Peter Helck


by
Armand Cabrera


Clarence Peter Helck was born in New York City in 1893. According to his memoirs he had a fascination with trains and drew them at every chance as a young boy. At the age of 13 he witnessed the 1906 Vanderbilt cup race on Long Island. This began a lifelong interest with cars and racing. At 19 he illustrated the cover for the Brighton Beach Motordrome. He studied art at the Art Students League in Manhattan and in those early days Helck worked for department store advertising and some New York film companies as a poster artist. In 1921 Helck studied in England with muralist Frank Brangwyn. It was Brangwyn who instilled in him the need to work from life something that served Helck well as an artist and an illustrator all through his career.


Helck worked for many of the major magazines of the time providing editorial and advertising illustrations. He is remembered for his powerful depictions of automotive and industrial subjects and is considered the premier artist of those fields. Helck’s advertising art won the Harvard Award for an industrial series for Westinghouse, four Art Directors Medals in New York and top awards in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago.


Peter Helck was also a successful gallery artist receiving many awards for his work. Throughout his career Helck travelled and painted the countryside in between his illustration assignments in Europe and America.

In 1944 Helck had the opportunity to satisfy his love of automobile racing and his art when Esquire approached him about painting a series of eight illustrations for ‘Great moments in American Sport’. The paintings were released as a set of prints and the originals toured the country promoted by the magazine.

His success as an artist allowed him to collect automobiles, acquiring many famous historical racing cars including the 1906 Locomobile number 16 which won the Vanderbilt Race in 1908. He became acquainted with many of the drivers through his illustration assignments and acted as a strong supporter of the Veteran Motor Car Club of America with his work for the various periodicals Bulb Horn, Antique Automobile, Horseless Carriage.

Helck was a founding member of the Famous Artists School in Westport, CT., working there in the first year with other notables including Austin Briggs, Fred Ludekens, Al Parker, Norman Rockwell, and Harold von Schmidt. Helck was later on the FAS faculty in Westport with Rube Goldberg and Al Capp.
 

Each year the Automotive Fine Arts Society awards their prestigious peer voted award for excellence. This award is named the "Peter Helck Trophy."

Helck was inducted into the Society of Illustrators hall of fame in 1968.


In 2006 a Helck painting would become the most expensive piece of automotive fine art ever sold at auction, gathering over $100,000 at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance automotive event.

Peter Helck passed away in 1988.


I would like to thank Timothy Helck for taking the time to correspond with me and allowing me to use the information posted on the Peter Helck site. I recommend visiting the site and reading Peter’s memoirs. Peter Helck is one of the true greats among American illustrators.


Bibliography

The Checkered Flag
Peter Helck

Great Auto Races
Peter Helck

75 Years with Palette, Paintbrush and Wheels
Bulb Horn July September Issue
Peter Helck

Forty Illustrators and How They Work
Ernest Watson

Illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post
Ashley Halsey Jr.

The Illustrator in America (three volumes)
1900-1960
1880-1980
1860-200
Walt Reed

Quote

Cultivate a policy of knowing thoroughly as much as possible about the subject you are called upon to illustrate. The casual reader seems ever ready to take pen in hand to prove his powers of observation, and the lack of the same in the illustrator. ~Peter Helck


Frank Frazetta 1928-2010

by
Armand Cabrera

I needed a few days to process what I would say about Frank Frazetta who passed away on May 10th. I never knew the man. His biography is well documented but I thought I would say something about him anyway. The impact his art had on me as a child was huge and helped me to become an artist.


Frank Frazetta got me to read when I was 11. While I had read Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson; I spent most of my days reading comics and playing with my friends. Like many people I bought Conan the Adventurer based on the stunning artwork for the cover.


I had never heard of Robert E. Howard and did not know who Frazetta was but the cover sold me. Some things have a profound effect on us as children. These paintings were some of those things for me.

I continued to buy Conan books long after they were any good, based on Frazetta covers. When those ran out I bought books with whatever Frazetta artwork I could find. He had the ability to make the characters seem real. Frazetta’s Conan, John Carter and Tarzan were those characters for me; they were who I saw when I read those stories. The paintings were realistic and fantastic at the same time. The images he created are some of the most powerful fantasy images ever made. His work has influenced every aspect of fantasy media in the last forty years.

His paintings have a facile economy to them, Fred Astaire with a paint brush. Part of his magic lay in his ability to give you just enough information to be real without painting everything in a finished way to the edges of the canvas. The viewer is allowed to participate in the creation of the world in the painting. It was a lot harder to do than it looks.

He had his influences from artist friends like Roy Krenkel and illustrators of the past like J. Allen St. John. He absorbed all of them and made them better and made them Frank Frazetta. Most of the illustrators I know got into the field because of Frazetta; he was the artist’s artist. Drawing ability, color, design; he had it all.

He changed how artists worked in the field of publishing. He made the world a better place for artists, even those that didn’t have his talent. Frazetta with his ability demanded the return of his work, the right to keep and sell his originals and the rights to the images. He built an empire around his work, selling books of just his fantasy art, calendars and posters.

Frank Frazetta’s death marks the end of an era. Often imitated never surpassed, Frazetta set the high bar for fantasy art like some 500 year creative flood never to be repeated in our lifetimes. He will be missed.