated and prolific American cartoonist, illustrator and scenic designer. Patterson’s art deco magazine illustrations helped promote the idea of the 1920s and 1930s fashion style known as the flapper. As his career blossomed, his ubiquitous version of the modern Jazz Age woman graced the covers and interior pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and& Photoplay, among many other magazines. As celebrated at that time as the “Gibson Girl” had been years before, his “Patterson Girl” was, in the words of Armando Mendez, “simultaneously brazen and innocent.”  Martha H. Kennedy cites Patterson’s dependence on the “graphic power of elegant, outlined forms, linear patterns of clothing and trailing smoke to compose strongly decorative, eye-catching designs.” Women of the time turned to Patterson’s work to follow trends in clothing, jewelry and cosmetics.