""Preview" Story Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 5, 1938"   Lot no. 4078

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By John Lagatta (1894-1977)

1938
31.75" x 24.50"
Mixed Media on Board
Signed Lower Center

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"Dancing the minuet before a camera and the hundred people behind it isn't the same as just dancing because you like the person you're dancing with." Story illustration for "Preview" by Richard Sherman, published in The Saturday Evening Post, November 5, 1938, with their copyright label on verso.

Mixed media, including oil, gouache, crayon, and glaze on board. Verso has faint unfinished graphite sketch of female figure. Signed "John LaGatta" in lower center image. Taped to window matte; framed.



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ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

John LaGatta showed a full appreciation of the female figure in his illustrations. In even the most decorously dressed of his models, the clothes appeared to reveal the figure rather than to hide it. Millions of readers would have had it no other way.

   Despite his emphasis on the figure, there is no overtone of suggestiveness in LaGatta’s work. The women are painted in frank admiration of their beauty and he made them colorful, curvaceous, and vital.

   LaGatta was born in Naples, Italy, but received his education in America, studying under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Frank Alvah Parsons at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. His first work was in advertising and much of his early work shows the influence of Etienne Drian, the famous French illustrator.

   As he developed his own personal style, LaGatta’s work was in tremendous demand. He worked for nearly a decade to the limit of his capacities in supplying all the magazines that competed for his pictures. After the ‘forties, LaGatta curtailed his output, but found a new career in teaching at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, California where he was a tough but enthusiastic instructor. He was elected into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 1984.