Arts Unknown: The Life & Art of Lee Brown Coye

Arts Unknown The life & Art of Lee Brown Coye Luis Ortiz

Arts Unknown The Life & Art of

LEE BROWN COYE Luis Ortiz

Nonstop Press New York

Arts The Life & Art of

Nonstop Press

Unknown LEE BROWN COYE Luis Ortiz

New York

to the memory of my mother Norma Luisa

text © 2005 by Luis Ortiz art © 2005 Lee Brown Coye Estate Art attributed to Weird Tales on pages 13, 55, 73, 76, 78, 80-85, 87-92, 94,-95, 97, 99-100, 113, 117-118, 122-123, 134, 147, 151, 155-157, 159-162, 170-171, 174 © Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the Lee Brown Coye Estate. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. First Edition 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN-13 cloth: 978-1-933065-04-5 ISBN-13 ebook: 978-1-933065-05-2 Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication

Ortiz, Luis. Arts Unknown : the life & art of Lee Brown Coye / Luis Ortiz. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-933065-04-4 1. Coye, Lee Brown. 2.Artists — United States — Biography. I.Title. N6537.C67O78 2005

730'.92 QBI04-800036

For bulk purchases or special sales, please contact: NonStop POB 981 Peck Slip Station New York, N.Y. 10272-0981 email: [email protected] Every reasonable effort has been made to identify and track down copyright holders. The publisher would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention. Copy Editor: Beret Erway Art Direction: Luis Ortiz production by Nonstop Ink Printed in S. Korea

CONTENTS 1 OUT OF SHEER ART

10 page 7

page 15

HOME AGAIN

page 23

4

SHADOWS ON THE WALL page 109

LEAN BROWN COW page 27

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5 CAZENOVIA DAYS

MCGURTY DISCS page 35

6 SYRACUSE SKETCHES

page 45

Fulltime

page 57

GOTHIC REDUX

page 127

ARKHAM TO CARCOSA page 135

page 63

9 DRAWING WITH RAZORS page 79

NOTES

page 166

BIBLIOGRAPHY

page 168

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS page 169

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8 August Detour

page 119

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PUBLISHED ART CHECKLIST page 163

page 101

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3 LEONIA

page 93

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2 TULLY TEA ROOM

CORPUS ILLUSTRUM

16 STICKS

page 149

INDEX

page 170

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preface Although Lee Brown Coye was a prolific artist, much of his art, over the years, has been scattered to the four winds, trashed by printers, or destroyed in fires.We also have the case of the 1930s murals he did for the Cazenovia School in central New York State.These may still exist under four or five coats of house paint on the stage walls of the school auditorium. This history of lost art has forced us to use reproductions, in some cases, taken from poor quality pulp magazines, newspapers, and photos taken for private reference by the artist.The appearance of this book should hopefully bring original art to light and we may be able to upgrade our image quality in future editions.Towards this end we would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who has Coye art.

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Out of Sheer Art “...his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” – Sherwood Anderson n later years, towards the end of his life, Lee Brown Coye liked to tell the story of his visit to Mann’s Brook in the spring of 1938, apropos of his almost cabalistic use of rough sticks in his artwork. How on a trout fishing trip along the little-known stream southwest of DeRuyter, New York, he had come across the remains of an old railroad embankment running through the wilderness. Following the trackless grade, he entered a thick forest of evergreens and scrub apple trees which, after a few miles, opened up onto a pasture. “As I started to work into the scrub growth I noticed a strange pattern of stones lying on the ground. They were flat stones as if taken from a stone wall or from one of the many railroad culverts [...]. [At first appearance a] sort of a giant architect’s drawing, but on examination it was more like a maze.” Coye continued on and came upon a collection of strange lattice works of branches, sticks and boards “[...] nailed and wired together in fantastic array[...].Sometimes these structures were stuck in a pile of

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stones or a stone wall[...]. One I remember could have been a child’s tree house. It had a definite third dimension[ality], except it was so abstract and useless [...].” Not too far from this weird garden stood the ruins of an abandoned tumbledown farmhouse, sinking fast into the creeping flora of weeds and lilac bushes. “The lawn and trees and even the house were covered with these structures. I went inside and on the walls in some of the rooms were drawings, in what appeared to be charcoal, of these weird, abstract concoctions [...]. Some of them covered a whole wall;huge,fantastic murals.” At this point Coye embellishes his

account by telling of his discovery of stone steps: “I found myself in a dark cellar, examining the rusty stains in the grooves of this huge stone slab, when a hand shoots out from the darkness and grabs me. I took a small iron frying pan I had clipped to my belt for cooking fish and walloped whoever it was that had a hold of me in that murky black cellar.The hand let go and I high-tailed it out of there.”1 Coye’s yarn, sounding as if it had been told beside a nighttime campfire, would interest more than one writer to consider its implications as the premise for horror fiction. here are many artists who have slipped through the intersects of twentieth century art, some deservedly so, but a few also deserving of rediscovery. In some cases artists considered firstrate in their time, embraced by publishers, galleries and art critics, today have their works residing in museum basement storerooms, rarely if ever seeing the bright lights of a gallery.This evanescence of art needs to be more earnestly exam-

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ined. While some artists’ aspirations are more focused and straightforward, Lee Brown Coye was an eccentric, zigzagging his way through the byways of twentieth century art.Due to his modest background and incomplete education, he was always unsure of himself and the unique art he would create throughout his life.This uncertainty drove him constantly to keep busy with new projects and art,regardless of set-backs. At first appearance his long-boned, wiry frame, never quite getting over 145 pounds throughout his life, and his preference for wearing bluejeans, suggests the character of a farmer.Yet, Lee was a magnet for intelligent, creative people who recognized his own uniqueness in the central and upstate New York art scene, a uniqueness that survived through the many metamorphosing art trends of the twentieth century in America. Lee was an art machine. He created pulp art, fine art, silver and wood sculptures, photos, murals, models, and book illustrations. He was also, at times, a writer. For all his emotional attachment to the region where he was born, there was never the degree of monotony in his work that we find in the work of some of his contemporaries like Edward Hopper. Lee’s art represents an ordinary blue-collar world, and unlike Hopper’s paintings of readily picturesque places, Lee’s work squeezes the picturesque out of less than picturesque places by revealing the emotional aura of even the most mundane neighborhoods. He was always something of a misfit and loner in the fine art world, and was

never completely comfortable in the commercial art context. His style of art could shift from modernistic abstraction one moment to a stylized realism the next—from high art to popular art— confusing critics from both camps who would take sides, denigrating one style while praising another (sometimes doing so with pictures hanging side by side in an exhibition). His heightened sensitivity to a vanishing nineteenth century folk-view and gothic mood helped him create unsettling pictures of a region of New York State he believed haunted with bizarre spirits. n 1906 Tully,NewYork,had a population of 574. For a small town at the turn of the twentieth century,Tully was remarkably self-contained with churches, a mason hall, hotels, a train station,

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blacksmiths, and even its own newspaper. Just a little over a hundred years earlier, it had been a few pioneer log cabins at a convergence of five valleys in a wilderness of evergreens filled with wild bears, wolves, and big cats.To the northwest, an Iroquois tribe of Onondaga Indians lived peacefully on their reservation. In the early 1800s, with the economy ready to bustle, Lee Brown Coye’s forebears made the move from Connecticut to the central NewYork region. His great-great grandfather William Smith purchased land from John Lincklaen, explorer and agent of the Holland Land Company,in 1807. After the Revolutionary War, tracts of land had been laid out in midstate New York as bounty to be divided among American soldiers—townships were proclaimed,seemingly using a classical Roman-Greek dictionary: Fabius, Homer, Pompey, Ilion, Syracuse, and Tully from Marcus Tullius Cicero. Fortunately, the surveyors-captains allowed the mountains, lakes and rivers to keep their gregarious and pastoral Iroquois names so that Tully lies in a glacial carved valley situated in the county of Onondaga neighboring the Tioughnioga River and Skaneateles Lake. The region is a motley collection of kettlehole lakes and ponds ice-built during the last glaciation and forming the drainage divide between the St. Lawrence River to the north and Susquehanna River Basins to the south. From time to time during the late nineteenth century the Tully Lake area was considered as a possible water reservoir for the booming city of Syracuse.

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Page 7 – ink and brush spot drawing for Spice magazine, 1945; page 8–1914 photo of the Coye home; this page clockwise top – ink drawing, ca. 1922; right – cover to PM magazine showing central New York scene, (1937); bottom–The Doors,”Watercolor, 1957.

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Boom times began with the opening of the Erie Canal on October 25, 1825. The “artificial river,” forty feet wide and four feet deep, pierced the wilderness of central New York on its way to Lake Erie. As specially designed flat bottom boats hauled freight, new towns sprung up along the length of the canal. One of the commodities hauled was salt discovered in the region. Brine was pumped out of tall derricks in the Tully Valley and piped to Salinas, outside of Syracuse, where the water was boiled to extract salt. Syracuse went from a quiet, lonely region of gloomy marshes and cedar swamps unfit for cultivation and eliciting the response from a visitor in 1820, “It would make an owl weep to fly over it!” to a grand metropolis. Salt extraction continued in Onondaga County for close to a hundred years until cheaper mining methods were discovered in the west. The boom times brought all strata of people to the area.Lee stated that at least two of his ancestors “[...] if not members [...] were close associates of the Loomis gang”. The Loomises were a family of scoundrels and horse thieves living in central New York in the mid 1800s.The gang terrorized and pillaged their neighbors from their farm on the edge of Ninemile Swamp, in the Chenango valley, supposedly hiding their booty in a secret cave in a mountain, and for a decade no one could stop them.It finally took a mob and lynch law (Plumb Loomis and a man who had been in his employ were each strung up several times until confessions were wrung from

both men) to break up and dispel the gang. The legend of the Loomis gang’s treasure hidden in a lost cavern somewhere in the Chenango Valley persists. Lee appeared amused by some of his larcenous black-sheep ancestors. The central NewYork area is rich in local tales and folklore traditions from the early Dutch, English, and German settlers, to go along with the Native American Indian legends already in

place. One Onondaga legend relates how a great reptile, the “Mosqueto”, came out of Lake Onondaga, near what is now Syracuse, and attacked a number of the tribe. The Indian stories were ridiculed by settlers, until enormous fossil bones (which we now recognize as mastodon bones from the Wisconsian Ice Age) were uncovered in the area. The one bit of local history that has

entered into general American iconology is the Onondaga Stone Giant, or the Cardiff Giant as it came to be known when unearthed at Stub Newell’s farm off the Tully Center road in 1869. The find created an immediate controversy whether it was the fossil remains of a ten-foot tall human being or a colossal ancient statue. Clark’s History of Onondaga, published in 1849, recorded that there existed among the Onondaga Indians a tradition of troublesome creatures which included “Quis Quis, or the big hog, the big bear, the horned water serpent, and the stone giant”.This particular stone giant was also a carnivore, devouring any member of the Onondaga tribe it came across. The news of the discovery spread and thousands of people from far and wide arrived to glance at the prostrate wonder. (Lee’s great-grandfather Shubael Brown was a teenager at the time and would have made the five mile trip on the “dug road” to see it.) The opportunistic showman Phineas Taylor Barnum offered $50,000 for the rights to exhibit it, before he decided that a copy (essentially a fake of a fake) would be just as good (ticket sales at his downtown Manhattan museum proved him right).A local New York State geologist, after a viewing of the Giant declared, “Altogether, it is the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country, and although, perhaps, not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving of the attentions of archaeologists.” It’s likely that the post-Civil War American public was ripe for such a hoax,and the block of gypsum,quarried

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Page 10 – pencil and watercolor drawing of Tully, N.Y., house, ca. 1919; this page clockwise top –watercolor,Tully salt well, 1940; right–”Lone Figure” 1930 woodcut; . bottom right–Ink and watercolor drawing, ca. 1946; bottom center – woodcut print,“Wickershire House, Cortland, N.Y.”1931; bottom left–pencil drawing “Grandpa”showing George Coye, 1934.

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in Iowa and crudely carved by ordinary Chicago stone-cutters, succeeded in fooling the public for months. The perpetrator of the hoax, George Hull, had planned to bury the giant in a cave at Salisbury, Connecticut, until he remembered the reports of fossil remains found some years earlier at Onondaga Hollow near Syracuse (besides the “serpent bones”, there were also ancient tracks of what appear to be a giant bird found in the vicinity), and that a distant relative of his happened to live in the locality. (After the hoax was revealed some Tully locals remembered seeing the carriage carrying a 3,720 pound box passing through their town a year before the giant’s discovery.) During the 1930s the Cardiff Giant was exhibited again in Onondaga County, this time serving as a focal point for regional nostalgia. Seeing the giant today at its final resting place in Coopertown’s Farmer’s Museum, it’s so completely of a simpler time that it’s hard to imagine anyone being taken in by the hoax, yet the statue has never failed to make money for its owners—even today one will have to pay an admission charge at the museum to see it. hen William Coye and Ida May Smith married in 1906, he was twenty-one, she was nineteen. For a short time, they lived in Syracuse in the house on Sabine Street where Lee Brown Coye was born on July 24,1907. Ida May Coye was homesick in Syracuse and less than six months after Lee’s birth, in January, 1908, William Coye moved his small family to the town of

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Tully, eighteen miles south of Syracuse. There they lived in a big house in the center of town on North Street, built by Ida May’s grandfather Shubael Brown. The house had an indoor flush toilet (a rarity in Tully at the time) using rainwater caught in a cistern. In October of 1908 Lee’s sister Helen was born at home. Lee’s father was a typewriter man. He commuted to Syracuse by train where he worked for Smith & Brothers Typewriter Company. The company began operations during 1903 when Lyman Cornelius Smith, a businessman who had made his fortune in firearms (he’s the Smith in Smith & Wesson), began manufacturing Smith Premier Typewriters in a former shotgun factory. William Coye was related to Lyman Smith through William’s grandfather Shubael Brown, and worked in the production department of the typewriter company as a “liner”—the person responsible for the alignment of the type-striking keys. Typewriters were still fairly new inventions at the turn of the century, and the grave defect of the machines was the herky-jerky impressions of letters on paper. Conscientious manufacturers went to great lengths to insure an even baseline; as one advertising copy of the time claimed, “Perfect alignment is the sure test of a perfect typewriter.” One of Lee’s earliest memories is of a terrifying night at

his grandfather George Coye’s farmhouse in North Pitcher. “I remember the night well. It was in August and it was very hot, and had I known about such things then, I would have called it humid. I [...] had gone to bed in the squeaky old spool bedstead with the feather mattress and the feather pillows. The bed was always damp, and your body settled down through the mattress onto the slats, which was uncomfortable enough; but this night there was a wretchedness and a foreboding which was not understandable to my seven years—a misgiving I could not account for.For one thing I was afraid a thunderstorm would blow up, and thunderstorms in the night made me timid and weak [...].

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Page 12 – silver sculpture, “Pancho”. ca. 1964; this page clockwise top left – ink and brush illustration for Spice magazine, 1945; right – oil painting, Rip Van Winkle, (detail), ca. 1944; bottom right – original Ink and scratchboard drawing from Weird Tales Magazine; bottom left – ink and brush dustjacket for Scylla the Beautiful, 1939; page 14 top right – watercolor, advertising art, 1934; page 14 bottom left – watercolor, Fall Of the House of Usher, (LBC’s last painting, completed a few days before his stroke), 1976.

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“The wretchedness was alleviated somewhat by the voices—friendly sounds that came up through the stovepipe-hole in the old farmhouse. There was grandfather and grandmother and on this particular night the loud voice of Will Newcomb the undertaker[...]. “But the hum of the voices was reassuring and, besides the undefined excitability, was conducive to sleep. There was a brief time when the voices were lost but vaguely heard, and then came the noise—a great boom like thunder, and I jerked upright—terrified.There was silence in the house, but the lamp-light still shone up through the stovepipe-hole, and I knew someone was still down there. “Then the undertaker’s voice said, ‘By Judas Priest,it’s the drums.’ “ ‘It must be,’ said my grandfather, and there was the sound of walking feet and the screendoor screeched and slammed, and there were brief footfalls

on the stoop as they all went out into the night. There was no lightning. The moon still left its light on the carpet but the booming rolled on for a long time, and I was alone in the house, experiencing real fear. “The next day they told me about them. How on certain hot, damp nights, generally in August, noises like thunder would roll across the sky, and there would be no clouds or even heat lightning. I remember no explanation [...] and it was many years before I could go to sleep with ease in that house.” Grandfather Coye and Newcomb’s matter-of-fact discussion opened up young Lee’s imagination.

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Tully Tea Room n Tully at this time the closest thing to a town library was Willard C. Wheeler’s home. He had moved to Tully from Orange, New Jersey, in 1912, after buying the Tully Times. Like most small town publishers he was also the editor, hand-set metal type, and ran the press. On Thursdays afternoons two women came into the shop to fold and address the printed sheets of the weekly. Lee had gone over to introduce himself soon after Wheeler arrived in town. Wheeler asked him how old he was and Lee bombastically announced, “I’ll be five in July.”Wheeler owned a large library that he and his wife had collected when they were writing and illustrating children’s stories. They allowed the Coye children to borrow books from this library and Lee found Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, and the Baum Oz books there. Miss Casey, the grammar school teacher, allowed Lee and Helen to enter her first grade class together, even though Helen was fourteen months younger then Lee.It was not long before Lee was scolded by teachers for drawing cartoons in the margins of his school books. A Tully resident at the time

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remembers that Lee left his drawings all over town,“usually in places where they were not supposed to be.” Other residents remember Lee as a “Holy terror.” Another resident,Will Bugby, recalls looking out the rear window of the Old Reliable Drug Store one day and seeing Lee painting broad white stripes on a stray cat.1 Lee would draw on the backs of penny postcards and give these away to school friends and teachers. His sixth-

grade teacher, Fanny Dowding, still had her postcard more than forty years later and presented it to Lee at a 1955 oneman show in Tully. Early Sunday mornings, Lee and Helen would be up before their parents to get the “funny papers.” The oversize colorful comics pages spurred Lee’s artistic bent as he sprawled on the floor copying Andy Grump from Sidney Smith’s The Grumps, or drawing characters from Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks, the latter having a small town background similar to that of Tully.The family also had a big blackboard set up in the kitchen which Lee would fill with comic strip characters. By 1917 William Coye had grown tired of his long daily commute to Syracuse and decided to buy out the owner of the ice cream parlor on the ground floor of the Slayton Hotel in Tully.The hotel was a four-story affair built in 1884,but by the early part of the twentieth century it had become an apartment house when there was no longer a need for a nineteenth-century Victorian style hotel in the small town. At the turn of the century the temperance movement had turned Tully into a dry town and the

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hotel barroom had been converted into a counter for an ice cream parlor. Lee’s father added more space for a tea room by leasing part of the hotel lobby. For Lee’s father running a tea room was a big step up from working in the typewriter factory. He was now an entrepreneur and his own boss. When not in school, Lee and his sister Helen helped out at the Tea Room.During the summer when groups of campers from the lakeside came into town, Lee could be found washing dishes unless he could talk one of his friends into doing it for him—free ice cream served as the main incentive. Helen liked working in the tea room, even if she seemed too small to work the big black cash register. She went to the tea room everyday after school and made herself a chocolatewalnut sundae before beginning work. As a child, Lee was spoiled to a certain degree. Both Helen and Lee were rarely punished though Lee’s mischief ran to Tom Sawyerish tricks and retorts. One summer a carnival came to Tully and staked its tents on the athletic field behind the red schoolhouse. William Coye was taking Helen and Lee to the campgrounds when a childless neighbor asked to borrow one of his children to take to the circus—the neighbor believed it improper for a grown adult to be seen at the carnival unaccompanied by a child.At the midway tent, Lee saw Helen in the stands and called down to her over the hurly-gurly music and trumpeting elephants, “Helen, Helen, look at the lady with the mustache!” The lady in question was not part of the

carnival troupe and the childless neighbor was mortified.2 The year 1918 brought an influenza epidemic that would kill more people than World War I. After a few deaths in Tully, Lee and his sister Helen were packed up and sent to Grandfather Coye’s isolated farm in North Pitcher, New York.The place had a dozen cows, a pig pen, and smokehouse, and was surrounded by berry patches. Helen was a bit of a tomboy, spending most of her time outdoors swimming and catching frogs at the nearby brook. Lee could be

found around the adults and neighbors, “wheelin in” to the back porch, where he was entranced by talk of crops, weather,people,and superstitious credos. Lee’s grandfather George Coye moonlighted as a cobbler and an undertaker’s assistant. Lee would always remember his ill ease when seeing his grandfather, already gruff and intimidating in his eyes, with the local mortician Will Newcomb—both dressed in dark suits, derby hats, and perched on the top seat of a hearse drawn by a solemn team of black horses. Years later Coye attempted to convey some of the “inconveniences” he felt at the time: “[...] the before-daybreak hours chasing cows and helping to milk, the mile or so walk to school, cocking hay and picking up potatoes, and the myriad chores that upset the peaceful life of dreaming and fishing, and[...] painting pictures.”3 Around this time an itinerant postcard photographer made a panoramic photograph of the Slayton Hotel with William Coye and Helen standing in front of the Coye Tea Room [pg.17]. Helen is wearing a big sharp-looking bow in her hair.A little way off along the expansive hotel porch, leaning aloofly against a post, is Lee. The faces are too small and the picture too faded from age and sunlight,to make out features and all that is noticeable about the people are the postures. Helen and her father, in his white jacket uniform, are relaxed while Lee appears tensely coiled and ready to jump behind the post. The street turns sharply and shows a Goodrich “tyres” store with a Ford

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Page 15 – pencil drawing ca.1945; Page 16 – – pencil sketch,untitled,ca.1944; this page top left – pencil drawing, untitled, 1933; right – scratchboard drawing of huckster, ca. 1939; bottom postcard photo of the Coye Tea Room at the Hotel Slayton, Tully, N.Y., ca. 1919, showing Helen and William Coye standing in front of tea room and LBC at right.

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1923, Lee and Helen and two school friends, Frances and Cyrinus, got up early and waited in front of the tea room for the Syracuse bus. Once in the city they went straight to the Strand Theater to see Lon Chaney,“the man of a thousand faces”, in the blockbuster movie of the day: The Hunchback of Norte Dame. On line outside the ticket booth, the uniformed ushers sang out in the cool autumn sunshine, “have your money ready, name your tickets up or down, you’ll get in quicker.”As the group stood behind blue velvet ropes they had time to study the glass-covered coming attractions before entering the red lobby and plunging into the half-darkness of the theater. Lee and his friend sat in the “up” balcony seats apart from the girls in hen Lee was fifteen-years-old he the “down” orchestra seats. When the earned pocket money by doing odd jobs in Roy Walter Riehlman’s bakery next door to the Coye Tea Room. On his own, Lee created artistic shapes using bread dough. Rielman would bake and set some of these out with the regular bread—becoming Lee’s first exhibition and sales. One of Lee’s responsibilities at the bakery was to “mind” the racks of bread dough while the yeast did its work. One hot day Lee decided he had time to go fishing at nearby Green Lake. When he returned to the bakery he found that the dough had risen rapidly in the heat and massed together, portions flopping onto the floor. Lee caught hell for his dereliction and his duties at the bakery were cut back—he now had more time to take his homemade fishpole,little more than a stick,to the local fishing hole. Early one Saturday in the fall of Model-T parked in front, and distinct in the foreground is a horse watering trough. The horse-and-buggy world of isolated spaced-out homes and monotonous satisfactions was quickly turning into a world where fast automobiles sped through the main streets, people paid ten cents to see monochromatic pictures on a white sheet in a big darkened room, and kids and adults alike were entertained by the four-color Sunday comic pages. At age thirteen Lee was already training to be an artist; he had borrowed Suggestions for a Course of Instruction in Color and Free Hand Perspective and Drawing from the school library, and both were long overdue.4

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lights came up they all met outside, blinking in the daylight. The day continued in this manner as the Tully gang hopped from one movie theater to another along Salina Street. The buses had stopped running by the time they were ready to go home and they caught the late train back to Tully. On the ride back, Lee asked the girls how many movies they had seen, and they said they had seen a total of four movies; Lee and his friend announced that they had trumped them by going to five moving pictures. By sitting in the cheaper seats,the boys had saved enough to afford one more movie. They all agreed that Hunchback of Norte Dame was the best film they had seen. Helen had liked Pola Negri in The Spanish Dancer. y the summer of 1924, business at the tea room had declined and when the Corona Typewriter Company approached William Coye about their plans to set up a new plant to build portable typewriters in Groton, New York, he decided to sell the tearoom and make the move. Shortly before Helen and Lee were to start their new school in Groton, their mother’s grandfather, Shubel Norton Brown, died on August 31.The funeral forced them to miss the beginning of the school year.With their delayed entrance to the high school, and the name Lee Coye on the attendance roll call, when he finally appeared, Lee disappointed his classmates who had gotten the notion, from his unusually sonorous name,that he was Chinese. According to his sister, Lee and his friends had “deep thinking things that

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Page 18 – woodcut of “Universalist Church” Cortland, N.Y., ca. 1932; this page top left – “The Bachelor” ink, 1929;“ top right “ Privy”woodcut ca. 1930; bottom right –ink drawing from Beat!! Beat! Drum!, 1939, bottom middle – ink and scratchboard, Spice Magazine,ca.1946; bottom left – ink sketch,ca.1939.

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they did” together and had little interest in schoolwork. Helen was more focused in her studies and by her senior year in high school had passed Lee in class. She would eventually graduate a year before him in 1925.Lee had somehow managed to get on the Groton High School football team, playing center, though barely weighing in at 125 pounds, and became close friends with the team captain, Paul Gilchrist. Just before prom dance, three boys from the school, including Paul, had asked Lee about his sister’s plans for the dance. Of the three, Lee told Helen to wait until Paul asked her before accepting any prom invitation. During the 1920s it was customary for high school seniors to take a trip to Washington, D.C. Lee Coye and Ruth Carmody were blind dates from different high schools when they met on their class trip to the nation’s capital. At the time, Ruth was a shy girl from Waverly, New York. She was two years younger than Lee, and it’s unlikely the two would have met if Lee had been a better student and kept pace in class.Once back in Groton, Lee began making regular trips down to Waverly. Lee’s mediocre to average grades in school painted him as an indifferent student. He had many interests and was always too busy to study, frustrating his teachers, who recognized his innate intelligence, when he wasn’t overwhelming them with his headstrong imagination and propensity for pranks (including blasting his trombone at illtimed moments), or his sheer enthrallment with drawing.

One day in art class, Lee had done a sketch he was particularly proud of and when his teacher Leslie Ryan pointed out flaws in the picture, Lee answered her with a brash “I believe, Mrs. Ryan, that you would find fault in [John Singer] Sargent’s paintings.” On another occasion, Lee was banished from the drawing room when he did a charcoal portrait of an American Indian with crossed eyes. Like most artists, Lee drew and sketched with unusual facility from an early age.A few examples of his childhood art have survived, and the time and energy he lav-

ished on these are apparent. These schoolboy drawings were chiefly humorous, scratchy copies of cartoons intended for his own recreation or the amusement of family and friends, but a few were creative reimaginings of houses in town. At this stage Lee was declaring his intention–to anyone interested–of becoming a cartoonist. Lee’s parents were not at ease with their son’s artistic leaning. Still, one evening soon after they moved to Groton, Lee and his father went to see his art teacher Mrs. Ryan. Lee wanted to know about courses of study to become a cartoonist. At this time, anyone aspiring to become an artist could expect to study for years,usually in Europe—or in the case of cartooning or commercial art go into an apprenticeship. Cartooning as a new field, developed to sell newspapers, was not generally taught in art schools. Ryan mentioned the need to have a grounding in academic fundamentals as a prerequisite to an art career and directed Lee to the art program at Syracuse University. (During the 1920s a spate of learn-by-mail “schools” took advantage of the dearth of cartooning classes by offering instruction by “professional”cartoonists—many of these correspondence courses were well put together and some who have taken them include Eizie Segar (Thimble Theatre), Carl Barks (Donald Duck),and Charles Schulz (Peanuts). Lee graduated Groton High School in 1926. His family lacked the funds that would be needed for a proper course of art study and the possibility of an artistic career seemed dim. Before long Lee was

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Page 20 – scratchboard from Spice magazine,1945; this page,top left – scratchboard,Spice ca.1945;top right– scratchboard,unknown,ca.1935; bottom right –ink drawing from Scylla the Beautiful, 1939, bottom middle – scratchboard, catalog art, ca. 1947; bottom left – ink,“The Bookworm”bookplate,ca.1930;Page 22 – scratchboard,unknown,1944.

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working as a draftsman at the SmithCorona plant on Washington Street in Syracuse (in 1926 Smith & Brothers Typewriter Company had merged with the Corona Typewriter Company). Lee appeared ready to follow in his father’s footsteps, but found office work stultifying and soon became bored with the mechanical routine at the Smith-Corona plant. He realized there would be no artistic achievement possible for him as long as he stayed there. n September 29, 1928, Helen was home in Groton when she received a phone call from Lee. He was in Waverly and announced that he had married Ruth. Up to this point, Lee had given no hint to his family of his marriage plans and Helen, caught off-guard, rushed to tell her parents. The couple settled in Syracuse near the university where Lee enrolled in an extension school art class taught by Professor George Hess. Even as a part-time student at the university, Lee was well known on campus. The Canton Tea Room near the campus gave jobs to the university students and Lee worked in the restaurant’s kitchen like many a freshman before him. Ruth had been taking classes with the idea of becoming a nurse. Professor Hess, a native Syracusan and graduate of Syracuse University, had studied in Paris, Munich, and Madrid. He was the first person Lee had met with a worldly outlook towards art. In Hess’ class, Lee sharpened his composition and was exposed for the first time to the academic techniques of anatomy and perspective.Hess also made him aware of the

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art scene beyond Onondaga County and the comic pages. To Lee, Hess was a “great philosopher [...].He had ideas”. In 1907,the year Lee had been born, the first cubist exhibition had been held in Paris. In a time when nineteenth century classicism and realistic modes of art ruled in America, the opening of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, in a New York City armory, showed American artists what modern European artists were creating.The Armory Show, after a slow start, began to draw huge crowds when a few newspapers printed mocking stories and cartoons of some of the artwork on display. Some art academicians were seen walking through the armory building shaking their heads in dismay or smiling in derision at their first look of the works of Duchamp, Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso, and many other avantgarde Europeans. The work of Americans at the show such as Hopper and John Sloan appeared somewhat quaint by comparison—and these were artists that had spent time in Paris. After the show, most American artists still went on following the utilitarian nineteenth-century modes of portraits, historical subjects, and landscapes. But some had seen the future of art, and by the mid 1920s European modernism was reaching a boiling point on this side of the Atlantic. The “Americanness” of art and realism seen in the contemporary

work of artists such as Edward Hopper was rapidly losing ground to the modernists, but bigger events were waiting over the horizon.5 This is the milieu in which Lee found himself when setting out into the world as a young artist.The talks with Professor Hess must have convinced Lee of the next step he had to take.

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3

Leonia

hat is striking about Lee Brown Coye is how incautiously he launched himself into the art world. Lee was impatient and only saw the limitations of living in Syracuse. He felt that he had to take a chance at making it in New York City, or at least being closer to the action and other artists actually living through their art. With high hopes of better things, and a hundred dollars in funds Lee had gotten from a friend who had faith in his talent, the newlyweds quit Syracuse in the early summer of 1929 and moved to the New York City commuter environs of Leonia, New Jersey, where they settled into a second floor furnished flat just off Christie Heights Street.“I went there against my father’s will,” he later stated, “He wanted me to stay at work and have nothing to do with art. He didn’t have any appreciation for it, I guess.”1 It was no accident that Lee picked the rural setting (its main throughway still unpaved at the time) of Leonia to live. Leonia had a thriving artist community that came together around 1915

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when a group of magazine illustrators, including Harvey Dunn, Charles Shepard Chapman, Dean Cornwell, and Howard McCormick, shared familial ties, studio space or were connected to

the Leonia School of Illustration.At the turn of the century advances in photograveur technology had allowed for the reproduction of pictures without slow, costly engraving. Many magazines such as Colliers, Century Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers Magazine began using cover and interior photography and art to try and beat each other’s circulation figures. This had opened up a new market for artists who could meet the requirements of commercial illustration. In the late 1800s, nationally prominent artist,children’s book illustrator,and author Peter Newell had moved to Leonia with his family from Illinois. His connections with artistic relatives and artist friends became the center of Leonia’s earliest art colony. Situated across the Hudson River from the upper west side of Manhattan, Leonia was a village of farms, and many barns were still in evidence when the George Washington Bridge opened a mile from the town in 1931. By then, many of those barns had become artists’ studios. Newell’s eldest daughter, Josephine, married Howard

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McCormick, originally from Hillsboro, Indiana, and the couple settled in Leonia. McCormick was a skillful magazine illustrator, wood engraver, and mural painter.The American Museum of Natural History had commissioned him to paint the backdrop for a Hopi village, and McCormick’s work there helped to revive the technique of gesso (wall painting using glue and pigment) in America. This was the technique he later used for six murals he did for the New Jersey State Museum at Trenton.Around 1908 McCormick, with fellow art-schoolmate and friend Charles S. Chapman, set up a joint studio in a Leonia barn. In 1911, after the death of his mentor Howard Pyle, Harvey Dunn rented a studio in Leonia to be near the New York magazine markets, including his mainstay The Saturday Evening Post. He met Chapman and in the summer of 1914 they opened the Leonia School of Illustration with thirty-four students. The old Civil War-era mansion they used for a school allowed for the boarding of artists,and art supplies were sold at cost, but Harvey Dunn was the reason artists began to invade Leonia like locusts. The accomplished Dunn quickly became an inspired and passionate teacher disseminating what he had learned under Pyle and his Brandywine School.At this time Dunn saw no separation between art and illustration and passed this philosophy on to his students. Dunn left for Europe during World War I and the Leonia School of Illustration would close soon after his return in 1920. He would later open the more

informal Harvey Dunn School of Art. The Dunn coterie of artists, with studios in suburban homes and barns throughout Leonia, offering critiques, sketching parties, news of the New York City art world, exhibits, and mutual support better suited Coye’s sentiment. Lee must have realized that the New

York brand of art bohemianism, then centered in Greenwich Village, went against the grain of his own temperament and background. The work of Leonian artists, done in murals, cartoons, magazine illustration, advertising, and whatever commercial work was available, reflected a Midwestern, and farming region, work ethic. Paul Mattingly, in his narrative history of Leonia, wrote: “The mutual instruction of the art colony ultimately meant more to most of these practicing artists than any

of the early apprenticeships or even the minimal formal instruction they received. In retrospect these individuals received as much from one another as from preeminent artists, such as Dunn and Chapman, who initially inspired their relocation to suburbia.” The Leonia art colony served as an efficient collegial surrogate for Lee, in a sense providing moral support along with some art instruction and professional contacts. Another mainstay of the Leonia art colony was the Canadian artist Robert E. Johnston. He came to Leonia from Toronto around 1921 to study with Harvey Dunn. Johnston had started out as a cartoonist for the Toronto Saturday Night and later worked for the New York World. In 1925, he won a one thousand dollar competition prize to paint a decorative mural of Walt Whitman for the town of Camden, New Jersey, and the money allowed him to set up his own studio in Leonia near his home. Johnston and his wife Kathleen befriended the struggling Coyes and would share their meals with Lee and Ruth–something a grateful Lee remembered later when he named his son Robert.2 Eventually, Coye came into contact with Howard McCormick and was able to get some lessons from the elder artist in making woodcuts. McCormick, following the informal studio school example of Dunn, would hold his own periodic art classes, charging one dollar per lesson. Every week or so, Lee would walk or take the short trolley ride to the Fort Lee Landing where he would catch a ferry across the Hudson River

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Page 23 & 24 – scratchboard from Spice magazine, 1945; this page, top left – pencil, ca. 1933; top right – pencil,“The Diarerealher,” (one of the drawings sent to Robert Johnston), Nov. 19, 1933; bottom right –ink drawing, ca. 1939, bottom left– pencil, , ca. 1936; bottom left – pencil,“Salvation Army”, ca. 1935; Page 26 , top – scratchboard, drawing from “Beat!! Beat! Drum!”, 1939; Page 26, bottom – woodcut,“Tavern #1”, 1930.

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of lights and people, and a gleeful sense of excitement and arrival prevailed. Living in the New York metropolitan area, Lee made some contacts, but few sales.He must have felt some intimidation at the rush and scale of the city. At this point in his career his nascent skills lacked the polish to sell professionally. Still, it’s probable that Lee might have made a go of it, if his timing hadn’t been so far off. The stock market crash in October 1929 triggered a great slump across the country and few people had money to spare for art. By the early 1930s even experienced artists found themselves forced to retreat from art or think more commercially. Great numbers of young artists were stopped dead in their tracks. It’s not clear how Lee to Manhattan. There he attempted to earned a living during his stay in Leonia. get freelance art jobs or place his art- Years later, Lee would call New York work with any gallery that would take it. More often than not he would return home with little to show for the effort. In June of 1929, Helen graduated from college and pooled resources with her fiancé Paul Gilchrist, in the sum of $495, to buy a brand new black Model A Ford roadster with red wheel hubs. They broke the car in by driving to Leonia with Ida May, all squeezed into the front seat. Their first night there, while their mother remained in Leonia resting, they drove through the Holland Tunnel and made a whirlwind excursion into Manhattan, Lee and Ruth riding in the rumble seat. The quartet motored around the city in the untiring Model A, sightseeing without stopping. The streets of the city were a blazed trail

“the lonesomest place in the world.” Lee had gotten some second-hand woodcarving tools from McCormick and began literally to grind out woodcuts, already showing some of the colloquial themes he would develop later. He would finish an edition,usually of a hundred prints or less, then as a frugal expediency sand down the plank and reuse it. There was a growing pile of art as Lee attempted to make a living as an artist. He sold these wherever he could or left them with galleries willing to take them on consignment. One work from this time is “Lone Figure,”[pg.11] a small woodcut showing a dark figure wrapped head to toe against the weather. But, a dotted vertical line suggests a rope, and the hooded figure may be standing on a scaffold just before the hangman springs the trapdoor.

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4

Lean Brown Cow

ith New York City already teeming with hundreds of unemployed artists, Lee and Ruth, discouraged and nearly destitute, their grubstake of a hundred dollars gone,borrowed money from their family and retreated to Groton.Before long Lee set up a modest studio downtown over a jewelry store and began making precise woodcuts and sketches of local sights and landmarks while taking in whatever commercial art jobs were available, mostly sign painting. At this time he also ventured a series of figure compositions that show his study of European art, including the woodcut titled “Three Figures,” a piece more in tune with Expressionism in its out-of-kilter buildings, with little architectural distinction, looming over an odd placement of people. The picture could have been a scene from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. This work was an experiment in technique and subject matter for Lee, and some of his other woodcuts reveal an illustrative quality close to that of American Lynd Ward’s wood-engraved novel-without-words.

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In his library Lee had a copy of Ward’s 1929 illustrated novel, Madman’s Drum, and Ward had been in Leonia at roughly the same time as Lee, though it is unrecorded if they ever met. While Lee and Ruth were still in New Jersey, Lee’s mother Ida May had an operation performed to relieve sinus problems. Soon after the operation she suffered a stroke.She had been a “practical invalid” most of her life. According to Lee,“She always said that her condition was due to the day she was born— Friday the 13th, [June] 1887.” Lee, Ruth, and Helen helped take care of Ida

May after her stroke, but she never fully recovered and died in the summer of 1930 at the age of forty-three. The insinuation has been made that this event led to Lee’s fascination with death, but the relationship between artist and mother is uncharted territory. From family letters, and reminiscences, she appeared to be a profoundly unhappy person and we can only speculate about the degree to which Ida May’s death may have been responsible for some of the morbid subject matter that Lee subsequently used.There was some manifestations of dark themes in Lee’s art before his mother’s death, and it is more likely that her effect on him in life was further-reaching than her death. Lee had always been drawn to the artistic beauty of the cherry wood coffins made by his grandfather’s friend Will Newcomb, who besides being the local funeral director in North Pitcher, built caskets and carriages in back of his funeral shop. Visiting the undertaker’s establishment one day in the early 1930s (and being mistaken for his father by the old gent), Lee admired Newcomb’s

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handmade wooden caskets including a few made for children (one in particular, decorated with painted roses, had caught his attention). Some thirty years later, long after Newcomb’s death, Lee would visit the closed-up funeral parlor and buy the old-fashion children’s coffin, finding a use for it as a coffee table. Lee appreciated the beauty in its Yankee craftsmanship—its original sepulchre purpose lost in his aesthetic view. At this time, Lee began a notable series of drawings and woodcuts that pictured typical architecture of Onondaga, Chenango, and Tompkins County, New York: churches, private houses, mansions, taverns, and even out-houses were done with minimal engraving of the wood, but with enough detail that architectural historians or antiquarians

could provide data about the structures represented. About once a month Lee would make the train trip to New York from Groton with a big portfolio filled with his woodcuts and drawings. According to his sister Helen, he did his first pulp illustrations at this time, but where these were published is not known.2 One illustration from this period is the “Bookworm”, a bookplate that uses hand-lettering and commercial print patterns. y early 1931, Lee and Ruth were back in Syracuse living in “The Chaumont” at 502 University Avenue. Lee earned a living by working odd jobs—framing pictures in an art store, working in a pastry shop,washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, and doing small commercial art jobs for Flack Advertising. Lee was invited to some of the smoke-filled speakeasys along James Street where he rubbed shoulders with Syracuse’s prominent society. He could remember the relaxed sense of people sharing hard times and happy with simple pleasures. In 1931 there were over a thousand advertising agencies in the 48 states that made up the country; two of them were in Syracuse: Flack’s Advertising and Barlows. Flacks big accounts included Keepsake Diamonds, and Hotel Syracuse which stood across the street from Flacks’ third floor offices on South Warren Street and filled the view from the window next to Lee’s drawing board. Lee was hard-working and energetic and eventually thought Flack was taking

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advantage of him. In little time Lee would grow to detest John Brooks Flack. Byron Fellows, an employee at Flack’s in 1931, remembers getting his first job in advertising by offering to work for nothing. Flack, in a generous mood, offered to pay Fellows’ carfare and lunches; within a year Fellows was earning $5 a week—a poor salary even for the Depression—and now had to pay his own way. Fellows knew Lee at this time mainly through mutual friend Larry Cook, who jocularly dubbed Lee “Lean Brown Cow.” Fellows would get to know Lee better a decade later when he was Lee’s neighbor and running his own advertising agency (Lee would

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Page 27 – scratchboard,spot illustration,Spice magazine,1946; Page 28,bottom left– pencil,girl,ca.1940; Page 28, top right– newspaper photo of LBC, ca. 1938; this page clockwise , top left– scratchboard illustration (detail),“Book of Jonah”, unpublished, ca. 1933; top right – wash, Grandma Coye funeral showing George Coye leaning over coffin with Will Newcomb to his right, 1934; bottom right – woodcut,“tavern”, ca. 1930, bottom left & Page 30 top right – ink and scratchboard, The Seventh Ogre, 1932.

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you might call it of the American School. I was very much concerned with social conditions and it developed into thinking in terms of architecture and putting bits in the paintings that would suggest the kind of people that lived in the architecture.”4 With the Depression, people had stopped buying typewriters and SmithCorona began to cut back on its workforce. Lee’s father was one of the expendable and William Coye wound up selling monuments in Cortland, New York, where he settled into an apartment over the stone works despite the dust that coated everything. Lee and Ruth, expecting their first child, soon joined him there in the hope of reducing their overhead. Eventually they found a big apartment on the ground floor of a house on North Main Street. design Fellows’ company logo). Fellows also remembers the artist using Flack’s likeness as a model for buffoonish characters in illustrations.3 n 1932, the mood of thousands of artists nationwide was grim. Not surprisingly many of them, when not fully embracing socialism, were sympathetic to its ideals. Some at the time saw the New Deal ethos as the basic political gateway to a worker’s utopia.The general belief for disillusioned millions was that capitalism was a wounded creature, and many Depression artists tried to capture the mood of unrest in their work. Lee commented on his early 1930s work: “[...] The first painting I did was more or less of a realistic, well

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Their son Robert was born February 11, 1932. In the summer Lee turned twentyfive and opened a studio at 6 Main Street over a ladies’ store. Through a mutual friend he was introduced to twenty-year-old Leo Kaplan, a recent graduate from the College of Art & Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. They found they had much in common and together set up the Studio of Coye & Kaplan which was little more than an unheated room with two drawing tables. Leo would do catalog illustrations of fishing tackle, corsets, and hardware while Lee worked, in some cases all night, on his woodcuts and ink drawings. But Lee made his living from sign painting,and he painted a lot of display cards for stores.Lee remarked about this period:“[...] if I had a week where I

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Page 30 bottom right – watercolor,“Bystanders”, unpublished, 1934; this page, top left – scratchboard illustration (detail), “Johnny Pye & the Fool-killer”, unpublished, ca. 1938; rest of this page top right clockwise & page 32 – ink and scratchboard, The Seventh Ogre, 1932. (The illustration on page 32 shows a “sticks”configuration in the background near the figures.)

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made $5 it was a big week. I had a small family.Of course I’m not complaining.I was in the same spot as everyone else.”5 Lee was a serendipitous reader, devouring whatever came his way and had somewhere read the East Indian tale he used as the underpinnings for his first illustrated book. Over the course of a few weeks he had been doodling the ink and scratchboard art that would

become The Seventh Ogre.6 Kaplan suggested they publish a limited edition, selling the books themselves and sharing in the profits. Kaplan was already familiar with the printing house of Leo Hart from his school days in Rochester, New York, and arranged to have the book printed. The firm of Leo Hart was essentially a job printing house, but they also produced small edi-

tions of books that sold to collectors. The Seventh Ogre would be Lee’s first substantial, unified illustrative work. Kaplan designed the book and typography; Lee supplied the illustrations and writing. Lee was also the “corporate” treasurer and when the printer’s bill came due he had spent the money on food and clothing for his family.The printer threatened a lawsuit. Kaplan attempted to get

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This page , top left – ink and scratchboard, The Seventh Ogre, 1932; this page, top right – ink and scratchboard, unknown, ca. 1945; this page, bottom – ink masthead art for Ad Clews, (newsletter for the Advertising Club of Syracuse) January 1937; page 34 – water damaged pencil drawing of unknown Syracuse building used for “Six Flights to Terror”Weird Tales, September1946.

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the printing plates of the book and take them to a cheaper printer.The plan was to use the money from sales of a second edition to pay Leo Hart, hopefully with enough left to pay the second printer. Horace Hart, president of the Leo Hart Printing Company, turned down this scheme. A lawyer friend in Cortland came to their rescue when he examined the contract and declared it illegal, since Kaplan had signed it as a minor. The previous year, Leo Hart had published an edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis illustrated by Rockwell Kent. Kent disputed his share of royalties on the book and assessed Hart’s character: “I found him to be a rather tough customer. I have since learned from others in the book business that he was generally so regarded.”7 Kaplan and Coye were lucky, in this instance, to come out fairly unscathed. Throughout the 1920s there had been a craze for limited edition books by fine presses. Printers such as Nonsuch Press, based in England, came out with enormously popular first editions that, like the euphophic stock market before the crash, were bought and resold at ever escalating prices. Bennett Cerf of Random House was the leading distributor of prestige press books in America in the late 1920s, some of which sold for upwards of two hundred dollars a copy. After the crash, some buyers who had pre-ordered Grabhorn Press’s Leaves of Grass at a hundred dollars, pleaded with Random House to have their money returned. Coye and Kaplan’s book, by fine press standards, remained a modest

endeavor. Three hundred-fifty copies were printed of The Seventh Ogre, with one hundred copies bound in black leather, stamped in silver, numbered and signed by both Kaplan and Coye. The deluxe edition was priced at $5 and the regular edition $3–stiff prices in those days for a volume that was seen by booksellers and buyers as a children’s book. Of all the books illustrated by Coye, it has become the rarest. In 1967, in a letter to August Derleth,Lee wrote:“[...] the last I heard [...] the morocco bound copies were bringing $35.It was a flop both in a literary sense and also financially at the time it came out [I] got sued by the printer and being Depression days I was insolvent.He lost and I lost and now it’s a collector’s item.”8 It is hard to gauge how many copies got out into the world.

The book gave Lee the opportunity to draw dragons and a cast of longlimbed characters in a fantastical setting. One of the illustrations in the The Seventh Ogre shows a lattice-work of sticks in the background some six years before he supposedly “discovered” them at Mann’s Brook (pg 32). Lee had no interest in becoming a publisher and even the idea of the book turning a profit was a secondary consideration; The Seventh Ogre was an opportunity to show what he could pull off. At this time Lee harbored ambitions to illustrate children’s books and was a great perpetrator of drawings towards this end. The creepiness exhibited by early children book illustrators like Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham goes a long way to explain adults’ strict attitudes towards children at the turn of century and Lee’s style of drawing would certainly have been at home here. Soon after the The Seventh Ogre Lee did a series of drawing for a Sinbad the Sailor children’s book which was never published (pg 49). The fiasco surrounding the book foreshadowed Lee’s future artistic career. In business dealings, Lee was the opposite of his sister Helen. She used lessons learned while working in the Coye Tea Room to become quite the businesswoman. With her attention to details, she did well in ventures with her new husband Paul Gilchrist. In a peculiarly Coye incident, Helen lent her brother fifty dollars, a princely sum during the Depression, which Lee promptly forgot about til Ruth found the money in his pants pocket after doing the wash.

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5

Cazenovia Days

n 1933 while many American artists under severe economic hardships were flirting with Marxist doctrines, the “regional” school of art, which had as its main proponent Ohio native Thomas Hart Benton, developed in the midwest around the concept of representing the look and feel of down home America. Benton was teaching at the New School in New York when Lee discovered his work. Coye’s early paintings can be linked temperamentally, if not wholly thematically, to the regional school. Syracuse was different from the midwest in its starker, brooding architecture and grimy industrial structures, and this was reflected in Coye’s work. Benton’s style, with its depiction of idealized country characters in flat, neutrally clean landscapes, was called cartoonish by critics, and could easily have fit into a Disney Silly-Symphony of the time— something Coye’s art, with its gnarly veneer,would have trouble doing. Benton was discovered by the general public when he appeared as the cover story of the December 24, 1934, issue of

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Time magazine. Benton’s optimistic sensibility and outspoken conservatism matched that of the Henry Luce TimeLife media empire. It wasn’t long before the cantankerous and publicity-minded Benton took advantage of his celebrity to repudiate schools of art that didn’t meet his criteria of using “[...] the scenes, behaviors, and mythologies of American life”for inspiration.His fellow regionalists warned him that his attacks were doing more harm than good to his cause. Late in life Benton eased back on some of his diatribes,“Now a good many of my pronouncements at this time were made in

heat and often [...] with the help of bootleg hooch which was not notable for its moderating influence.”1 During his stay in Cortland, Coye was going out with his paint box and sketchpad into the countryside whenever he could. Most of these early landscapes are now lost and whether they showed the growing influence of Benton, it is impossible to say. For American artists during the Depression, there was another choice to be made,besides politics, between the more popular folkloristic American genre or the exclusivity of European styles and modernism. The debate between the two polemics was ongoing (outside the debate of degrees inherent in American social realism vs. American regionalism) and Lee was certainly aware of them—it can be said he never felt the need to go to Paris. In this he might have been heeding Edward Hopper’s advice,“In my day you had to go to Paris. Now you can go to Hoboken;it’s just as good.”2 With Prohibition repealed at the end of 1933 and money worries dogging him, Lee’s frustration with his

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career grew at the bar counters and taverns he began to frequent.While working late into the night, Lee would listen to raconteur Alexander Woollcott’s radio program The Town Crier on the CBS radio network.Woollcott, a household name at the time (he was the inspiration for the 1930s play and movie The Man Who Came to Dinner), would share curious anecdotes and pithy melodramas of “incurable triviality” revolving around murderers, ghosts, and unusual lore. Woollcott’s radio stories would influence Coye’s newspaper column “Chips & Shavings” in the 1960s. After moving back to central New York, Lee began sending drawings to Robert Johnston in Leonia and received critiques by return mail.At this time he was experimenting with many styles, modeling himself on a variety of now largely forgotten illustrators (recognizable are the styles of Jean De Bosschere, Sidney Sime, and W. Heath Robertson) and using exaggeration of form to define character. Johnston, a fine draftsman, appears at odds with Lee’s stylized figures, redrawing a wrinkled trouser leg to show Lee how real cloth creases and also attempting to break him of the habit of over hatching drawings [pg.25]. Lee at this stage mixed realism with cartoonish exaggeration; Johnston appeared to advocate the separation of the two. Despite the difference in outlook, Lee valued Johnston’s comments and redid drawings to the best of his abilities following Johnston’s advice. Where this on-going critique may have led no one will ever know—Robert Johnston died in December 1933 at the

age of 47, following a recurring illness. For all intents and purposes, Lee had no need of further art instruction—everything done from this time would be practical application of what he had learned, supplemented by the study of other artists’work.

hile living in Cortland, Lee read a news item in the Syracuse PostStandard written by Anna Olmsted, director of the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, announcing the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first federal job program for artists. PWAP, which began in December of 1933, would eventually employ 3,749 artists nationwide before it finally expired in June, 1934. Under the program artists had to qualify creatively and be in financial need. The Central New York area was administered by Anna Olmsted, work-

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ing under Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Museum in New York. Lee considered himself “between engagements” and wrote her that he was interested in what he could do for the project. Lee had run into Olmsted a few times before at Syracuse art shows. A PWAP committee made up of Syracuse artists would meet monthly and Olmsted herself would travel to regional meetings at the Whitney Museum. Frequently GertrudeVanderbilt Whitney,the benefactress of the museum,would show up at these meetings. Initially, due to the short time involved and the small quota for participants outside New York City, murals were not considered and assignments were only made for easel paintings and smaller decorative panels. Eventually, Washington allocated more funds and Anna wrote back to Lee outlining a proposal for a mural to be done in the auditorium of the newly built Cazenovia Central School. After submitting some samples, which impressed the jury when they learned that Lee had no formal art education, Coye was given the assignment.The pay would be $37.50 a week. “I was a big shot,”3 Lee exclaimed. Under PWAP guidelines a project on the scale of a mural was usually given to “advanced artists.” The “American Scene” (using the idioms and background of the country) was the operating phrase under the PWAP. Artists were given “utmost freedom,” but it was generally understood that they were to perform as craftsmen in the prescribed interest of their benefactors, the federal government, as represented by local communities.The people

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Page 35 – ink and scratchboard cover art, The Seventh Ogre, 1932; Page 36 – ink,“Bait” cover, for Flack Advertising fishing brochure, 1937; this page, clockwise top left – pencil drawing, untitled, ca. 1943; top right – LBC painting mural showing detail from Founding Fathers of Cazenovia, 1934; bottom right – Ink drawing, untitled, ca. 1937; bottom left – ink and scratchboard, The Seventh Ogre, 1932; Page 38 – newspaper halftone of mural (destroyed) in Cazenovia Central School, ca. 1934.

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of Cazenovia wanted a mural that would present a historical perspective related to the town and be an expression of civic pride.Lee,a history buff,began browsing through libraries researching local history to find a proper subject. He settled on the founding of Cazenovia in 1793 by explorer and agent for the Holland Land Company, John Lincklaen. (Lee had in his possession the original 1807 land deed from his great-great grandfather William Smith showing Lincklaen’s signature.) The mural would encapsulate Lee’s love of history and his great interest in Central NewYork. The only place in Cortland large enough for Coye to begin painting the mural was an empty downtown theatre, but he found he could not afford to rent the place. Lee then approached Gus Ulrich, the minister of the Universalist Church, and received permission to set up in the rear of the church auditorium. The only problem with this arrangement was having to get up early every Sunday and find someone to help him lug the huge canvas, all six and a half by 18 feet of it, scaffold, and supplies outside before services commenced. “In a rainstorm we used to set it against the church with the face down and hope it didn’t get too much water on it.”4 With the canvas past the initial stages Coye brought the mural and his family to Cazenovia. Initially they rented an apartment in town, but would lease a cottage on Cazenovia Lake with the onset of warmer weather and the fishing season. Once the mural was installed in the more natural lighting of the school auditorium, Lee realized he

had made a miscalculation. In mixing his pigments in the church he had not taken into account the color shifting effect from light streaming through stained-glass windows. He had to repaint the mural. Lee’s inexperience didn’t discourage him from plowing on; he preferred learning at his own pace by trial and error. In the spring of 1934, while most of Cazenovia was refreshing itself at the lake, picnicking on lawns or promenad-

ing at the park,the Central School auditorium was littered with tins and oil pigments as Lee reworked the colors of his first major commission. It was tricky work painting at such a large scale level

by level, having to move a twenty foot stepladder by hopping it across the school auditorium, and maintaining a wobbly balancing act when posed at the top of it. Lee had never painted a mural before, but showed no sense of intimidation.At this scale, a grid was necessary to enlarge preliminary sketches to the right size. This required patience and precision; the temptation is to go at it freehand, but this only leads to distortions from working too close up to the canvas.At the school Lee was supervised by Principal Wayne Lowe and Thornton Chard, the town historian. The pair would be instrumental later in expanding the commission. Local newspapers noted Lee’s arrival with a build-up that must have appeared somewhat over-blown even to Lee, who hitherto had been without any real success. Art commissioned for public consumption and paid for by the federal government was a new idea, and the PWAP would serve as a pilot program for the later WPA. Most artists in the New Deal relief program appreciated the opportunity to work and reach a larger audience without the major hindrances usually found with many commercial jobs. Lee must have envisioned this project as the catalyst to his career. By the end of May, Lee had three murals completed when his weekly federal checks stopped.When the original PWAP commission expired on April 28, Principal Lowe, Thornton Chard, and other residents of Cazenovia, began a subscription campaign that raised enough money to continue the work through June.Art teacher Bernice Tyler

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This page, clockwise top left – newspaper photo of LBC on ladder working in Cazenovia Central School auditorium; top right – mural detail from Civil War panel , 1934; bottom right – newspaper photo showing mural detail from early Discovers panel, 1934; bottom left –Lee Brown Coye posed before Founding Fathers panel.

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had her pupils creating posters soliciting contributions from other schools. By then the campaign had collected enough money and expanded the commission to include two more murals. Later in the summer, Edward Rowan, art administrator for the PWAP program in Washington, and Anna Olmsted came to Cazenovia to officially unveil and dedicate the murals. Looking at extant photographs of the Cazenovia murals, one can spot Benton’s influence, especially in the placement of a high horizon, and the use of both realistic and modern styles (using flattened figures and objects represented by visual shorthand). Some viewers of the mural commented on its affinity to Benton’s work.“I think Benton fit in with my philosophy pretty well. I’m not comparing myself with Benton. I think he is one of our greatest painters, but we are all influenced by people.You can’t help but be.” 5 Lee was not exactly an imitator of Benton. Where Benton was turbulent, Lee was tranquil; where Benton was content to make lucid pictures of America’s rural beauty and American characters, Lee would push onward — his technique evolving while he looked for new areas of artistic expression. Lee was never satisfied with his work—Benton thought he was a great artist and did not need to expand his horizons. While in Cazenovia Lee met Hervey Allen, the author of the nationwide best-seller Anthony Adverse. The massive 1,000-page historical novel was published on June 26,1933,and a year later it had sold a brisk 396,000 hardcover

copies and helped to keep booksellers, its publisher Farrar & Rinehart, and the Ticonderoga Pulp & Paper Company solvent during the Depression’s nadir. Allen was summering at the Dower House, his wife’s family home in Cazenovia, and the money from the book royalties and movie rights allowed him to buy a thirty-five acre colonial estate on Maryland’s eastern shore called the “Bonfield.”Allen’s taste in art was rather old fashioned (indeed, when an illustrated edition of Anthony Adverse was being considered Allen was adamant that no “modern art” would sully the pages of his book), and it seems likely that he was attracted to the historical theme of Lee’s mural and its Benton qualities. Allen had seen the Central School mural and offered Coye a commission to paint historical “decorations” of sailing ships for the hallways of the “Bonfield” mansion.This bit of good fortune, coming on the heels of the PWAP work, would turn out to be too good to be true. In July, Lee made the trip to

Oxford, Maryland, to see the layout of the “Bonfield” walls, where he discovered that Allen was not interested in the tentative sketches he had made. The actual parameters of the job entailed copying prints of sailing ships from the Library of Congress. Lee’s interest in the project waned at the requirements and he told Allen he had to get back to Cazenovia to concentrate on his murals. Allen sensed the difference of approach between them and soon afterwards wrote Lee of his haste to get his house finished and have another artist do the work as soon as possible.6 “It would have meant a lot of money, but I didn’t want any part of it,” Coye later recalled. Lee had been diplomatic in letting Allen cancel the “Bonfield” commission and on December 2, 1934 wrote the author to inquire if he would be interested in seeing some drawings he had done for Anthony Adverse. Allen replied that he well understood the struggles of making ends meet while attempting to do creative work (one can read his sense of self-satisfaction between the lines), but “Wyatt” (N. C. Wyeth) was doing the art for the illustrated edition and there was no need for Allen to see Lee’s attempts.7 Allen only mentions the illustrated edition of Anthony Adverse, and appeared unaware of the multiple dustjackets designs using different artists planned for the book by Farrar & Rinehart. With the coming of cold weather, the Coyes were forced to return to Syracuse, where they rented rooms at 804 East Genesee Street. Ruth took a job as secretary to Anna Olmsted at the

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Page 40 bottom – scratchboard spot illustration for Spice magazine, 1946; this page, top left – pencil sketch, (water damaged), untitled, unpublished, ca. 1947; top right – pencil sketch, (water damaged), untitled, unpublished, ca. 1947; bottom right – ink, Civil War sketch,“The Cynic”, 1937; bottom left , scratchboard illustration for The Art of Bundling, 1939; page 42 , scratchboard and ink illustration, “Lutheran Church, Sharpsbury, Md., Sept. 17, 1862”, 1937.

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Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts. Lee was painting chinaware for Onondaga Pottery (better known as Syracuse China), but he hated the mindless drudgery of working with pre-stenciled artwork and his boredom showed in his work. He once got careless with the paint on some of the china seconds and the dishes came out of the kiln stuck together; before long he was back at Flack Advertising working on accounts which included the regional Cortland Bakery (better known locally as Corbaco). Weekends would find him in Cazenovia working on the murals, in some cases repainting sections he was not happy with, and sleeping on a cot set up on the stage of the school auditorium. Coye worked deliberately and revised his work by degrees. Regarding the Cazenovia mural, Lee made

no excuses about his inability to match his own artistic ideals. Lee was still reworking the murals as late as 1939, and would never be fully satisfied. Some school personnel began to disparaged Coye’s figure work. This did not bode well for Lee. His response was “Leave anatomy to the doctors and technicians.” At some point in early 1939, a local school administrator published an article in a school publication8 faulting the murals’ interpretation of historical figures in the Erie Canal panel, calling the people “grotesque” and the painting itself too “modernistic” in style. Coye defended his work, “I know it is hard for some of us to appreciate those things which smack of plain, homely, hard work.And I know, too, it is difficult for some of us with a proud nature and a cast-iron front to accept the fact that some of our be-tombed ancestors were in the class with horse thieves.” A contretemps developed when the school ordered the waterway represented in a “romantic setting” and a defiant Lee painted mangy mules and hungrylooking drivers. In this case it’s likely that Lee knew his history better than the school administrator. Then without any fanfare or warning, the Cazenovia murals that were affixed to the walls were white-

washed and those done on canvas taken down. Clearly the intent was to remove the murals from sight permanently, but at this late date, it is not clear if this action violated PWAP rules (even if only in spirit); Anna Olmsted learned of this act of art vandalism too late to do anything about it. Lee was certainly aware of the trouble Diego Rivera had in 1933 when the muralist declined to remove the face of Lenin from a nearly completed fresco for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York. Rivera believed “art should be propaganda.Art which is not propaganda is not art at all.” Since Rivera’s propaganda was not John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s propaganda, the building’s agents gave Rivera a check, fulfilling their contract, then dismissed Rivera and (to the dismay of the art world) the mural was jack-hammered off the wall. Lee, in the fall of 1934, had attempted to get an interview with Rivera to talk about the technique of painting frescoes. As the Cazenovia murals evolved, Lee was moving in a direction that was certain to cause some umbrage with his depiction of Cazenovia life and Cazenovia character. He may have been attempting to get Cazenovians to take an honest look at their history, but it is questionable whether a public school auditorium was a proper venue for making such a statement. If Rivera could not win his battle to combine socialist comment with Aztec Indian art and modernism in a bastion of capitalism, how did Lee believe he could paint over the whitewashed history of Cazenovia? But

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This page clockwise top left – newspaper photo showing two of the six Cazenovia murals (LBC repainted panels many time between 1934-1939, and there are photos showing various iterations), 1934; top right – ink and scratchboard for Sleep No More, “Magnus”, 1944; bottom right – pencil drawing from sketch book, ca. 1943; bottom left – pencil drawing, untitled, ca. 1947; page 44 – ink, illustration using a spatter ink style from Scylla the Beautiful, 1939.

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Lee was capable of showing a sense of mischief when concessions were imposed on his art. After working for years on the mural, stasis was not an option for both sides and the outcome, in hindsight,was inevitable. As with much of the art created under PWAP, there was a question as to ownership of the murals.The Cazenovia Republican had reported on June 7, 1934, “The government has definitely donated these four murals to the school. In this matter the school is very fortunate because most of the art work done at government expense remains the property of the United States and may be moved from place to place at its discretion.”What may have been fortunate for the school proved unfortunate for Lee. It is likely that ownership would have made little difference to the outcome.There would be many attempts at censorship of public murals in ensuring years, and questions about the worth of art paid by public money. Life magazine would feature a story on April 17, 1944, about the government warehouse in the borough of Queens, New York, piled high with unallocated WPA paintings;all were sold off as wartime government surplus to a Long Island junk dealer for pennies on the pound. The dealer was speculating on the value of the canvas itself.When reclaiming the canvas proved too costly, the dealer placed some of the art in Henry Roberts’ downtown Manhattan bric-a-brac and thrift shop where a few artists were able to buy back their work at bargain basement prices. Surprisingly, with the end of the federal art program

in 1943, there was no national agency responsible for the preservation of the art created and much was lost or destroyed. Some of the artists who had worked under the various Federal programs included Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning, Stuart Davis, and Raphael and Moses Soyer. While impressive in its variety and ambition, and moving in its evocation of so wide a collection of lives and scenes, the Cazenovia murals did not quite cohere,and it’s hard to tell if this is due to Lee’s inexperience or concessions made to local taste.The scenes shown, stretching both forward and backward over central New York history, were too haphazardly sliced into horizontal topography on the canvas.The most substantial panel in the series was the Erie Canal section, because it adopted a more unified approach in its layout by presenting

activity along the winding waterway and banks.The snakelike design allowed Lee to present canal locks,scows,farmers tilling the land, and the towns springing up along the Erie. The depiction of riverboats and sylvan mid-state countryside presented Lee’s drawing strengths and his keen eye when depicting sights that interested him. The two murals on opposite sides of the stage incorporated ventilators and the top arches of doorways into their design. These two panels show early modes of travel: on the left side an old smokestack locomotive pulling out of a wood station, the right panel shows a Canestoga covered wagon. Lee uses the wagon-horses’ legs to fill in the open slots of the door arch-moldings. By the late 1930s regionalism and the artists associated with it have gotten an unjustified bad rap as being onedimensional and naively expressing nationalistic trends.With fascism taking hold in Europe, a few critics went as far as to accuse regionalistic artists of creating propaganda. Overlooked is the iconic, mythic, and humanistic qualities frankly exposed behind the facades of the picturesque farmhouses and efficient factories. Regionalist Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic,” showing a sour-faced midwest couple standing in front of a barn with the farmer holding a pitchfork, is no pageant to national optimism. But Lee was more a fan of Benton’s paintings than of regionalism and, unlike Benton, held no real aversion to modernist art— Lee, after all, was still trying to find his own personal style.

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Syracuse Sketches yracuse had gone through many christenings in it history: The “Gear City”, the “Salt City”, the “AmericanVenice”(for its conference of the Erie and Oswego Canals), and the “Typewriter City”; most of these names connected in some way to commerce. By the mid-1930s, it was an industrial city with many of its workmen out of work. The Franklin Motor Company, based in Syracuse, had gone bankrupt in 1932, Smith-Corona was going through hard times, the “Salt City” had long lost the lion’s share of that trade to west coast businesses with cheaper methods of mining salt.The financial climate in Syracuse during the Depression, like many industrial cities across America, gave the sense of an old champion boxer,aged and tired,being plummeted in the late rounds of a match. Regardless, advertising agencies were selling their clients on the idea that the public was being tight-fisted with its money instead of broke. People could be convinced with slogans and claims that there were some “necessities” without which they would live even poorer

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lives, or in the case of high-ticket items, that everyone needed a few luxuries. In the 1920s, modernist styles of art had begun to infiltrate advertising (Rockwell Kent was creating art for Steinway piano ads and Georgia O’Keeffe was working for the Dole Pineapple Company).The idea was to convey an aura of modern esthetic and class to a commodity. Lee attempted artwork for Flack combining the simplicity and modernistic designs then making their way into national print advertising.

One extant preliminary illustration (possibly for advertising purposes), done by Lee at this time, presenting a familiar downtown street scene with a marching band and banners spelling out the store name [pg. 14], manages to have the line and wash drawing quality of one of Charles Demuth’s unbalanced, distorted watercolors. Advertising was following the lead of “high art.” Modern artists, employing unexpected use of color, line, and form, were trying to jar the audience into new perceptions of familiar commodities, but Flack was not an adventurous New York City agency with forward looking clients. Flack’s clients expected a certain level of realism and clarity and were loathe to get too far away from old school illustration. Any leaning on Lee’s part towards the spare style of modern art could only go so far before Flack and its clients would rein him back into busy detailing, all elements visually literal. Norman Rockwell was the exemplar artist. Some critics of modern art in advertising did accuse the agencies and artists of esthetic pretensions which did not sell “...west of

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the Hudson and north of the Bronx.” Lee’s own determination to create art had to coexist with his advertising work at Flack’s; real art had to be kept at a distance from his everyday commercial assignments. As a trade-off, this was a financially secure time for Lee, even if his attitude toward his own work showed a general sense of ennui (and perhaps a little bit of self doubt). He was still attempting to break into the New York gallery scene and managed in February of 1935 to place some wash drawings with the Ten-Dollar Gallery at 28 East Fiftysixth Street in New York City.1 The gallery had changed its name the year before, from The Upstairs Gallery, when it began using $10 as the highest price charged for art, and carried watercolors and black and white works exclusively. By 1929, the Associated Artists’ It is unlikely that Lee sold many drawings even at these prices. Ten dollars exhibition had moved to the Syracuse could pay your rent for a month in Museum of Fine Arts. One of the show’s jury members during the early many parts of Syracuse in 1935. 1930s was Professor Hibberd V. B. Kline, oye became a member of the Asso- from Syracuse University College of ciated Artists of Syracuse in early Fine Arts, and a teacher of printmaking 1935 and had the painting The Last Load at the museum. (Coye had done etchin their show.The Associated Artists was ings based on Goya at one of Kline’s founded in 1927 by faculty members of early classes.) Kline had also spent time the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse Uni- in Leonia during the 1920s, a few years versity; early exhibitions used the walls of before Lee lived there. Since many of the Clark Music Company’s downtown the artists represented at the early Assostore as a gallery. At this time many art ciated Artists shows were alumni and clubs and painting societies across the faculty members of the college, some country sponsored annual juried exhibi- politicking in the selections made was tions that presented the work of profes- unavoidable. An academic outsider, Lee sionals, amateurs, and weekend painters, got by strictly on merit and his work side by side in a uniquely American form would become a regular presence at the of egalitarianism. annual show for the next dozen years.

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oye had three drawings accepted for the March 1936 Associated Artists exhibit: Working Men, The Corner of North and Main, and Bystanders [pg. 30].That summer was the warmest on record in Syracuse.Within the stupefying confines of the Flack studio, Lee’s development as an artist appeared to have come to a standstill — with few creative assignments. The advertising work he was doing entailed ninety-percent mechanical work,preparing layouts of typeset galleys and photos to meet printer’s specs, and ten-percent creative consideration, spot art or decorative lettering. His office mates noticed that Lee was not a “happy camper” at work.2 Lee was a lifelong train enthusiast. The trips made to the countryside as a child had instilled in him the romance of railroading, something that Lee would pass on to his son. In 1936, Syracuse’s one hundred year history of street level grade crossings (and street accidents) came to an end when the train tracks were elevated. Up to this date, Syracuse had been unique, for a big city, in having railroad tracks going down its main throughway at street level with passengers and pedestrians staring at each other as the train crawled into westside New York Central Station.The earliest memory that a then four-year-old Robert Coye has of his father is getting a train set for Christmas that year, and being told that he could play with it “when you are old enough.” He could only watch as his father and Uncle Paul set up and played with his “gift.” Things began to pick up for Lee when he won first prize in painting at

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Page 45 – scratchboard spot illustration for Spice magazine, 1946; Page 46 – ink and scratchboard, title page from The Seventh Ogre, 1932; this page clockwise, top left – scratchboard spot drawing from Spice Magazine; top right – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling,“In Soot and Cinders from the Passing Trains”, 1938; bottom left scratchboard illustration for Sinbad the Sailor, (detail) unpublished, ca. 1935; Page 48 – pencil sketch for painting, Funeral for a Friend, ca. 1942; Page 49, top left – photo of Lee Brown Coye, in studio of Flack Advertising, working on clay figure models, (sketches on table top include scenes from Sinbad the Sailor), ca. 1935; Page 49, top right – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling, 1938; Page 49, bottom right – scratchboard and ink illustration for Johnny Pye & the Fool-killer, unpublished,1938; Page 49, bottom left – ink on scratchboard, Knickerbocker, unpublished, ca. 1945; Page 50 – ink drawing of “sticks” found at Mann’s Brook from “Chips & Shavings”column,August 22,1963.

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the 1937 Associated Artists exhibit with his oil on board Backyard. In the summer of 1937, Lee received a commission to illustrate one of Balzac’s Droll Stories as a Christmas give-away booklet for the Syracuse printing firm of J. F. Campbell. The Vicar of Azay-Le-Rideau came out at year’s end in a 500 edition run under the Braeside Press imprint.While purely a commercial assignment, Lee’s work shows a more relaxed line and an earnest sense of humor in tune with the joviality of the story. Balzac’s bawdy tale of a vicar is a strange choice for a Christmas book. Balzac had modeled his Contes Drolatiques on the Decameron and told the story of a vicar in the days when they were allowed to have “wives”. At about the same time the Balzac book came out, Lee managed a small coup. PM magazine, which began publishing in 1934, was a monthly journal for production managers, art directors, and others in the graphic arts field. By 1937, it had begun showcasing a commercial artist in each issue and having him create a cover using some interpretation of the magazine’s PM masthead. Some of the artists showcased included A.M. Cassandre, Miguel Covarrubias, Lynd Ward, Paul Rand, and Alexander Steinweiss. Lee was the featured artist for the February/March issue of 1938, and he painted a full-color landscape of a country road using a rural mailbox for the placement of the magazine’s title [pg. 9].The issue included an insert,The Work of Lee Brown Coye, showing many of Lee’s ink drawings, which Lee used as a mini-portfolio.

As soon as the winter broke in 1938, Lee was out casting his fishing line.The lonely tranquility of fishing suited him and many times his only companions were dragon-flies skimming over the water and his sketchbook. He had a hand,artistically and with his experiences as a fly fisherman, in the promotional pamphlet Bait [pg. 36]put out by Flack Advertising. Lee continued to revisit the North Pitcher region, on fishing and sketching trips. He was already attracted to the decaying stillness of old buildings, “I guess that’s the morbid side of my personality. I see a lot of pathos in a building [...]. I can’t paint happy pictures [...]. Bright landscapes just aren’t [me].” 3 That spring Lee came across the extension of land with the strange “sticks” farmhouse on one of his fishing trips. On one of his visit to the Syracuse Fine Art Museum’s Lee made drawings

of some modest buildings across the street. He later completed the tempera Just Across the Street in his home workplace from the sketches.The painting was entered into that year’s Associated Artists exhibit in March. Professor C. Bertram Walker, on the Associated Artists jury committee, described the painting as a “[...] picture of some rather old and dilapidated red brick buildings[...] Collectively they make a most interesting silhouette against a pale flat sky.The dominant color note is a common enough red, but beautifully modulated, completing a harmony in form and color which is extremely restful and satisfying.”4 Just Across the Street won first prize at the Associated Artists exhibit, and was eventually brought by the Syracuse Museum for its permanent collection. In 1939, it was selected for the Modern American Painting section of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California. Despite Professor Walker’s description, this painting does not sit easily in a regionalist milieu.The canvas was a big step away from the chauvinistic interpretation required by the Cazenovia murals, and evokes a more personal sense of place. The palpable quiet and synthetic representation of light, and even the absence of people,convey a compromise between the two different schools of art and appears influenced more by one of Edward Hopper’s studies in loneliness than any of Benton’s canvases. This American style of realism is something that critics have mistakenly taken as a continuation of nineteenth century academic tradition. Just Across

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the Street can be said to mark the point of departure for Coye’s oeuvre to come. After the positive reception of this canvas, Coye, never a confident artist, must have felt he was on the right track. A few months after the PM insert appeared, Lee was rewarded for his many visits to New York’s art markets when he somehow connected with the publishing firm of Farrar & Rinehart. Art editor Ruth E.Anderson had been looking for artists for their Rivers of America series. Anderson had Lee design and paint an evocative, monochromatic dust jacket (a three tier duotone of a Mississippi riverboat, New York City streets, and Russian architecture) for Emerson Waldman’s novel The Land is Large [pg. 70]. Farrar & Rinehart was also bringing out trade editions for the Countryman Press of Weston,Vermont,and on Anderson’s recommendation, and after seeing samples of his work, Countryman commissioned Lee to illustrate Stephen Vincent Benét’s Johnny Pye and the Fool-killer [pg.51]. Vrest Orton ran Countryman Press. He had returned to his native Vermont in the early 1930s after living in New York City (having worked for H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury previously), and founded the press to publish books of country life and American literature. In Vermont, he set up a letterpress print shop in his barn and started out by designing and printing elegant chapbooks written by Edgar Lee Masters and Stephen Vincent Benét. While in New York, Orton had met and become friends with many authors, including Theodore Dreiser and Howard Philip Lovecraft, a writer who had been called

the Edgar Allen Poe of the twentieth century, and would figure in Lee’s work years later. Orton did give Lovecraft editorial work, but had no interest in weird literature and never considered publishing Lovecraft’s writings. The Benét novella, half fantasy, half folk tale (and in the same vein as his classic The Devil and Daniel Webster), first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Lee had completed a dozen drawings and these had been incorporated into the typeset galleys when Benét saw them for the first time in early May and disliked the “cartoony” quality of the artwork. Benét demanded that Orton replace Lee and recommended his friend Charles Child. It was Lee’s first experience,though by no means his last, with having one of his illustrative ventures turn out stillborn. Benét’s assessment of Lee’s work is of course a personal opinion, yet the final Pye artwork done by Child displayed a woodcut style similar to the work Coye had already done, and over the years it had been falsely thought by some (going by early announcements of Coye as the artist) that Child was a pseudonym used by Lee for the Benét book. The agreement Orton made with Benét allowed the author to dictate the

illustrator for any of his books. Orton wrote Lee that this was akin to allowing the author to pick out fonts for the typesetting and thought Benét “nuts” for not liking Lee’s illustrations. He was thinking of running off proofs of Pye’s galley sheets with Lee’s artwork to give to friends entitled, The Rare Suppressed Plates for Johnny Pye and The Fool-killer, Suppressed by Stephen Vincent Benét. 5 Orton was also preparing for publication Dana Doten’s The Art of Bundling, (subtitled, Being an Inquiry into the Nature & Origins of that Curious but Universal Folk-Custom, with an Exposition of the Rise & Fall of Bundling in the Eastern Part of No. America). The subject of the book concerned a custom of eighteenth century colonial life in which a young man and woman did their courting in bed fully clothed.As a consolation, and in consideration of Coye’s easy acceptance of the Benét situation, Lee was given the commission to create drawings for The Art of Bundling.Lee was able to use some of the sample illustrations he had done for Anthony Adverse with some modifications for Bundling. Lee made a trip to Manchester, Vermont, at the end of May 1938, to meet Doten, and told him an anecdote about western bundling which Doten used in chapter seven of the book. When Bundling appeared in the fall of 1938, it rated a line in Clifton Fadiman’s prestigious book column in the New Yorker, “No student of our history would fail to read Mr.Doten or to study Lee Brown Coye’s sturdy illustrations.” Fadiman had also noted Dr. Seuss’ first book that same year and was the first prominent reviewer to recognize Lee’s

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illustrative talent. Farrar & Rinehart’s popular Rivers of America series were finely illustrated books coming out at the rate of about three volumes a year. Art editor Ruth Anderson would have considered using Lee for one of the Rivers books, but after the series editor Constance Lindsay Skinner died suddenly in early 1939, and was replaced by Benét,with Carl Carmer as co-editor, Lee was effectively shut out of any chance of doing a Rivers of America book. Lee’s temperament was such that he would not have pushed the issue after the situation with the Johnny Pye book.A few Erie Canal-boat sketches Lee did at this time, possibly as demonstration drawings, show that he would have been a natural for the series [pg.55]. As luck would have it, four years later, upon Benét’s own death, Hervey Allen became the series editor. In a curious bit of turnabout (and showing the five-degrees-of-separation in New York publishing), Benét was a reader for Farrar & Rinehart during the mid1930s, and he had pushed for the publication of Anthony Adverse when John Farrar had doubts about publishing it. Soured by these developments, years would pass before Lee would approach Farrar & Rinehart again. On November 22, 1938, as the final show of the season, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts mounted Lee’s first oneman show.Two of the museum’s galleries were given over to showcasing eightyone of Lee’s works; paintings and watercolors were hung in the large reception room and the drawings and woodcuts in a smaller gallery off the main floor,

including the illustrations from The Art of Bundling and the Balzac booklet. During its three-week run, critics accorded the show a relatively warm reception. Anna Olmsted was instrumental in getting this exhibit organized, and considered Coye to be a discovery of the Syracuse Museum. In her regular art column in the Post-Standard, she gave fervent praise for Lee’s work,“there is no search for superficial decorative effects, no concern with mere prettiness, but instead an unfailing respect for design and pattern in dark and light.” She did overlook some of the cartoonishness and youthful insecurity with anatomy that weakens some of the works on exhibit. Coye’s art influences by this time had begun to branch out to include Charles Burchfield, along with Benton, Hopper, and Diego Rivera. He valued Hopper for the character and mood of his barren small-town streets, Benton and Rivera for the substance and strength of their draftsmanship and large-scale mural

design,but Burchfield was a different animal. His paintings were unique in inviting the viewer to enter into a mystical landscape of radiant light and shadow. Burchfield, a resident of Buffalo, New York, painted the terrible beauty of nature, mostly devoid of figures, in uniquely subjective terms. Despite working in a realistic style, Burchfield’s art was called expressionistic, visionary, and even abstract at different times. Burchfield’s evocation of mysterious and scary forces attracted Lee’s attention when he first came across the artist’s work in the latter half of the 1930s. It’s interesting to note that Burchfield had, early in his career, worked as a wallpaper pattern designer. Lee’s 1938 watercolor The Ghost on the Knoll depicted a Burchfield inspired landscape of a nightime wind swept cemetery (pg 55). he Quaker poet and Syracusan writer, Albert Vann Fowler, a friend of Lee’s,was looking to publish a book of verse that he had written with his wife Helen. Lee agreed to do illustrations and effectively became the production liaison for Scylla The Beautiful. Lee recommended Vrest Orton as a publisher in the early part of 1939, but Orton declined doing the book under his imprint stating that “poetry will not sell” and suggested doing a privately printed edition. Coye and Fowler had also been contemplating doing a book together on the Civil War , and Coye mentioned this to Orton during a visit to Vermont in the summer of 1939.(A decade earlier Lovecraft had also visited Orton in Vermont.) Orton went as far as suggesting the use of a

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53 Page 51, top left – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling, 1938; page 51, top right & bottom right – scratchboard and ink illustration for Johnny Pye & the Fool-killer, unpublished,1938; page 51, bottom left & Page 52 – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling,1938;this page clockwise,top left – scratchboard title page from The Vicar of Azay-Le-Rideau, 1937; bottom right & left, this page & page 54 – brush and ink illustrations for The Art of Bundling,1938.

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multi-point-of-view story told by common soldiers, but this book idea was put aside and never taken up again. Fowler wanted to get Scylla The Beautiful out by December 7, 1939, well in time for Christmas, yet both he and Coye were still attempting to get things in motion with Orton as late as October 23. Orton drastically cut his prices to a fifth of his normal fee, out of his friendship for Coye. But Fowler finally decided to find someone else to do the job, and Robert Roberts, in nearby Hamilton, N.Y., took over the printing of 550 copies of the book. Republican Press was the printer’s colophon used to give the book a “publisher”—the book was more of a vanity publication on the part of the Fowlers. For Scylla Lee used a spatter ink technique that gave the artwork a gritty, urban feel. One curious incident reminiscent of the Cazenovia mural occurred when one of the pictures from Scylla, “In Soot and Cinders from the Trains,” [pg. 47] appeared in the Syracuse Post-Standard on December 18, 1939, and elicited a letter from a reader that took offense at the “shocking representation of a woman in a state of undress.” The drawing depicted the Syracuse intersection of Washington Street and Irving Avenue from ten years earlier. In the foreground the Cazenovia stream locomotive is passing while bluecollar workmen lounge along the street. The one lone woman breezing along the sidewalk is wearing a low cut, above the knee, slip of a dress. Hardly naked, yet suggestive for the era. Lee explained, “...in 1927 and 1928 [I] passed this cor-

ner every day, going to and from work. ...I can only say that Washington Street was famous throughout the county for something besides the railroad tracks.”6 he Museum of Modern Art was established in 1929 to promote modernism, which meant mostly French and other European artists. The other major museum in New York, the Metropolitan, like many long established art museums across the country, was even more hidebound in its opposition to living American artists.The Met had turned down a large donation from socialite, sculptress, and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to add an American wing of modern art to the stogy enclave. The decision incensed Whitney and she decided to finance the first major museum to showcase living American artists.The Whitney Museum opened on Eight Street in Greenwich Village on November 18,1931. From the start, Julianna Force, the

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first director of the Whitney (and longtime personal secretary to the founder), possessed the open-minded dynamics that drove the museum in its efforts to give American artists the same attention as other museums were giving to European artists. She initiated, with Gertrude Whitney’s approval, bi-annuals exhibits (which soon became annual shows), for American sculpture, painting, and watercolor. Artists were invited to send work without juries or prizes to contend with.The museum was unique in paying a “rental” compensation to the artists for exhibiting their works and not charging a commission on works sold. Force and Gertrude Whitney were well known for championing young and unknown artists. Julianna Force invited Lee to show two watercolors at the 1939 Whitney annual exhibit.Anna Olmsted had taken the lank, red-haired artist under her wing, and it is likely that her patronage had convinced Julianna about Lee’s maturing talent. Force was accustomed to playing the fairy godmother role for artists. Lee was one of seventy-one artists invited to send two works each, of their own selection. Other artists invited to that year’s show included Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Peggy Bacon, and Reginald Marsh. Coye was one of a large contingent of artists exhibiting at the Whitney for the first time. One of the paintings Lee sent to the Whitney show was Dark House, a somber-hued watercolor he had done of a house in Paris, New York. It was one of many weekend watercolors Lee had painted during that year, but this piece

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This page, clockwise, top left – ink drawing of Canal boat 1937; this page, top right – scratchboard illustration for “The Black Modonna”, Weird Tales, May 1947; this page,bottom center – brush and ink illustrations for The Art of Bundling, 1938; bottom left, this page – watercolor, The Ghost on the Knoll, (from newspaper halftone), whereabouts unknown; winner of first prize for watercolors at the 12th annual Associated Artists show in Syracuse, New York, 1938; page 56 – scratchboard illustration for 3 Tales of Horror,1967.

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was noticed by a representative of the Metropolitan Museum and purchased by that institution.A painting bought by the Met would have been a singular breakthrough for any artist, but the Depression was still on everyone’s mind and Lee continued to work in advertising even after he learned that his paintings had been selected to appear in the American art exhibit at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. By early 1939, Lee had left Flack’s and moved to William Lane Advertising. He had not been there long when he announced that he was quitting advertising.He had no specific career plans other than to paint. Ruth was furious, but the deed had been done and nothing she said made a difference to Lee. Some years later, an art professor at Oswego College was telling Lee about his dream of building a studio and just spending his time painting; Lee wrote in his journal:“He is a seeker of trivia to avoid the issue— something to do with security—you paint or you don’t paint—there is no in between.”7 Advertising had been playing the “in-between”in Lee’s career. His dissatisfaction with advertising, in conjunction with his bolstered confidence from his one man show at the Syracuse Museum, his paintings showing at the Whitney and the Golden Gate Exposition, along with the Metropolitan Museum sale, triggered his decision to create a niche for himself in the art world. In this light leaving the safe confines of a regular advertising salary may not have been as cavalier a decision as it first appears. Lee also had some mural commissions in hand.

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Fulltime f Lee had any initial concerns about getting established as a full-time artist, they quickly vanished. The year 1940 would turn out to be a busy one for him and set the tenor for rest of the decade. Lee and Ruth had recently moved from their East Genesee Street apartment (which had a bad furnace and was never warm enough in the winter), to a second floor apartment in a converted private house around the corner. They would live at 315 South Beech Street for the next fifteen years. Early in the year, working in the basement craft room of the big brownstone mansion that housed the Syracuse Museum, Lee, with the help of art student Frances Cook, finished a mural for the bar room of the New Worden Hotel in Saratoga Springs. The painting showed the original Canfield Casino from 1864 and was done from studies of photographs and drawings done on site. The Syracuse Museum bulletin reported that the museum’s basement room, where the mural was painted,“speedily became a mecca for many of the artist’s art-minded friends.” Lee was in New York City on Sunday, January 29, 1940, for the hanging of his work at the Whitney Museum Annu-

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al.He decided to stop into the Metropolitan Museum to see “Dark House,” finally on view eight months after its purchase, but when he reached the gallery where it was supposedly hung, he found only workmen painting the walls.At the information desk, he learned that his painting was temporarily in the basement storeroom while the exhibition room was being redecorated.1 In February, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts hosted the first annual exhibition of advertising art, sponsored by the Advertising Club of Syracuse. Lee received two gold awards, for a newspaper layout design and a consumer direct mail piece, and a silver award for trade

paper artwork—all done while working at Lane Advertising. Lee must have cast a cold eye on this sort of recognition for pure commerce by a museum of fine art. March saw the Associated Artists 14th annual exhibition at the Syracuse Museum where Frances Cook was voted first prize winner for her technically proficient oil painting Portrait Study, and Lee came away with an honorable mention for his watercolor.At the end of May, Lee had a one-man show at the Schrafft store on South Warren Street, an upper middleclass restaurant at the time. Lee was also engaged to paint a series of murals for Doane’s Grill in Hamilton, New York, and settled on a historical theme,showing the old Chenango Canal, which had once run directly beneath the restaurant. In August, Coye accompanied Anna Olmsted to the summer art colony at Southern Culture Institute at Blue Ridge, North Carolina, for their annual art conference, where she was lecturing on art.Lee taught art classes in sketching and painting and exhibited a large number of his oils and watercolors. On his return to Syracuse in the fall, he continued teaching a regular sketch class begun the previous year in the Syracuse Museum basement, next to the

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boiler room, where he had painted the Saratoga Springs mural. The class met Tuesday evenings, between 7:30 and 9:30,and charged a rate of fifty cents plus a ten-cent model fee per class. He had some initial anxiety about overseeing a group of inexperienced students, but managed better than he had expected and discovered that he enjoyed teaching. The class proved popular enough that before long a second session was added, on Thursday nights. Over the next few years,these classes would serve as a meeting place for friends and patrons of Coye. Franklin D. Roosevelt had proclaimed the last week of November 1940 as National Art Week and Coye took part in the festivities at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Art where he was among the artists demonstrating art techniques. His deftly done woodcut of a train approaching a trestle received a special mention at the art exhibition. The start of 1941 found Lee working on new murals and exhibiting at the Associated Artists. Lee was doing much, yet not enough of it brought in money. Being so busy was a way of warding off idleness. He appeared at his last Whitney Museum American Art Show, in February,with a watercolor titled “The Old D., L. & W. Station.” Lee had sketched the gray brick railroad station a year earlier, and created a muted nighttime view of the old and the new:a stream engine,and a “modern streamlined automobile.”2 At low ebb financially in November 1941, Lee decided to become an associate of William Spitz Advertising Agency with offices in the Empire building at 472 South Salina Street.While not a full-

time employee, he must have considered this a setback,taking into account his vitriolic opinion of advertising and the fact that the Spitz agency specialized in local department store accounts. On December 7,1941,a cold sunny Sunday in Syracuse, Lee heard the radio report of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A few months later William Spitz enlisted and Lee found himself at loose ends. In wartime Syracuse, Polk’s Business Directory was listing Lee as a commercial artist and he found himself taking on more assignments for which he felt no passion. It should be mentioned that many of the murals done for stores and restaurants were commercial work. The historical themes used in these allowed Lee to spend time researching archives

and locations. He would spend so much time and money on books and travel to historic sites, that he would only have straitened profits, if any, to show at the completion of a mural. To central NewYorkers it must have appeared as if Lee was winning awards every year at the Associated Artist shows. These were good for recognition, but offered little else. In his art class he taught “the purpose of art in the lives of all of us is fun.I mean this in the sense of the pleasure derived from it, the pleasure we get from the use and consequent development of the imaginative nature of every individual.” But Lee was also a pragmatic thinker when it came to his art and he accepted the fact that he would have to do work to order as a commercial artist, regardless of intrinsic aesthetic merits or “fun.” y 1942 the tide was turning against realistic representation in the art world. Lee found his realistic style made him an anachronism and cut him out of the Whitney annuals. The defeat and occupation of France by Germany had brought many refugee surrealists and abstractionists from Paris to New York, which by default became the new art capital of the world.The French artists, most disciples of Picasso, infused modernism directly into the American art scene, pushing American realism to the edge. No artist working at this time could ignore the siren appeal of surrealism or abstract art regardless of his feelings towards modernism. The cachet of making a sale to the Metropolitan Museum was ancient his-

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Page 57 – scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks? “Squire Toby’s Will”, 1946; Page 58 –oil painting, title unknown,1944; this page clockwise, top left – oil painting, title unknown, 1958; top right – LBC working on mural depicting the early days of Utica, N.Y.,“The Battle of Oriskany, Aug. 6, 1777”, 1940; bottom right – ink and scratchboard, Knickerbocker History of New York, unpublished, ca. 1945; bottom center – scratchboard illustration, unknown,ca.1944;bottom left – brush and ink spot art for Spice magazine,1946.

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tory to Lee.Regionalism and the “American Scene” were out of vogue and now belittled in most art publications.Where a short time before Lee felt himself part of the New York City art world, trips to New York now seemed unproductive and Lee kept closer to home. Lethargy was akin to death for Lee, and he managed to keep busy. He told his son,“You should not waste a moment being idle, do something—no matter what.”3 he studio air is permeated with the smell of linseed oil and pigments. The mural braced up on wood pylons is a large one and the first of a series Lee has begun that year based on American folk songs.The picture shows a bar room full of people with a piano at its center, and the bar at the other. Frankie is on a stairway, gun in hand. Johnny is reeling from the bullet. The bar patrons, made up of real life friends of Lee,are witnesses to the tragic ballad and Lee has casted himself as the piano player at the center of it all. In May 1942 Lee was on the committee in charge of exhibits for the New York State Exhibition of Watercolor, and talked Ruth into over-seeing their business office. In June, he began showing his work at the Grand Central Art Gallery in Manhattan. In spite of local awards and recognition, he felt that serious critics would ignore him in favor of New York City artists or see him as only a regionalist. Byron Fellows, the former Flack Advertising employee, now lived across the hall from the Coyes at 315 South Beech Street, and was writing articles for a farm magazine. One assignment was to interview Victoria Dreyfus, a

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prize livestock breeder and wife of millionaire and big-time talent promoter Max Dreyfus.The Dreyfuses had turned their 700 acre estate, the Madrey Farm, two miles south of Brewster in Putnam County, New York, into a victory farm to help the war effort. During the course of the interview,Victoria mentioned that her husband Max was looking for creative people to add to his own talent stable, which had once included composer George Gershwin. Fellows began talking about an exceptional artist he knew back in Syracuse.Victoria Dreyfus became interested and asked to see some of this artist’s work. At a follow-up meeting at the Dreyfus estate,Fellows brought along one of Lee’s paintings. According to Fellows, when Victoria saw the canvas she became excited and began talking about promotional ideas, going as far as mentioning spreads in Life magazine. The patriotic

Dreyfus asked Fellows about Lee’s military status and Fellows answered that Lee was not in any branch of the armed forces.The meeting ended there. Regarding Lee’s military status, he had been classified as “rejected, physically unfit” when called down to the Denison Building enlistment office on March 3, 1944, but this classification could have meant many things. His friend Reverend Gus Ulrich found the opinion of the examining officer to be full of “sense and judgement”[sic]. He wrote to Lee, “you simply are not a killer and couldn’t be without tearing your soul to tatters and becoming useless to your time.”4 Lee would do his bit for the war effort by assembling truck frames in a garage on South McBride Street, where he met and learned welding from Casimir Glinecki. His metal working would eventually lead him to take up silversmithing and sculpture. At this time Lee began a satirical album on the war, eschewing the usual patriotic themes, which were commonplace during the war. This series of drawings may have been in response to the propaganda art prevalent then. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor,Thomas Hart Benton painted eight violent works of unbridled anti-fascism collectively known as the “Year of Peril.” One image shows a heartland blonde being raped by Japanese soldiers, another a fascist ogre in uniform sowing skulls out of a seed bag. (The latter a homage to Jean Francois Millet’s The Sower.) Benton’s paintings present corpses (casualties of war) and spilled blood without the usual sanitizing seen in American art,

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Page 60 – pencil sketch, untitled war album, unpublished, 1944; this page clockwise, top left – watercolor,“Dark House,” 1938; top right – pencil sketch, untitled, ca. 1945; bottom right – ink on scratchboard illustration, unknown, ca. 1944; bottom left – watercolor, “Night Train”, 1940; page 62 – ink on scratchboard, Knickerbocker History of New York, (unpublished), ca. 1945.

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propaganda or otherwise. Lee was certainly aware of “Year of Peril” and inspired by them. The paintings were at the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York City in April of 1942, the Paramount newsreel made of the exhibit ran in thousands of theaters across the country, and millions of posters showing the paintings were printed by the Office of War Information during the early war years. Art critics lambasted the savagery of Benton’s renderings, but as Benton’s grandson would note years later, they were prophetic visions of concentration camps, death marches, kamikaze attacks, and other war crimes. Lee drawings on the other hand avoided jingoistic sentiment and fell under social satire. He realized early on that these were for his own private consumption.The miasma of war bringing out the worst in human nature has never been a topic for even-handedness during wartime.

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8

August Detour

t the end of 1943, author, editor, and publisher August Derleth began marketing the first in a series of anthologies.The first book was entitled Sleep No More! and the series was envisioned by Derleth to “[...] take in as many kinds of readers and as many gambits of horror as I could.”1 Derleth,a connoisseur of weird fiction since childhood, sold stories to the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales when not writing serious, regional novels of his native Wisconsin. In 1938 Derleth and friend Donald Wandrei tried to get a publisher to put out a story collection of fellow Weird Tales author H. P. Lovecraft.When this failed they created Arkham House, ostensibly to publish Lovecraft.2 Lovecraft is a person that needs further illumination.He was a strange bird:a native of Providence, Rhode Island, and an Anglophile, who thought that the American colonies should not have broken away from the British empire. His biographer, L. Sprague De Camp, called him “past-oriented,” due as much to Lovecraft’s childhood nostalgia as to his

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abiding love of all things colonial. Lovecraft was also xenophobic; the brief time he spent during the 1920s as a married man, he lived in the cultural and racial melting pot of Brooklyn,“[...] getting to the point where not just ethnics, but nearly everybody, got on his nerves,”3 according to De Camp. His much putupon wife, Sonia, must have been one of those enervating persons, since he essen-

tially abandoned her and New York at the same time, moving back in with his aunts in the old section of Providence after two years of marriage. A theme in Lovecraft’s fiction was that ancient other-worldly beings (“Old-Ones”) once ruled the Earth and were seeking a return to dominance that would open up “terrifying vistas of reality” for humanity.The entities of the Cthulhu Mythos possessed a peculiar cosmic awareness without any particular interest in mankind. With these stories Lovecraft presents a colder horror just behind the gothic facade built by Hawthorne and Poe. Until Lovecraft came along, some sense of spiritual awareness drove supernatural tales of terror. The plot thread of all the Cthulhu tales is no more or less than the insignificance of human beings to the greater cosmos. The mysterious revelation and return of the “Old Ones” will force humankind to face its divine egocentric myopia and false self-awareness. Lovecraft begins “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The most merciful thing in the world,I

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think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” While a regional and ancestral chauvinist, Lovecraft acknowledged the insignificance of even his sacred New England environs, once remodeled into his fictionalized Arkham countryside. (Lee would later state that he felt some of the same psychic barrenness in central New York.) Lovecraft, in the manner, if not the mind, of an avant-gardist, wrote not for money, nor for fame, which he believed to be beneath the dignity of a gentleman. Throughout his life, Lovecraft wrote tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand letters to many correspondents, professional and amateur writers and fans alike. This epistorial largeness, and the cozy persona and erudition of his letters, was an aspect of his personal gallantry and his manner of seeking to entertain an audience.There is no question that he would have accomplished more creatively and financially if he had written less missives and more fiction,but this would have been ungentlemanly. He died in 1937 of stomach cancer, exacerbated by a poor diet and an adulthood lived in penny-a-word pulp penury. That Lovecraft’s sort of gallantry should appear so late into the twentieth century is almost too benign to be credible, yet reveals an artful self-concealment. It is easily understood that after Lovecraft’s death there was a strong fan base working to get his work published beyond the cheap wood-pulp pages of Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. Lovecraft’s fiction has something in it of both the visionary and the artificial, written

in a leisurely, dispassionate manner with ornate narrative touches, yet for the most part, building a stage solid enough to hold all its fantastic elements. he early war years had seen a surprisingly good collection of terror tales edited by Boris Karloff, a reprint of Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 anthology Creeps by Night, and a big horror omnibus from Random House entitled Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. All were selling well, and Derleth saw the chance for his own expertly selected anthology of out-of-print and obscure horror stories. Initially, Ziff-Davis, based in Chicago, appeared keen on publishing the book, but a tug-of-war with editor Ray Palmer developed when he wanted to substitute stories in Sleep No

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More! for some by his own pet authors in the pulp field, and expounded his credo that the “adult reader is the pulp reader grown up,” 4 Ziff-Davis wound up passing on Derleth’s book in February of 1944. (Palmer, primarily the editor of Amazing Stories since 1938, had taken the moribund magazine and turned it around with an eccentric mix of old-time pulp writing and pseudo-scientific non-fiction.) The Ziff-Davis rejection elicited a long, miffed letter from Derleth which ended with the advice to publisher Bernard Davis that he should keep pulp standards out of his book business.5 Once Derleth got back the manuscript of Sleep No More! he sent it to his mainstream publisher, Farrar & Rinehart. On May 3, 1944 Stanley Rinehart Jr. wired Derleth his acceptance of the anthology. Earlier in the year, during a slow period, Lee made one of many forays to New York City and at the prodding of his friend Reed Alvord, a Hamilton, New York, journalist and Colgate University administrator,visited the Farrar & Rinehart offices on Madison Avenue. Lee showed some of his recent illustrations to a few of the editors there, including a young art editor Faith Ball. All agreed on the quality of the artwork, but had no definite commission to offer at the time. Derleth had not given any thought to publishing Sleep No More (Farrar & Rinehart had removed the exclamation) in a illustrated edition, but if he had, it is likely that he would have suggested Virgil Finlay, a popular fantasy artist with a detailed, realistic style. Finlay had done dust-jacket art for Arkham

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Page 63 – scratchboard, Who Knocks? “The Ankardyne Pew”, 1946; Page 64 – scratchboard, Sleep No More, “Seaton’s Aunt”, 1944; this page, left – scratchboard and ink, Knickerbocker, unpublished, ca. 1945; top right – oil painting, cover Weird Tales,Nov.1945,right bottom – ink,cartoon from Spice,1945.

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House, and illustrations for the American Mercury’s gravure magazine, Weird Tales, and many science fiction and fantasy genre pulp magazines. There is no record of Derleth’s reaction when he was told by Farrar & Rinehart editor Philip Wylie on June 8, 1944, that Lee Brown Coye, an artist hitherto unknown to Derleth, would be

doing the book jacket and interior illustrations for Sleep No More, just as there is no record of who picked Coye for the assignment once the idea of an illustrated edition was formulated. The most likely person is Faith Ball, but Derleth’s editor Philip Wylie or possibly managing editor Adelaide Sherer are also candidates; whoever it was made a blind

match that would prove ideal, for Sleep No More,subtitled “masterpieces of horror for the connoisseur,” and would finally link Coye with the genre he appeared destined to illustrate. After taking the commission, Coye discovered that he had a month to illustrate twenty stories and create dustjacket art including the typography. He

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Page 66, left – watercolor, unknown title, 1940; this page top left – scratchboard drawing, Who Knocks?, “The Intercessor”, 1946; top right pencil, unknown, ca. 1946; bottom right –oil painting, title unknown, 1944; bottom left – oil mural for Treasure Island, “Billy Bones,” ca. 1946; page 68 – scratchboard and ink cover to Spice magazine, Nov. 1945; page 69 top left – pencil study for Sleep No More, (this is one of the censored illustrations not used), 1944; page 69 top center – scratchboard and ink cover to Spice, December, 1945; page 69 top right – scratchboard, Who Knocks?. “The Follower”, 1946; Page 69, bottom right – scratchboard, Who Knocks?. “The Follower”, 1946; page 69, bottom left – ink, cartoon for Spice, 1946.

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also learned that the book’s manuscript was at the printer and unavailable for him to read immediately (this was in the days before ubiquitous photocopying machines).Told that many of the stories had been printed in Weird Tales (nine

came from there), Lee visited the magazine’s Rockefeller Plaza offices where he spent the better part of three days in the back-issue library reading and making thumbnail sketches concerning such pleasant matters as black magic, grue-

some madness, ancient monsters, and supernatural evil. Coye, who was a fan of ghost tales and clearly fascinated by folk superstitions, fell under the spell of the stories in the anthology and created twenty-five illustrations and dust-jacket art, and an unknown number of drawings that did not make it into the book. Among the group left out were a couple of illustrations that Farrar & Rinehart thought too gruesome to print.6 One of the censored pieces showed a pair of hanged men, audaciously detailed in death [pg.69]. A more sedate picture of a woman “hung” in a closet did make it into the book [pg. 77], along with one drawing of a severed and rotting human head gnawed on by a rat for Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” [pg. 73]. Regarding the original Lovecraft drawing, Lee was to later comment,“it had several homes before it finally found someone who could stand it”.7 When Derleth saw photostats of the book art, he was duly impressed and wrote to Farrar & Rinehart, praising Coye’s work. When it comes to the writing of horror or ghost stories, a certain amount of vagueness and power of suggestion is essential to give the reader a sense that such things can happen.The same is not true for horror art. An illustration is witness to the author’s imagination and if the right level of explicitness, without losing the mystery, is not met, the effect of terror is gone. The ability to create lucid pictorial details is not enough (a realistically done skeleton serves only as an anatomy lesson). The fairly familiar must be turned inside out without

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straining the viewer’s credibility.A skillful author can provide fearful hints on which the reader’s imagination may build;it’s harder to avoid the Grand Guignol in art, and Lee seems to have found the right balance. Lee had drawn pictures showing dead bodies on the battlefields of the Civil War [pg. 41, 42], but had never before shown putrefying flesh.The fallen solders could have been asleep, but there

is no mistaking the horrid display of corpses that Lee used to flesh out the supernatural terrors in the Derleth anthologies.These are not intended as an end to themselves, however. With the Depression still fresh in people’s mind and World War II raging, a range of new attitudes and anxieties had developed in the American psyche. Newsreel audiences saw the flotsam of bodies floating on the tide off Normandy Beach and

would soon be horrified at the mass graves and emaciated bodies revealed at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.These brutal images brought the barbaric intrusion inherent in most gothic fiction into everyday life and introduced a dark,almost fantastic reality, horrific and completely unseen before, within the familiar. Like Otto Dix and George Grosz during World War I, Lee was one of the few modern artists not afraid to show a decaying body or blur the line between beauty and ugliness. The book jacket to Sleep No More is an effective bedlam of hellish creatures surrounding a terrified sleeper (Lee himself as the model) [pg. 75].The color outside the vignetted bedroom is a crimson stain bleeding off the cover jacket, and the shadows are given an olive green hue, adding a subtle eerie cast to the proceedings.The art displayed a forced perspective by having one of the nightmare creatures reaching out from the door in the far background to the bed. Lee would use this sort of anatomical elongation for a later illustration for the story “October Game’ [pg. 97] by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales, and for 3-D dioramas he would create during the 1950s. Some of the “nasty and loathsome”8 interior illustrations were genuinely disturbing for the time.If ZiffDavis had published the book it is unlikely that it would have been illustrated, and Coye’s affinity for horror illustrations inspired by Lovecraft, Machen, Robert Bloch, and M. P. Shiel may never have been discovered. Sleep No More was officially published on September 21, 1944, and was

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Page 70 – sepia watercolor, dustjacket art for The Land is Large, 1938; this page clockwise, top left – tempera, Dust to Dust, 1946; top right – scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?, “Negotium Perambulans”, 1945; bottom right – pencil drawing, Knickerbocker, unpublished, ca. 1945; bottom left – ink and scratchboard, Knickerbocker, unpublished, ca.1945; page 72 – scratchboard and ink cover to Spice magazine,Jan.1946.

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generally praised by Eudora Welty in her review for the New York Times, with the piece using two Coye drawings from the book. Within a month the book had sold out its 6,000-copy first edition print run and a second printing of 2,500 was immediately ordered.The success of Sleep No More guaranteed a second volume would follow, and Derleth had in mind a collection of ghost stories entitled Who Knocks?, with Coye again doing the illustrations. Like Sleep No More, many of the twenty tales in Who Knocks? came from pulp magazines including Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and Unknown Worlds. In the main illustration for “A Reversion to Type” by Edgar Lloye Hampton, Lee draws Amerindian fetishs that mimicked early Picasso use of African masks motifs in his art.Without anyone to tell him otherwise, Lee was pushing the boundaries of his illustrations, mixing Culture with commerce. Not many artists could get away with this level of self-expression outside of chic European art publications. ll of Coye’s studios, over the years, became small museums showcasing his sundry interests. His own illustrations, those returned by publishers, would be haphazardly thrown into a box (with the accumulation of his Derleth art and later Weird Tales drawings, Lee began calling it his “horror box”). An old violin that had once served as model hung on the wall, and shelves would be lined, cabinet of curiosities like, with all manner of books and curios: tomes on the Civil War, animal bones, a

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human skull bought from a medical supply house, type specimen books, what Lee called his “clean dust,” old Montgomery Ward catalogs (to use for art reference), paper samples, and Lee’s album of early American stamps. On January 12, 1945, a Friday night, Lee had been working late in his second floor studio in the Hiawatha Building on East Genesee Street when he smelled smoke. He was there with friend and studio partner, Casimir Glinecki, and they soon realized that a fire had broken out somewhere below them. Coye and Glinecki heard explosions and knew they had to get out quickly. Finding the front door blocked, they raced through heavy black smoke to a rear fire escape and reached the street as the fire trucks were raising ladders to rescue them. This was the third all-points fire alarm in a commercial building during the past five weeks,and with g e n e r a l wartime alerts in effect and a war materials

facility next door, the fire chief viewed the pair with narrowed eyes, ordering the artists taken to the police station to give “statements.” The fire took four hours to get under control, and when it was over, the roof and most of the second floor was gone.The only thing Lee thought to save when rushing out was his stamp album; most of the books and the contents of the horror box were burned or water damaged.He did manage to salvage from the basement some of the water-soaked murals he was working on for the

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This page , top left – ink on scratchboard, Who Knocks?. “The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee”, 1946; top center – ink on scratchboard illustration, The Night Side,“The Eerie Mr. Murphy”, 1947; top right – ink on scratchboard drawing, unknown, 1945; bottom right – ink on scratchboard, Sleep No More, “Rats in the Wall”, 1944; bottom left – ink on scratchboard for Sleep No More,“Cassius”, 1944.

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Howard Johnson franchise in Dewitt. A small insurance settlement helped him to set up a studio across the street. The stamp collection would be sold off bit by bit during lean years and then restarted when the coffers were full. The new studio in the Group Parts Park Building was up and running within a few weeks, Lee fixed up the Howard Johnson paintings and began working on a new series of historical murals (telling the always-popular story of the building of the Erie Canal) for a Rochester jewelry store. The Howard Johnson in nearby Dewitt had a Coye room filled with a dozen of his canvases,

depicting scenes from Treasure Island and Washington Irving’s writings. To stave off boredom during a slow period, Lee was teaching himself card tricks and how to make cigarettes magically disappear.Downshifting from painting murals Lee began doing cartoons and cover art for a new Syracuse magazine, Spice,a short-lived regional version of the New Yorker. Spice was published by Virginia Bailey during 1945-1946 and used the cover legend “design for gracious living of central NewYorkers.” Lee created a matronly old lady cartoon character that appeared on covers and in spot cartoons.A contest was run to give her a name, but the magazine changed its name and slant before a winner was announced.The November 1945 Halloween cover had a witch riding a broomstick with Lee’s old lady hitching a ride. Many of Lee’s cartoon captions were written by other hands at Spice.The same arrangement was commonplace at the NewYorker, with two of their biggest luminaries, Peter Arno and James Thurber. The spot art Lee drew for Spice showed a strong naturalness with handling cartoon figures and settings, and it is a pity that he did not do more in this vein. Some of Lee’s drawings of city scenes reveal the influence of Frans Masereel, a woodcut artist and early contributor to the NewYorker. rom the time he had read The Knickerbocker’s History of New York as a boy, Lee had wanted to illustrate the book. A movie, Knickerbocker Holiday, based on the book, had played in Syracuse in 1944.The movie was a musical

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and showed the usual cinematic streamlining of historical elements, but it would have inspired Lee to reread the book and begin working on his own artistic interpretation. Lee started some drawings for Washington Irving’s faux history in 1945 and these showed a stylistic shift and new attention to satirical details. The freedom Lee took with Irving’s stories,using textures and angular caricature to update the social commentary and incorporating background and figures together as design elements,advanced his style from naturalism to a modernistic geometry using minimal hatching and satirical exaggeration. The Knickerbocker world was presented as a pandemonium of torture, religious intolerance, greed, gluttony, and general turmoil. Those responsible for the world’s misery were the church and the state, singly and jointly. In one drawing of a group of American Indians sur-

75 Page 74, left – local newspaper account of LBC showing his drawings for Sleep No More, (the middle illustration he is holding is one not used in the book, and now lost), June 11, 1944; page 74, right – unused scratchboard for Sleep No More, 1944; this page, top left & right – scratchboard, Knickerbocker History of New York, unpublished, ca. 1945; this page bottom – scratchboard dustjacket illustration (detail) for Sleep No More, 1944; Page 76,left – scratchboard and ink,“The Occupant of the Crypt,” Weird Tales,Sept.1947.

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rounded by solders and priests, Lee used figure deformation and posture to make a visual impact, and express character.All of the Knickerbocker drawings were done in scratchboard. Lee had discovered scratchboard in the 1930s and immediately liked its woodcut characteristics. Lee’s scratchboard method began with sketching in pencil on paper to establish outline and

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Page 76 right – scratchboard, “Squire Toby’s Will,” Who Knocks?, 1946; this page top left – scratchboard and ink,Knickerbocker History of New York, unpublished, ca. 1945; this page top center – scratchboard and ink illustration “The Occupant of the Room,” Sleep No More, 1944; this page top right – scratchboard and ink,“Mr. Minchin’s Midsummer”, Nightside, 1947; this page bottom right – ink, cartoon from Spice,1945; this page bottom left – scratchboard and ink illustration “Running Wolf,” Who Knocks?, 1946; page 78 right – scratchboard and ink, “Weirdism,” ”Medicine Men,”Weird Tales, Mar.1949.

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dark areas. He then transferred the drawing to Ross #2 white scratchboard by scrubbing the back of the drawing with the broad side of a square stick of charcoal. Scratchboard is a heavy paper stock with a cauky clay coating. When inked the surface can be scratched to reveal the white undercoating.Lee would place the preparatory sketch on top of the scratchboard, then carefully retrace the drawing with a hard pencil,leaving a thin line carbon copy. Using Winsor & Newton #00 and #0 series 7 brushes and Pelican Ink (which he preferred to Higgins) he drew on the scratchboard,finishing by scraping white lines into the board’s blackened surface using engravers’tools,knives,pins, rags, pieces of wood, fingers, and any odd pronged tool to create varied textural effects and hair-thin scratches. But Lee’s tool of choice was a woodcarver’s awl, held in the same manner as an engraver working wood. Lee worked with his face close to the drawing, as it developed into a fully fleshed-out imaged, so close he could smell the sharpness of the ink when it came into contact with the scratchboard. At the end of a busy day the black crescents of ink under his fingernails look like negative images of the sickle moons he placed incessantly within his pictures. Generally, Lee would spend time between commissioned working on illustrations for some of his favorite books. At this point of his life he was working at a feverish pace with seemingly no respite. Lee emerged during the war as a mature artist with a grisly imagination that prepared him for the next phase in his career.

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Drawing with Razors or more than thirty years between 1923 and 1955, the original Weird Tales (the “unique magazine”) was the finest periodical of its kind. Born out of the flourishing pulp field that included titles like Zeppelin Stories, Astounding Stories, Strange Tales, and Dime Detective, for most of its life, through brilliant issues and bad ones, Weird Tales was a locus for a literary generation that included among its authors H. P. Lovecraft,Robert Bloch,Robert E.Howard, August Derleth, Fritz Leiber,Theodore Sturgeon,and Ray Bradbury. Their stories would soon appear in seminal anthologies and books published by Arkham House (Derleth’s specialty press could have been the hardcover arm of the magazine) and other speciality publishing houses beginning to print science fiction and modern American fantasy in hardcover. To this day, Weird Tales has remained the mother lode for horror anthologies presenting classic horror stories.The magazine proved to be the perfect vehicle for Lee’s art. When Lee visited the Weird Tales office to read stories for Sleep No More, the magazine’s art editor, Lamont “Monty” Buchanan, noticed the red-

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haired artist making thumbnail sketches and started a conversation.The two hit it off, and Buchanan asked Lee if he would like to do some work for the magazine. Lee left that afternoon with a story in galley proofs. It was not unusual for the magazine to make this sort of last minute, off-the-cuff piecework assignment since

their pay rates were bottom-of-the-barrel five to ten dollars for a black and white drawing. On the way to his hotel, Lee stopped at a drugstore where he bought some razor blades. Then he found an art supply store, where he picked up India ink and scratchboard. The next morning he returned to Rockefeller Plaza and presented the startled Buchanan with a finished drawing for “Please Go Way and Let Me Sleep” by Helen Kasson,a tongue-in-cheek tale of a family “living”in a crypt which gave Lee the chance to depict a plethora of corpses [pg.83]. Slow,meticulous pulp artists,such as Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok,both discovered by Weird Tales, realized after awhile that they could not afford to work for the magazine. According to Bok (who ran into Lee later at the Weird Tales office), “I got $5 a drawing for Weird. But then I also got $5 a drawing from Planet, Future Fiction, Stirring Stories, Science Fiction Quarterly, Cosmic, Astonishing, and others. It was standard [payment].”1 At these prices, Buchanan would find hastily done art shoved under the door at deadline time by some of the journeymen artists he was forced to use. Many pulp artists took it for

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granted that they were producing for the day rather than for posterity. At their pinnacle,in 1940,pulps were selling millions of copies a month. Still, most educated people were loath to be caught with one in their possession. To these people pulps were trash: trashy art and trashy writing,for the masses.Lee did not make this sort of distinction and once wrote “[...] I’d rather have my stuff in a pulp magazine where people can see it,than in a museum where they don’t.”2 One pulp author, Charles Beaumont, remembers, “their physical appearance suggested nothing short of mortal sin [...]. But it was the covers, more than anything else, that turned the grown up world against the pulp [...]. In a way unknown to me, and unduplicated by artists in any other field, those masters of the brush managed to work sex, action, horror, terror, beauty, ugliness, virtue, sin, and a dozen other elements, into every picture painted [...]. We revered those pulp artists and regarded their contribution [...]as being equal to that of the writers”.3 Indeed, a buyer scanning the newsstand would have to make an instant decision based on the cover—and all pulp publishers were aware of the importance of this few seconds of on-the-spot come-on. Weird Tales was a bit different in that its core audience preferred a good scary read to a good cover. In the 1930s, many covers were less weird than strange with stylized nudes of women, extravagantly posed, commonplace. (Lovecraft once stated that he tore off the lurid covers after buying an issue, but his copies of Weird Tales, residing at Brown University,

have somehow managed to regenerate their covers.) The magazine’s venerated authors included Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, as well as Lovecraft (still showing up in the magazine many years after his death with “found stories”–mostly works Derleth expanded from notes or fragments left by Lovecraft). By the mid-1940s, however, the fortunes of all pulp magazines had fallen on lean times; paperback books were supplanting the pulps’ traditional throwaway entertainment value. Many magazines were cutting back on overhead wherever they could, and one by one pulps disappeared off newsstands. The few survivors came out of the science fiction,mystery, and fantasy field; generally, these were the best of the lot. Lee would,in some cases, pick up a dozen or more Weird Tales manuscripts on visits to New York City and begin reading the stories on the train ride back to Syracuse. Outside of a deadline, usually a fortnight, there were no stipulations. “In pulps, oddly enough, an artist is given such freedom as is seldom found elsewhere.” Lee also painted a few covers for Weird Tales’ sister magazine Short Stories. The latter contained realistic, non-macabre fiction, and Lee’s work there showed the same hauntedlooking houses and eerie

people—which leads one to believe that Buchanan would use cover paintings done for the bi-monthly Weird Tales as fill-ins for the bi-weekly Short Stories. This misuse of his artwork may have been one of the contributing factors that led later publishers to typecast Lee as an artist that could only do horror. Later in life, when being rueful about his career, Lee would say of his pulp years that he was unable to get straight illustrative work from publishers because of his horror reputation. But mainstream publishers would not have been aware of his

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Page 79 – ink spot illustration, Spice magazine, 1946; page 80 – scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales,“The Might-Have-Been”, March 1948; this page, left – ink on scratchboard Weirdisms for Weird Tales,” Wizards and Witches,” March, 1949; this page, top right – oil painting, cover for Weird Tales, July,1948; this page, bottom right – scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales, “Master of the Crabs”, March 1948; page 82, bottom left – ink on scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales, “Lover in Scarlet”, Jan. 1949; page 82, right – pencil study for Weirdisms in Weird Tales, “Vampires,” November 1947.

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pulp work unless Lee had presented pulp samples or mentioned it—he certainly had enough unpublished, nonpulp art samples to show—and much of the macabre vein in Lee’s work could have been minimized by careful weeding out. Lee would also declare, at various times during the 1940s and 1950s, that he had given up book and magazine illustration, so as to move beyond conventional commercial art. These statements would be made as he was privately doing art for Treasure Island, Candide, and The Ox-bow Incident to satisfy whims he had to illustrate these books. hile the art in Weird Tales was mostly dependent on artists willing to work for poor wages, the response of Weird Tales readers also determined art assignments. It is clear that Coye’s art was popular from the beginning. He was stylistically different from Bok and Finlay,or any of the other artists in Weird Tales.Lee’s use of scratchboard gave his work an oldtime woodcut look, yet the art was done

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with a modernistic bent and an eye for odd distortions. Lee was the only one of the three famed Weird Tales “horror artists” to ever have his work censured for its gruesomeness. Finlay did have some troubles with his drawings showing nude women until he developed the technique of using celestial confetti and outworldly bubbles to cover offending anatomy. Pulp artists are sometimes faintly praised for their “untutored genius,” but few ever went on to any achievement beyond fourcolor newsstand decorations. It was even rarer to see an artist with fine art credentials deigning to work for the pulps.During the Depression some fine artists may have seen the pulps as a paying market equal to a hit-or-miss sale at a gallery show, but in a post-war world, pulp work was an escapable choice for any decent artist. None of this mattered to Lee who normally tended to down play his own artistic abilities. Of course,

the museum and dealer-run fine art world’s marketing of successive art movements, where artists appear almost to stumble into fame (Jackson Pollock being an example), can psychologically and economically wear down any unlucky artist over time. Lee began doing “Weirdisms,” full page drawings dealing with occult lore, with the July 1947, Weird Tales.“[....] The macabre, wouldn’t-want-to-meet-himin-a-dark-alley,gent on our cover will be recognized,if not as someone you know, as the smiling hero of our first ‘Weirdisms’ inside.” Herbert was the name given to Coye’s grave coiffured, snake-fanged vampire used in this first of

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This page, top left – original oil, used as cover to Weird Tales, March 1945; this page, top right – oil, cover to Short Stories, March 25, 1945; this page, bottom right– silver jewelry, “Jonah and the Whale”, ca. 1966. this page, bottom left– scratchboard,“Please Go Way and Let Me Sleep,” Weird Tales, March 1945; page 84 left – oil, Weird Tales, March1948; page 84 right – oil cover to Short Stories, Feb. 25, 1945.

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a series of “picture horrors” [pgs. 82, 88]. The first few “Weirdisms” were written by fellow Syracusian Evelyn Michel until she lost interest in the series and Lee took over the writing. The main book Lee used for research was Isis Unveiled written by Russian-born mystic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. First published in 1877, this monumental tome deals with mysticism, witchcraft, spiritualism, and occult lore, using ancient and modern

citations channeled from dead entities by Madame Blavatsky’s “soul-senses.” Although attacked as a fraud and a plagiarist (more because of her opposition to dogmatic religions than her belief in the supernatural), her early fans included Thomas Edison and W. B.Yeats.Today Madame Blavatsky is considered the mother of “new age.” Lee found Isis Unveiled fascinating and used it to develop themes for his “Weirdism” page. In his book The Weird Tales Story,

Robert Weinberg wrote that “Coye was an exceptional interior artist, but, like Virgil Finlay, his cover artwork was not up to his other work [...]. Coye’s problem was more with his very style of art. Coye’s covers were pictures much the same as his interiors. One style was not suitable for the other. In black and white, Coye’s sketches had the shape of nightmares.With the addition of color, Coye’s work suffered.” In fact, Lee was far more flexible

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than the limitations of this assessment allowed. Disparaging his Weird Tales cover art, compared to his black and white work, makes it appear as if Coye was simply putting gaudy make-up on a corpse. Like any good artist Lee evolved his style and approach with each new creation. Painting a pulp cover offered a different set of viewer expectations from the context of wall art, yet Lee, with his perfectionist tendencies, drew little distinction between the two except for subject matter. It is unlikely that he ever made more than a hundred dollars for any of the covers he painted for Weird Tales or Short Stories. The slapdash, cheaply done printing of pulp publications (where covers from different magazines were gang printed

on large press sheets and cut apart afterwards) did not allow for on-press adjustment in order to present a truer sense of the artwork’s original color palette. Experienced pulp artists knew enough about limitations of color press to stay away from painterly nuances. A scribbling of motley colors in one area, done to achieve a subtle effect, could easily turn into a brown sludge on the illmaintained presses run around the clock by pulp purveyors. Pure primary hues of green, red, and yellow worked best. These vivid colors also showed up better on newsstands. It is easy to see how the graphic starkness of Lee’s interior black and white interior art might work better on pulp paper than his color art on the better cover stock.

Another writer has assessed Lee’s Weird Tales cover art:“...the colors had a certain washed-out brightness to them—not so much that they had run, but that they had crawled.”4 At this time Lee admired the polychromatic color work of Paul Klee, the German modernist artist given to a motley blending of colors and shapes that did not reproduce well in print and had to be seen in person to be appreciated. In his gradual move away from realism towards an increased semi-abstract stylization, Lee had seen art by Klee on visits to New York City. Under Klee’s influence Lee began experimenting with color, and some of this carried over to his commercial work. Lee, unlike many young artists, was

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Page 85, top left – oil, Weird Tales, Jan. 1949; page 85 right – scratchboard “Weirdism” for Weird Tales, ”Witches” Jan., 1948; page 85, bottom left – pencil, unknown, ca. 1946; page 86, top – oil, Frankie & Johnny, (detail),1945; this page, top left – pencil, untitled, ca. 1946; this page, top center– scratchboard, ”The Gentleman from Prague,” Sleep No More, 1944; this page,top right– scratchboard and ink dustjacket mechanical art for Night Side, 1947; this page, bottom right – oil, Weird Tales, March 1948; this page, bottom left – oil, Weird Tales, Sept., 1949; page 88, left – Coye live on the second floor of 315 S. Beech Street; between 1940 and 1954; page 88, right – scratchboard “Weirdism” for Weird Tales,”Vampires”,July,1947.

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not looking to emulate commercial illustrators (such as Norman Rockwell, J. C. Lyendecker, and Dean Cornwell) working for magazines like Esquire, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. While aware of these artists, Lee preferred studying the works of Klee or Burchfield. Not being a regular pulp reader, Lee had no fixed view on “horror art,” except perhaps for Goya’s socalled black paintings and his Desastres de la Guerra etchings.Lee’s pictorial experiments dovetailed with his interest in the work of surrealists and abstractionists,his study of medical anatomy. Today, it is easy to forget the sense of astonishment that the first viewers of Coye’s unique art in Weird Tales must have felt,especially when one takes into account the medical work he was doing at the same time.“I saw some pretty horrible things, and it gave me some ideas.” ee’s first published art for Buchanan appeared on the cover of Short Stories for February 25, 1945.This was an uncharacteristic painting by Lee for E. Hoffmann Price’s “Detour to Kandahar,” showing a typical blood and thun-

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This page, top left – scratchboard and ink cartoon for Spice, “Well, the NEXT time you have them at your command...”, Jan. 1946; this page,top right – scratchboard for Who Knocks?, “The Dear Departed,” 1946; this page, bottom right – scratchboard, Who Knocks?, “The House of Nightmare”, 1946; this page, bottom left – scratchboard and ink, “The Ponderer,” Weird Tales, Nov. 1948; Page 90, right – scratchboard and ink for Weird Tales, ”One Foot & the Grave”, Sept. 1949.

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der pulp scene of a Khyber Pass caravan fighting off bandits [pg. 84]. In this piece Lee tried to create traditional pulp art to accommodate the story and must have realized the results were not a complete success. Buchanan’s input may have led to the painting’s scenario.Thereafter, Lee went back to trusting his own instincts and was less inclined to follow examples he saw on newsstands or attempt subjects far afield of his experience. Lee’s first Weird Tales cover painting appeared in the March 1945 issue.This was a muted color version of the black and white illustration for the story “Count Manus,” by M. R. James, in Derleth’s second anthology Who Knocks?, showing two mysterious, cloaked figures at a desolate crossroad–a long way from the Khyber Pass [pg. 83]. The spare, flatly-painted canvas, with patchy,Cezanne-tinted colors,looking as if painted in nervous haste, is a good deal more subdued than the earlier and longer-contemplated Short Stories cover. Before Coye’s impulsively subjective horror art, the illustrative field was filled with painstakingly done baroque images. Lee’s work, with all its traditional horror vestiges and gothic darkness, inhabited by deformities, dwarfs, hunchbacks, bearded corpses, dank crypts, and rats, avoided literal interpretation and pictured various horrors infused with a modern sensibility. Lee’s inventiveness and efficient design marked a Copernican shift in the universe of macabre illustration, as definite as the work of Lovecraft was to horror writing. By comparison, Finlay, with his obsessive accumulation of stippling dots

and a busy engraved line in the style of Franklin Booth, and to a lesser degree, Bok, with his stylized Maxfield Parrishinspired,luminous covers,remained hallmarks of aesthetically representational art. Finlay, at the time, was looked upon as an ace of weird and science fiction

pulp illustrators.Today his work appears dated, made to fit the era of letterpress metal “cuts.”While Bok and Finlay were capable of doing first rate horror art,neither could approach the degree of grue that Coye was able to get into his work. Lee’s illustration for Ray Bradbury’s

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This page left – scratchboard and ink illustration for Weird Tales, “Incident at the Galloping Horse”, Nov., 1948; this page, right – scratchboard Weirdisms for Weird Tales,”Witch-finder”Nov.1949; Page 92 – scratchboard illustration, “And Give Us Yesterday,”Weird Tales,Jan.1948.

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“The Black Ferris,” [pg. 103] in the March 1949 issue of Weird Tales was on a plane of gruesomeness beyond anything done by Finlay or Bok. During the late war years Lee was astonishingly creative. The list of his works at this time includes a proposed satirical war album of some fifty illustrations expressing his despair at the caprices of war. Many of these barbed drawings have been lost over the years (and it is not certain whether or not he finished all fifty drawings), and it was unlikely that he would have been able to find anyone to publish them at that hyper-patriotic time. The subject covered by the extant sketches, poking fun at military hierarchy,was full of the same wit seen in the earlier Knickerbocker illustrations,and depicts Lee’s inner conflict as a non-combatant observer reacting, like Goya, to the lunacy and chaos of war. One critic generally claimed that the main physiognomy in Lee’s art was the “moldering corpse.” On one hand, Lee was explicit in his handling of horror themes, but on the other, he aimed at humor and wit.There was no hatred in Lee’s art, like in the work of German artist George Grosz—who once commented, “man is not good—man is an animal!”Grosz’s social analysis was heavily loaded with a subjective edge articulated by World War I, early pulp art, and the political upheavals in Germany after the war. In artistic and personal terms, Lee was living through many similar social and career disillusionments. After the war,Lee’s drawing began to develop a more stripped-down and

refined manner, presenting a direct link between popular culture and contemporary developments in the arts. Lee’s break from realism was also well underway, from one drawing to the next as he distorted human anatomy and space. He had become interested in all forms of modernity and was attracted to the unbridled freedom and questing he saw in abstract art. Some of this eye-catching modernistic draftsmanship can be seen in the drawings for the third and last Derleth horror anthology for Rinehart, Night Side. The reclining figure for the story “Nightmare”by Marjorie Bowen is seen from an unusual overhead point of view [pg. 100].The bed creates a frame for the body and the pillow and creases in the bed sheet become graphic embellishment.Lee’s portrayal of the human figure reflected his brand of tortured anatomy. Lee condensed his horror drawing with bits of abstractions into designs utilizing natural elements to offset the odd characters.The illustration for Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” from Night Side introduces sunflowers graphically treated as a familiar element to offset the bizarre persons in the picture who may or may not be human [pg.137]. Lee’s pulp paintings were done in a rush, he was fully capable of finishing a cover in a few days once he had worked out the composition. His covers for the September 1948 [pg. 87] and May 1951 issue of Weird Tales used a more monochromatic palette and present an almost art brut execution. It is likely that he rushed through these paintings in a matter of hours.

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Corpus Illustrum

merica had changed after the war. Soldiers coming home from duty overseas had lost some of their provincial constraints and narrow views of life. Lee had seen the work of modernist artists, and through them found new energy in his art by experimenting with flatness of form and figures distorted into angular shapes.This phase of geometrical art, a literal flatten cubism of form, would continue throughout the 1940s, leading to his abstract paintings.Lee saw these works as studio diversions, apart from landscapes and street scenes, or subjective figures, since he knew they would be difficult to sell. Storytelling art was still his main interest but commercial assignments had to be chased down, and Lee was a poor agent for his own work. At the end of May 1946, the PepsiCola “Paintings of the Year” third annual art competition had accepted Lee’s Dust to Dust [pg. 71]. The elaborate selection process of the show included regional screenings that passed on their “best” to a national jury for final selection. Lee’s large picture of

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an outdoor funeral procession is his most interesting painting of 1946.After careful study, one is struck by the combination of somber settings and sexual motifs running through the painting,

including the use of phallic features for some of the figures, and the Georgia O’Keeffe-like treatment of the details of the trees.We see peripheral characters: a man in hat and overcoat at the edge of the painting with his hands over his crotch, as if preparing to urinate, and somehow a duck has wandered into the scene. Another man, possibly a disinterested passerby blocked by the procession, is treated comically, his pronounced nose and snub chin suggesting male genitalia. Looking at the show’s catalog, it is easy to see how the exhibit invited attacks from some artists and critics. The winner of the Pepsi-Cola $2,500 prize, Boris Deutsch’s What Atomic War Will Do to You, is a monstrosity. This jejune painting — a heavy-handed ripoff of Picasso’s Guernica — reveals the faddish, post-war social thinking of the national jury, along with its appeasement by warmed-over modernism. Hermon More, the curator of the Whitney Museum, saw Lee’s Dust to Dust at the National Academy of Design in New York City that fall and

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depicting the family tree of modern art. The artist of this drawing, Ad Reinhardt, was a proponent of abstract art and presented Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh as the roots of the tree; Picasso, Matisse, and Braque as the large trunk that branches into two boughs, the left one labeled Mondrian (abstraction) and the right bough carved with Grosz’ name (social surrealism) at the junction leading to realistic art. This latter branch, exhibiting wormholes and insect infestation, bore leaves with the names of realistic artists Reinhardt believed were weighed down by “subject matter,” “Mexican art influence,” “war art,” and the “PepsiCola contest.” n early 1946 neurosurgeon Dr. Arthur Ecker returned to Syracuse from a stint in England with the U.S. Army Medical Corp and resumed his medical practice. One weekend found him taking in the Associated Artist show at the Syracuse Museum. When Dr. Ecker returned to his office on Monday, he asked his secretary, Patricia Crough, to find the phone number for an artist he believed would make an excellent medical illustrator.Where Dr. Ecker got the idea that Lee would have any interest in medical illustration is anyone’s guess. Perhaps seeing some of Lee’s horror illustrations had given him the notion that Lee would be the right artist for the job he had in mind. The next day Lee appeared at the doctor’s office wearing blue jeans, a handkerchief tucked in his back pocket, and accompanied by a strange, lanky

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thought enough of it (perhaps as unconscious of the sexual content of the picture as the Pepsi-Cola selection jury) to ask Lee to send photos of his recent work for possible inclusion in the upcoming Whitney annual. The Pepsi-Cola show was disparaged by many artists. A cartoon appeared in the newspaper P.M.’s Sunday supplement (not the production manager publication) on June 2, 1946,

woman named Frieda (or “Freedie” as Lee pronounced her name). By all accounts Frieda Crosby was a mystery woman, her mouth showed evidence of a fixed cleft lip and her long dark hair draped half her face in the then-popular manner of Veronica Lake (or someone used to hiding herself). She had appeared one day, in answer to a notice Lee had circulated for a figure model to pose at his museum art class. Lee was smitten by Frieda. She was a temperamental inspiratrix, and not the most reliable of models (the

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Page 93 – scratchboard for Night Side, “One Head Well Done”, 1947;Page 94 left – scratchboard and ink illustration for Weird Tales, “The Will of Claude Ashur”, July 1947; Page 94 right– ink sketch, untitled,ca.1947;. this page, top left – pencil untitled,1947; this page top center – photo by LBC of Frieda, ca. 1947; this page, top right – pencil sketch, untitled, 1947; this page, bottom right– scratchboard and ink for Weird Tales, ” Fever Dream”, Sept.1948;this page,bottom left –photo by LBC of Frieda,ca.1947;Page 96,left – scratchboard for Night Side,”The Face in the Mirror”,1947;Page 96,right – pencil sketch,untitled,ca.1947.

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pay was little enticement, never more than a few dollars per session).At times Lee would have to pick her up before a class to insure he had a model for the evening.Whenever Lee could not find Frieda, Ruth would filled in wearing a swimsuit. 1 At this time there was no definite text book on the network of blood vessels in the human brain and Dr. Ecker decided to take on the project. Before long he realized an artist would be necessary to help him create maps of the arterial pathways of the brain. Lee did not think twice about learning anatomy on a clinical level—a far cry from his usual carefree anatomy. In fact, the artist was characteristically short of money and saw this line of work as potentially lucrative. Lee received special permission from the head of the

Department of Anatomy at Syracuse University to attend some dissections of cadavers and observe brain operations taking place at the Syracuse Memorial Hospital where he made on-the-spot drawings. Lee and Dr. Ecker would spend after office-hours brooding over brain angiograms—x-rays that showed blood vessels after they had been injected with an organic iodide compound and had their cavities pumped with air to enhance details. According to Dr. Ecker, “In the x-rays’ negatives, the air appears black and the iodide appears white. By correlating the appearances of these special films with the situation found in the dissecting and operating rooms, Coye was beginning to grasp the relationships between the intimate structures of the brains, with each other and with the skull, not only in the normal, but also in cases where these structures were distorted by blood clots or tumors.”2 Lee became so adept at reading abnormal “patterns” in these x-rays that another local neurosurgeon, Dr. William Peacher, of St. Joseph Hospital in Syracuse, would call him in as a consultant. Lee was allowed to take specimens to his studio to photograph. On one occasion he borrowed a complete head from the medical school anatomy lab. Late that evening feeling the need for a break, Lee took “George” (the name he had given the specimen) to the Elite Cafe around the corner. Lee plopped the jar with George on the bar counter and said,“Let’s have one for me and one for my buddy George.”3 To the amaze-

ment of the bar’s patrons, Lee proceeded to pour George’s drink into the crock holding the decapitated head. During this phase of his career, Lee was looking at medical illustration as an alternative to commercial art.“I am not suggesting medical art as a substitute for the illustration of books, magazines, and advertisements, but accepting the fact that all of us have to make a living, preferably by the use of our talents [...] here is an opportunity with unlimited possibilities [...] and, for me, it is infinitely more satisfying than adhering to the regimentation enforced by smalltown advertising executives.”4 In a promotional letter he mailed to area doctors at the beginning of 1949, Lee wrote,“a studio has been equipped to make photographs and illustrations of operative and post-mortem specimens, as well as lesions of ambulatory patients, and animated movies for

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This Page top left – scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales, ”Tsanta in the Parlor,” July 1948; this page, top right – scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales,“The October Game”, March 1948;this page bottom right – pencil sketch,untitled,ca.1946;this page, bottom center – scratchboard title page illustration for Night Side, 1947; this page, bottom left – pencil sketch,untitled,ca.1946; page 96 – pencil sketch,untitled,Sept.18,1947.

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teaching purposes.” Coye, through his association with Dr. Ecker, and his promotional efforts, began rubbing shoulders with the medical circle in Syracuse, and soon found himself also preparing art for an ob/gyn doctor to be used in a animated teaching film. The film done for Dr. Raymond Pieri was shot in the dead of winter, 1949-1950. Lee’s third studio on East Genesse Street, in the wing of a former residence converted to doctors’ offices, was heated by a small heater which gave off more fumes than warmth and on particually cold days doctors kept their overcoats on while visiting the “set.” Lee had bought a 16mm Kodak Cine-camera just for the job and built an elevated platform to use as shooting stage. A month was spent constructing three-dimensional wooden models and working up the drawings for the The Female Perineum. After filming, the work print returned from the Rochester lab “upside-down;”5 this was a common film loading flub that many inexperienced cameramen made with the Cine-camera.The film had to be reshot. Lee also worked on a film showing the workings of the human larynx for Dr. Blaisdell. Lee constructed a black box to house the wooden larynx which would allow him to film from any angle.6 The “animation” of these films were achieved by the movement of the camera or the 3-D model; Lee was not actually doing stop-motion animation such as Willis O’Brian’s King Kong, or George Pal and Ray Harryhausen’s 1940s Puppetoons films. His

work was closer in method to the frame by frame recording of stationary objects in the advertising animations done during the 1930s and 1940s by the animators Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker.7 Dr. Ecker’s book, The Normal Cerebral Angiogram, the first American text book on cerebral angiography, would be published in 1951. Little of Lee art

got into the book and by that time the novelty of the work had passed. Lee realized the medical profession had much in common with the advertising field. As with his murals, Lee spent more in research, materials and time

than he could ever invoice. He always assumed that he would make it up in the next job—his financial irresponsibility went hand-in-hand with his gifts as an artist. uring the fall of 1947, soon after turning forty, Lee’s sketchbooks were filled with erotic images done using a linear syntax prompted by his view of some of the erotic work of Picasso.The simple, lithe rendering of one of Lee’s drawings depicting the female nude in a mesh of overlapping lines, with distorted grimace and multiple images, is uncharacteristic of him. Picasso’s egotistical nature (particularly in his relationships with women) is revealed in his erotic work. His renderings of women show tortured and twisted figures with re-invented anatomy that go beyond any cubist formulas. Lee’s drawings are erotically charged in a personal, unfussy, freehand manner, without disdain for the subject. These sketches show a fine line and lightness of touch and intimacy. (Freida’s likeness is recognizable in some of these drawings.) The sparseness of these sketches displays an assurance even when the schematic nudes present intimate couples and examples derived from the German school of lustmord, sex murders used as subject matter.One sketch presents a violent bedroom scene of the murder of a prostitute in a twotier sequence mimicking Grosz’s juxtaposing of a comic strip vernacular with a crime scene image [pg.95]. These were private drawings. Like

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This Page top left – scratchboard illustration for Night Side,“The Night Wire”, 1947; this page, top right – scratchboard illustration, “The Cranberry Goblet,” Weird Tales, “ Nov. 1945; this page bottom right – pencil sketch, untitled, ca.1943 ; this page, bottom left – pencil sketch, untitled, ca.1946; page 100 left – scratchboard illustration for Night Side,“Nightmare”, 1947; page 100 right –scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales,“The Will of Claude Achur”, July 1947.

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adolescents drawing raunchy caricatures of naked ladies, Lee was not doing these for public consumption. Indeed, he would have shocked his usual audience—more from the quiet intensity than the sexual activity of the work. Lee’s erotic nudes mark a time of confidence, working by impulse. ne of Lee’s art students at this time was Robert Hager, an amateur photographer and history buff, who earned his living as a dentist. Hager was casting silver for dentures using the lost wax technique and introduced Lee to the process which involved creating a wax sculpture that is then suspended and covered with a plasterlike “investment.”This is placed into a kiln and the wax model is melted leaving behind a hollow mold of the sculpture. Molten silver is then poured into the mold, set inside a centrifuge and allowed to cool and solidify.The piece is then separated from the mold and polished.With careful artistic planning silver pieces shaped in this manner can be welded together into sculptures. Lee had already learned the rudiments of metalworking when he welded truck frames during the war alongside Casimir Glinecki. During the fall of 1948 Lee’s landlord threatened to evict him unless he caught up on four months of rent on his studio space. Hager had dropped by the studio around this time, and Lee offered to sell him fifty drawings for fifty dollars. Hager knew a bargain, and picked through the box in Lee’s studio filled with Weird Tales and the Derleth book illustrations.

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11

Home Again

n the complacent,gray-flannel fifties, contemporary American art was not selling. Even Jackson Pollock, a darling of the New York art scene, was having trouble marketing his drip paintings. The real business of art, since the late nineteenth century, had thrived, with a few exceptions (including geniuses like Picasso and Matisse),by delaying sales for a generation after the artist had done his prime paintings. (Of course there are many chic artists-of-the moment used by galleries to pay day-to-day expenses.) Picasso and Matisse had achieved enough international fame and recognition to have continuous sales throughout their lives; still, wealthy patrons of these long-living artists preferred the bluechip works that they had done as young men during the 1910s and 1920s. Regional exhibits present another side of the picture. Here artists could show art and make sales based more on appreciation than speculation on the future worth of a painting. Whether drawing the ghost images and phantoms of his imagination or doing medical art, Lee vacillated

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between the imperial will of the fine artist and the banal financial need of accepting whatever art commissions came his way. The Whitestructures began appearing in Lee’s work during the late 1940s. These were abstract constructs of metal and wooden rods, appearing to mimic the skeletal girder frame of a skyscraper

scaled down to human size and following a particular line of thinking on Lee’s part: “I have always believed that form on any creative endeavor, if it be achieved, is a fourth dimension—what the mathematicians would call the 4th is something else—what else could the magnificence of a Cezanne, or a Renoir, or countless others be, but another dimension?”1 Coye was attempting to get out of a “subjective rut” and manipulate space when he began his three dimensional constructs, and used a rat maze construction behind the shapes as the basis for some of his abstract paintings. Lee would also incorporate the Whitestructures into paintings, where they would rear up like a children’s playground set of monkeybars, or tower over a landscape. It’s difficult to know what to make of these constructions. Lee’s work on them was odd and eccentric, and seem to display a secret harmony, and possess a weird sense of dignity and abandonment. In a letter Lee sent to a friend, he talked about the dreams and nightmares brought on by the Whitestructures, and

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explained that “... [they] ring bells in my head. [...] I have the same problems now. I do more work at night than in the day and all the problems are more profound than in the day when I can work on them—this, I guess is the habit of the neurotic.”2 The Jungian concept of the progress of civilization moving men and women away from their instinctual foundation and opening up a rift between nature and mind, between the unconscious and conscious, can be seen in modern art terms as a choice between the concrete and the abstract.These opposites of matter vs.spirit are symbolically expressed in the abstract Whitestructures with an unconscious affinity, on Lee’s part, to the psychic exaltation of the “sticks” he had seen the the spring of 1938 at Mann’s Brook. Many artists believe in the secret souls of art; Giorgio de Chirico spoke of a “ghostly aspect,” Kandinsky of “inward clang,” and Klee wrote: “The object expands beyond the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge that the thing is more than its exterior presents to our eyes.” In place of the word “knowledge,” Klee could have used “superstition”. The Whitestructures stick constructions were as far into abstraction as Lee would ever go. In his abstract paintings Lee always kept one foot firmly planted on the ground of concrete art by attempting to fit recognizable figures and shapes into a Whitestructures schematic. Here he was attempting a reconciliation of the opposites, unconscious and conscious. It is not unusual that a few art critics have also interpreted abstract art as

a by-product of metaphysical unease and anxiety. Klee, wrote in his Diary during the First World War:“The more horrifying this world becomes[...]the more art becomes abstract [....].” By the end of 1949, Lee was finding the restrictions he worked under at the Syracuse Museum too constraining. Anna Olmsted realized she might lose Lee as an art teacher and suggested that an art group run independently of the museum would have more freedom. Almost as an afterthought, and in the hope of forming a unique entity apart

from the Syracuse Museum, Lee began the Onondaga Art Guild along with thirty other local artists. Many of the charter members had been in Lee’s adult education art class given earlier that year. The group of weekend artists included engineers,nurses,physicians,dentists,and even a minister. As a testament to the guild’s democratic nature, it is still in existence,more than fifty years later. That winter, the new guild gathered in the basement of the museum during the evening hours, to paint from a live model (usually Frieda). One of the artists there, Bob Hager, the dentist who had bought fifty drawings for fifty dollars from Lee,remembers,“at the end of each session Lee would go around and criticize each one’s efforts. No matter how good or how awful they might be, he never had anything but positive comments to make about each one’s attempts,never did he ridicule our efforts or make derogatory remarks to the group.”3 After the class a few members would go across the street to an eatery called the Crystal situated along the elevated railroad track (now route 690). Lee arrived at the deli restaurant with his glasses fogged from the cold winter air. Lee and members of the art group would “crystalize”the day’s events. Lee was much given to casual comment when hailing or leaving his friends— “Don’t think it ain’t been a nice day, cause it ain’t.” This was delivered with a good-natured smile. Besides art instruction,Lee would encourage his students to get into exhibitions and also helped Michael Labonski, one of the guild’s charter members, sell his oil

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Page 101, – ink and scratchboard illustration, unknown publication, ca. 1946; page 102 – pen and ink sketch, unknown, unpublished, Oct. 31, 1946; this page clockwise, top left – ink and scratchboard, “The Black Ferris,” Weird Tales, May 1948; top right this page – oil, title unknown, ca. 1948; bottom right this page – photo Ruth and Lee Brown Coye, ca. 1955; page 104, top left – brush and ink and scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?, “A Reversion to Type”,1946.

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painting of a skull and chain to Weird Tales, where it appeared as the cover for the September 1949 issue.4 Lee had painted a provocative canvas called “Friedie” in 1949, showing Frieda in a tight sweater and red skirt. Potential exhibitors had problems with this picture and refused to hang it.“The people who object to it have their minds in the gutter,”a fellow artist commented. There was much back and forth debate regarding the merits of “Friedie,” in some cases by people who had not even seen the painting. “I don’t see why people don’t want to look at it,” Lee said of the painting. “It’s either awful good or it’s awful bad.” After a few rejections,Lee stopped offering the work for exhibition. Through word-of-mouth the painting eventually

sold to a lawyer in Fulton, New York. Commentator Grace Lewis, writing in her newspaper column “At The Post” summed up the brouhaha,“[The picture is] alive, but after all this, you’ll be disappointed. It’s just a painting of a woman in a tight sweater and a short skirt.” It is doubtful, even at that time, that just the attire of the model alone could create such a stir.The figure in the painting has to be assessed in its entirety: long black hair,staring eyes,wide lips,and posture, to understand its impact. Lee would essentially repaint the picture as Black Widow for a Fantastic cover in June 1963 (adding a decapitated head on the woman’s lap to fit the venue) [pg. 131]. By the time of the Fantastic cover, Friedie had long disappeared from Syracuse, but Lee would continue using Friedie likenesses in pictures the rest of his life. Lee would attempt all manner of techniques, and most subjects, yet felt intimidated by portrait painting and shied away from these types of commissions. This is unusual considering how many of his friends and colleagues’ likenesses would work their way into his murals and drawings. Some of these portraits may have been approximations, but the individual characteristics or impression of a person came through. Since these were not meant to appeal to a sitter paying for the painting, or concentrate on external appearance, Lee could interpret the subject freely which gave him some stylistic leeway from exact observation. Lee made photographic studies to use when he needed a model but did not want the distraction of a model in the studio.

This is a trait that he shared with the German painter Otto Dix, who could only begin to paint portraits after the model had left the studio. Many studies of Frieda can be traced backed to photos taken in Lee’s studio. ee had first taken up photography to aid him in painting murals and put together a darkroom in his studio. A fledgling Syracuse television station, WSYR went on the air in the spring of 1950 and offered Lee work designing a back-drop for their news program.The flimsy cardboard TV-set background, in the manner of primitive theatricals, used enlargements of Lee’s photos showing Syracuse streets and buildings.Along the way, the TV station realized they needed an art department and enlisted Lee to help set it up.

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Page 104, bottom right – pencil pulp drawing, unpublished, ca. 1945; this page clockwise, top right – brush and ink scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?, “Intercessor”, 1946; bottom right this page – brush and ink scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?,“A Reversion to Type”, 1946; bottom left this page – photo of Lee Brown Coye with Bela Lugosi at the Fayetteville Famous Players Playhouse, taken by Robert Coye on the stage of summer stock set for “Arsenic and Old Lace”, 1949; Page 106, bottom left – ink and scratchboard art for business card for Hartman the “Hypno-Mentalist”, ca. 1950; Page 106, top right – oil, Vertical Composition No.2, ca. 1949.

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At the same time,he was doing stage design for the New Vic Players theater group at the Syracuse Museum Playhouse, constructing sets with the help of members from the Onondaga Art Guild for “The Doctor,” and an over-the-top Victorian set for the mystery “Angel Street.”Lee had taken his son,Robert,to see Bela Lugosi at the Lafayette Famous Artists Playhouse in the summer of 1949 [pg. 105], where he was appearing in a run of Arsenic and Old Lace. (The old horror actor was winding down his career in summer stock.) Across the street from the theater was a cemetery— a place that always held a strong fascination for Lee—and Bob took pictures of his father nonchalantly smoking a Pall Mall while siting on a grave [pg.107]. Over the Halloween weekend of 1950, Lee received a letter from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York informing him that his semi-

abstract painting “Vertical Composition No. 2” had been accepted by their National Jury for the forthcoming American Painting Today exhibition. Six thousand two hundred forty-eight works had been submitted to the jury after 18,000 invitations had been sent out, and 307 paintings made it into the show. Somewhat minimizing the open nature of this show was a letter of boycott sent by New York artists to newspapers and the Metropolitan Museum calling the New York jury “notoriously hostile to advanced art.” Eighteen artists signed the letter, rejecting the “monster national exhibition,” including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell. This loose group of what would later be named Abstract Expressionists saw themselves as pioneers in American avantgarde art battling what they perceived as the conservatism of social realism, regionalism, expressionism, and surrealism. To these artists “advanced art” meant unabashed abstraction. This was the first time a group of American artists had used general media exposure (including write-ups in Life and Time magazine) rather than the appreciation of the culturati or the consensus of the art world

107 This page clockwise, top left – photo of Lee Brown Coye in cemetery in Fayette New York, ca. 1949; top right this page –brush and ink scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?,“Negotium Perambulans”, 1945; bottom right this page – brush and ink scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?,“Old Martin”, 1946; bottom left this page – pencil study for a Weirdisms page, ca. 1948; Page 108 – brush and ink scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks?, “The Phantom Farmhouse”, 1946.

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to gain attention and further their orthodoxy. The 1949 article in Life on Pollock titled “Is He The Greatest Living American Painter?” mixed hype with derision,but people took notice. In Vertical Composition No. 2, an abstract figure of a conquistador emerges from the painting through a loose patterning of colors and latticed Whitestructure lines [pg. 106]. Lee’s painting fell between the extremes of representational and nonobjective art and slotted into the middle ground of American art at the Metropolitan Museum show. At the polar ends of pure abstraction and realism, critics of the exhibit cited the sameness of emotion in works at the show, and the lack of personal contribution. The Met’s exhibition demonstrates how wide the rift could be between All-American modernists and the art establishment. That much of the postwar American avant-garde’s reputation was built on airy notions, generated by art pundits and media reporting, created animosity and suspicion towards the new art. With Lee’s austere turn into abstraction, he was taking a dim view of his early works and now saw the early paintings of anthropomorphic houses, somber people, dark skies, and smokebelching trains, as examples of artistic immaturity. “Sloppy sentimentalism, pure emotion without any artistic value”. He added,“I was painting those things because of nostalgia, trying to recapture my early feelings. I did a few good paintings, but not many.And there was no growth.”

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12

Shadows on the Wall

y the fall of 1950, Lee had stopped doing illustrations for Weird Tales after a productive run of six years. He was using photography to get away from his feeling of subjectively running around art’s raw subjects; he had also stopped painting pictures of old houses,and instead concentrated on making three-dimensional dioramas and models for museums, and doing abstract paintings, and the Whitestructures.There was more cold intellect and less intimacy involved in the abstractions,and his abandonment of emotional content may have caused his feelings to become pent up. Lee was becoming more tense and discontented, and drinking more, which did little to help his mood. Thornton Wilder, in Our Town, tells us how people from small towns think about their fit into the universe.At the age of forty-three, Lee deplored his own place in the scheme of things and judged his paintings as worthless. He felt he was merely an experienced commercial artist who did occasional fine art.These feelings of anguish com-

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plicated his existence. He wrote letters to the Syracuse Post-Standard defending mediocre artist friends attacked by critics, and publicly decried the art museum policies regarding its representation of local arts, exasperating its director Anna Olmsted. Lee was physically and emotionally all over the place, pouring all his energies into overlapping projects and obsessing about deadlines and money. At times he was so highly strung that he could not sit still in one place. He was stumbling home from bars in the middle of the night, becoming

argumentative when Ruth questioned him. In the face of the mounting conviction that her husband was overwrought, Ruth managed to have him placed into Syracuse Psychiatric Hospital in the fall of 1950. Lee later wrote, “[...] in the hospital my nights were horrible, all my desires, failures, and disappointments plagued me unmercifully and drained me of rest.”1 Perhaps it is a tribute that he did not retreat into some form of insanity in the face of liquor and the disorder of his thoughts.One of his doctors later compared Lee to a Stephen Leacock character “who jumped on his horse, and galloped off madly in all directions.” Like many fundamentally manicdepressive creative people, Lee thrived on keeping busy, but felt the pressure of having to make a living. The German artist George Grosz had once called art an illness, and an artist a man possessed of a mania. Lee left Syracuse Psychiatric after a few months and went back to work designing sets for the New Vic Players theater group, and chasing after new commissions. On an emotional

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and intellectual level, art was all he could do, and on both levels his drawings had been a visual metaphor for his state of mind and his studio served as a refuge from the outside world. Most people overlook the pressures of creating art for a living.Artists are in the uneasy position of being constantly judged. For every admirer, there are scores of people ready to state their dislike of an artist’s latest work, and an artist needs a thick skin or a supreme sense of ego to function.There is a balancing act between sensitivity and callousness that every artist has to perform. Lee was intimately familiar with all of this. Ruth’s emotional and financial support helped alleviate some of the hardships Lee had to face, but, confusion between emotional and mental problems, and the complications of alcohol, made it difficult for family and friends trying to help him. Lee saw other patients in the hospital in worse states than himself.This sort of revelation worked wonders in psychiatric wards before drugs became the panacea of choice. Of course, a mental hospital was a particularly scary place before the tsunami of psychotropic drugs displaced some of the then acceptable treatments available, including physical isolation, electro-shock and, in more acute cases, lobotomies.The prison-like atmosphere in a psychiatric hospital alone could induce a patient to contemplate his behavior and become “cured” within the parameters set by doctors. n 1954 Lee and Ruth bought a house in the Syracuse valley section with

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extra room for a comfortable studio in the attic and a workshop in the basement. It had not been a productive period. In January 1955, Dorothy Baldwin of Tully wrote to remind Lee of the commission she had asked him to do in 1947. She had been a rural mail carrier and wanted Lee to paint a picture of the Tully Valley to hang in her living room, so, Lee remarked,“[...] as she grew older and could not get about, she would [...] have this picture to see the valley as she remembered it [.…].”At the time of the original commission, Lee was experimenting with abstract painting and was not able to make a sketch he thought Baldwin would find satisfactory. By 1955, he had no excuses to offer and accepted the commission. In Tully, more people became involved once they heard Lee was back in the vicinity, and the project grew into an agreement that “if I would furnish the paintings, Tully would furnish the space, and we would have an exhibit of my work in the old home town.”

views of the few remaining woodframe salt-wells obelisks, barns ready to topple, and old Victorian homes with turrets and arched cornices along Tully’s main street. Everywhere he went, he met people he had not seen in thirtyfive years. The watercolors, landscapes, and woodcuts done later in the studio, revealed element-worn buildings and betrayed his nostalgia for the region.

At first, it was hard making sketches since I had not painted realistically for several years.At that time I was doing three-dimensional construction work and getting a tremendous bang out of it. Before that, I had gone in for serious photography,had spent one year in medical school, where I dreamed of being the great American medical illustrator, and had put in a lot of time in operating rooms and the morgue, watching operations, doing autopsies, drinking tremendous quantities of whiskey, and enjoying other vulgar activities. I am not attempting any self-analysis, but after those ten years, I suddenly became aware that creative work of any sort is much greater than the pure emotion aroused ith good weather he packed his by the things which make you homesick. art supplies and searched out [....] I knew nothing [...] about Tully, as I soon found out. It was a period of great confusion.To try to be objective about “the scenes of my childhood” in order to put them down on paper seemed very silly [...]. I used to take the train to Tully nearly every day.There was a club car where I could have a couple of bottles of beer en route and visit with the porter. Riding in a club car the same rails that, as a child, I had ridden in a coach,was fun [...]. I think the train ride became the first reality of the whole deal. When I got off,

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Page 109 – brush and ink spot art for Spice, 1946; page 110 – silver pin of rooster, ca. 1966; this page , top left – woodcut print,“Freedie”, 1954; this page top right – LBC in his studio at 1171/2 East Genesee Street, ca. 1949; bottom right – ink, “Oswego’s Main Drag”, 1958; bottom left – pencil study for “Black Dog,”ca. 1946; page 112 – ink and pen, cover to New Vic Player playbill, ca. 1950.

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things started to happen. It is surprising what a little publicity will do, for people began to look for me, and would come out on their porches and want to visit. It got so that the day would be gone by the time I reached the place I wanted to sketch. All that had been accomplished was the renewal of many old acquaintances. As I see it now, this was very important, but at the time it was an annoyance. So I changed my approach and stayed down around the railroad tracks where nobody would see me. In this way I came up with quite a bunch of fairly good sketches. In all, I made about twenty paintings of the vicinity, besides four or five that never got finished. Perhaps you could call one or two of them good paintings.The exhibit as a whole looked pretty good. But actually it was a mediocre show for a person of my experience and background. Be that as it may, in September the show was set up in the auditorium of the Masonic Temple and was held for three days [...]. Besides the Tully pictures, I got together some of my abstracts, some woodcuts, drawings,sketches,some wood sculpture,a couple of those three-dimensional things, and a couple of small exhibits of the tools and methods used in producing my three-dimensional work. [...] The plan was to have the general reception on Sunday; Monday was the day that people went around in their cars and picked up all the old people with whom I had been associated as a child, such as Sunday school teachers, school teachers, my mother’s dressmaker, etc.:Tuesday was for the “ambulatory patients,”who were able to get there under their own power.They haven’t had so many people in the Masonic Temple, I believe, since the day it was dedicated in the 1920s. Every-

one was completely amazed at the crowds...especially that Sunday afternoon. [...] The next day proved to be more of an old-home day than anything else. People came from as far as fifty miles away all dressed up—the lame, the halt and the blind. And believe me, if I thought I was emotional about sketching around Tully, this day reeked with emotion until it was running out the seams. There was my old Sunday School teacher,who was an old woman when I was a child, now eighty-nine years old, who had

teacher of mine, my first school teacher, who just before this show had a serious heart attack and insisted on coming up by herself to look at the pictures with the aid of a cane and remarked that she was going to do it by herself if it killed her.Another school teacher who had had not only a heart attack, but also a stroke, would not let anybody help her around the room and did it with the help of a chair and had to look at the pictures and read the labels by means of a reading glass.[...].There were little groups all over the place visiting and talking and having the best time they had had since the box factory burned up. [...] My sister came back for the three days, and all in all it was a highly emotional and retrospective performance. [...] I am just now beginning to realize the important of the experience. he show moved from Tully to the Syracuse Museum in December 1955. The centerpiece at both venues was a scale replica of a colonial wharfside hostelry, the Blue Whale [pg. 113], which in colonial times served as a meeting place for mercantile businessmen. (The New York Stock Exchange had started in such a coffeehouse overlooking the East River.) This model was made of tiny bricks, stone, plaster, wood, and bits of metal, and seem to weigh a ton. Everything, including furnishings, were built using distortion to present a forced perspective.The six-foot-long by five-foot-tall construction presented a common room on the ground floor, a guest room on the second story, a cobbling room and carpentry shop. The public room had a well-stocked library, a schoolmaster’s desk with a pigeon-hole

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fallen about a year before and broken a hip and had to get around on crutches.She was so little that she used the hand grips of the crutches under her arms and it was quite a sight to see her come in the door with these two things towering up above her shoulders. She somehow or other managed to get over to me and gave me a big kiss.Without a doubt she was the happiest and jolliest person in the whole assemblage. Then there was a school

This page, top left – scratchboard, “The WIll of Claude Ashur,” Weird Tales, July 1947; top right – LBC in the Tully Valley drawing a salt well, ca. 1955; bottom right – pencil, ca.1944; bottom left – wood and stone 3-D diorama “Blue Whale,”ca.1955;page 114 – ink,cartoon for Spice ,1945.

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mail rack that served as a nascent post office; toward the back of the public room a walk-in fireplace served as a kitchen. The labor Lee put into the model, and the use of real stone and wood, reflects his attention to detail that went beyond the practical.The diorama was created as a work of art as much as a model. Albert and Helen Fowler, the authors of Scylla the Beautiful,had moved to a Quaker study center in Pennsylvania and in 1948 they had begun a literary magazine, Approach. Helen Fowler wrote Lee in the spring of 1957, asking him to write a piece for the magazine. One of Lee’s long-held bugaboos was the politics of art institutions: the need to present big shows with “name” artists, even if these artists came from thousands of miles away. Lee thought this sort of thing was all right with selfsupporting museums, but not for institutions supported by public money. Local artists were never held in as high esteem when they had to compete against artists touted by the New York art world. Lee could accept a career of little critical praise, small crowds at shows, and virtually no money, but the total capitulation of trustees wooing high-ticket benefactors and the exploitation of the far-flung art of the moment was something else. The chase for donations, endowments, and public awareness, especially after the Associated Artist exhibits moved out of the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, virtually forced area artists, including

Lee, into small-scale regional shows. Lee had been thinking about his experience with the one-man show in Tully and Syracuse, and offered to write up the experience for Approach. The manuscript ultimately took issue with “[...] the consequences of lack of understanding on the part of ‘art authorities,’” in Syracuse and “[...] their refusal to accept their responsibility as a community museum.”2 The Fowlers made some changes to the manuscript, blunting its attack, and Lee wrote back,“Now as to the cuts— this sort of thing is not new to me, although in my present work if I can’t argue down a change or deletion that I don’t believe in, I quietly tuck my work under my arm, stop in at my favorite saloon for a few beers, go home, put the work into my abstract barbecue, and touch a match to it [...].The fact that I have come out on top creatively (within myself, that is), does not insure anything as far as being able to get financial secu-

rity out of it. I have to depend solely on the sale of pictures. Right now they are selling, so we can get a living.That is all. Tomorrow—what? The point I try to make is that to be a creative person, it takes this sort of stuff. I’m proud of it and in Syracuse am unique—universally this sort of thing is a rarity.”3 uring 1957, Lee had gotten the idea, from automobile dealers, of accepting commissions on the installment plan. In this way, he thought, average people, and not just the well-to-do, could own and appreciate original art. He was afraid that some would consider this “too commercial” and defended the idea,“[...] I’m not concerned with making money. If I can sell one painting, it merely means that I can afford the time to do another.And time for creativity is vital to the artist as well as to the people who will ultimately be able to appreciate his art.” Lee always appeared surprised when someone was willing to pay money for one of his paintings. He even argued with a gallery that wanted to raise his prices, stating that he didn’t want to put his work out of bounds for common people. On May 28,1957,Lee appeared on local television, introduced as “Syracuse’s leading commercial artist.” Lee gave a good, animated account of himself in the otherworldly glow of the small screen, even after that uncomfortable introduction. The afternoon program presented some of his paintings, models, and photos of his full-size recreation of a dungeon, including

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life-sized prisoners, for the Fort William Henry restoration at Lake George. The program only allowed him to give superficial background on the fort’s history. Television and fine art have never been a good match. (The Museum of Modern Art had some years earlier taken issue with the Jon Gnagy “Learn to Draw”television program,for teaching the public a sort of paint-by-numbers art.) During the 1940s Lee’s interest in local history had him visiting the Onondaga Historical Association where he met its director, Dick Wright. Both had model making in their blood and around this time began construction of a 16-to-one scale Erie Canal boat of the nineteenth-century. The scow was taking form when they realized they had no idea how the front stabling area of the boat would have looked.They made appeals through the Post-Standard for canal boat workers.Thirty to forty oldtimers contacted them, including a few who had shared sleeping quarters with the spare horses.The game was afoot for a pair of nineteenth-century aficionados. Lee loaded the half-finished model into Wright’s car and took it to the experts.The outcome of all of this was a twelve-inch model that is still on exhibit at the historical association. While on a family trip in August 1957, Lee’s friend Bob Hager (also an amateur historian and Erie Canal enthusiast) stumbled across the remains of a canal boat near Kirkville,NewYork. The stern was buried under the abutment of a road bridge along the Erie Canal. It wasn’t long before he had talked Lee into helping him dig it out

and they returned with a large crosssaw. Wading into the canal, the pair managed to cut off the bow end and drag it out of the water with a rope attached to the rear bumper of Hager’s car.The large piece, from a Black River scow, was deposited in Lee’s backyard, much to Ruth’s chagrin. Lee and Hager were able to make sketches and take photographs before the boat pieces were cut up and used as firewood in Lee’s barbecue. Today many historical archeologists would be aghast at the doings of the pair. arly in 1958, the Oakton Company of Chicago, a liturgical art provider, was engaged by the governing staff of LaMoyne College in Syracuse to create a reliquary to contain the finger bone of a sixteenth century Jesuit, St. Robert Francis Ballarmine.This was to be a gift for an archbishop in Cincinnati about to retire. A Cuban silversmith was first given the job, but with the recent revolution in Cuba, the artist and reliquary had gone missing.Through the efforts of Bob Coye’s first wife, Jill, whose sister headed Oakton, Lee was asked if he would design and make a replacement silver reliquary. Lee had no idea what he was exactly required to construct when he first accepted the job. (Throughout his life, he had lived with a comfortable

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agnosticism.) After some explanation, Lee requested that the bone be sent to him. This caused some consternation, since the bone could only travel from the Vatican to places blessed by the Catholic Church. It was finally agreed that it would go to the Cathedral in Syracuse, where Lee could take its dimensions. Somehow, Lee, in his usual hands-on approach,managed to abscond with the bone to the basement workshop of his home on Academy Place. Late that night he heard some noises at the front door—looking out, he witnessed a group of people wearing church vestments, and sprinkling holy water.They were blessing the studio. He also learned that, having touched the bone, he was now considered a relic himself. Never one to miss an opportunity, Lee tucked the finger bone, wrapped in a velvet cloth, into a back pocket and headed to his favorite watering hole. Before the end of the night, Lee had pulled out the bone.Asked what it was, he replied that it was a “holy relic of a saint.” Before long, two barmaids were crying and praying in front of it. The metal and wood reliquary was completed, with the help of Casimir Glinecki, and shipped to the liturgical art company in Chicago. Before long, the reliquary was returned, broken, and Lee repaired it and sent it on. Shortly afterward, it came back, again broken. Both times, Lee believed the reliquary had been ill-handled in Chicago— when it came back broken a third time, he refused to fix it. Since he had not taken any money up front, he was never paid for the job.

Page 115, top left & bottom left – metal and wood reliquary, 1958; page 115, top right – ink and scratchboard art for Who Knocks?,“The Phantom Farmhouse”, 1946; page 115, bottom right – LBC working on diorama for “Rail City” at Sandy Creek, N.Y., ca. 1956; page 116, bottom – pencil study for spot art, Spice magazine, ca. 1945; this page, top left – ink drawing, untitled, 1944; this page right –scratchboard “Clay,” Weird Tales, May 1948; page 118, top left & right – ink and scratchboard art, ca. 1945; page 118 ,bottom right –ink and scratchboard art, Sleep No More,“The House in the Burying Ground,”1945; page 118,bottom left – scratchboard illustration “Ghost Hunt”, Weird Tales, March 1948.

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McGurty Discs

mblematic of Lee’s work was his use of symbols, including thin sickle moons, colored discs, sperm whales, sunflowers, and roughhewn stick configurations. The sticks, especially, appear to have a connection with pagan symbols. (This goes back to the site he found in 1938.) Ancient people worshiped the natural world long before organized religion came along, but Druids chanting in the woods made poor churchgoers. Once the church grew powerful, it used its might to stamp out all pagan thought and cabalistic icons—these were presented as aligned with evil and witchcraft in order to scare off any sympathizers.Any sort of pagan-dom, revolving around fertility, the natural universe, and hedonism, was dangerous to Christian, or for that matter Jewish or Muslim tenets and could not be tolerated. Writing of the bizarre sticks in the woods Lee said,“...at first I though it was the work of children but it was far too sophisticated for that ... [then I thought was it ] the work of a crazy person or the wild creations of an educated idiot?”1

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The primal structures would remained a mystical experience to Lee and engaged him in a deeply personal manner. John Updike once wrote,“Being ourselves is the one religious experience we all have, an experience sharable only partially, through the exertions of talk and art.”2 Lee’s use of emblems was scattershot,and at times incongruous—his crescent moon, for instance, could appear in a lower quadrant of a painting superimposed over the foreground. Lee drew his motifs from his immediate central New

York surroundings, following his own instincts and emotional response. In this, Lee remained in touch with a primitive way of seeing his surroundings: like someone alive thousands of years ago out at night, he had the awareness of the bugs in the ground and the wind stirring up the trees,and the feeling of unknown forces loose in the land. The signature leitmotifs in Lee’s work altered little over the years and the modes of art that he produced. The sickle moon (“[...] the old moon in the new moon’s arms3”) has been associated with lunacy, femininity, and nocturnal darkness, but the inside joke for Lee is that the crescent moon was also used on outhouse doors, to denote distaff facility (men folks could always use the woods). Lee’s crescent moon always opens to the right side, mimicking the letter C for Coye. One of Lee’s earliest extant drawings, done in the early 1920s, of a Tully house, shows a familiar Coye crescentshaped slit in the window shutters. n the 1950s, Lee appeared in galleries or small scale shows that had not dis-

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missed him as provincial or old fashioned. Most of these exhibitions were regional shows. Reverberations between picture and observer only intensified when Lee’s abstractions were shown together with realistic landscapes and 3-D constructs. (This was the consequence of his motley interests.) At one of these shows in the late 1950s, at the student union building of a small upstate college in central New York, a reception was held by the art department. Local press put in an appearance, in a constant search for any material that would justify their ad clogged small town paper, and took the mandatory photos of the artists, posed in front of their paintings. As Lee wrote of this exhibit years later, “At that particular time, I was indulging a whim and most of the paintings had small round circles of color spotted about.The pictures were mostly the usual local landscapes and architecture that I find so fascinating, but at that time it tickled my fancy to put a round spot of flat color lying on the roof of a house or nailed to a barn or tree or fence post and sometimes they would show up in a field of grain or hay.” The president of the college, a “cultured and well-read man,” asked Lee the meaning of the colorful circles in a lot of his paintings. “Those are McGurty discs,” Lee replied, quick to tie fact with imagination and give a logical-sounding answer to a logical question. “Yes, McGurty discs. Philip McGurty made them years ago.You still run across them once in a while out in the country where I come

from. It’s too bad there aren’t more people like Mr. McGurty. He had a real feel for color.” Dr. B— appeared confused and Lee continued, “Philip McGurty was a farmer who lived a few miles from here. He had a hill farm. Hill farms are hard to work,but he was a good farmer and a

hard worker, and he made it pay. But besides being a good farmer and hard worker, McGurty had a soul, he loved color, too, and would speak about the sunlight on a field of ripe wheat and the color of the wet ground when it’s first turned in the spring [...]. “On warm summer evenings he would sit on his stoop and watch the setting sun as it hit the top of a hill across the valley,and he would feel badly when

it got dark and the bright colors had faded into night. “He wished there was more color yet in the fields and hills and trees,and,he thought,‘There is a way to get it there.’ “McGurty’s first move was to get some old boards which he cut into various size circles. These he painted in bright colors. Reds and yellows mostly, because they would stand out better against the background of a green trunk or a dark hill. He took the wooden discs and nailed them around on trees and fence posts.When he sat on the stoop in the setting sun, they glowed and he was happy with the work he had done.” Dr. B— seemed to be mollified by the explanation. “[...] the ones that haven’t disappeared are faded and worn and of little consequence now.You find them used as covers for rain and flour barrels, and I know of two of them that cover seats in an outhouse.” On different occasions Lee would vary the story.In another version a windstorm toppled an old straight oak tree on McGurty’s farmyard. The straight trunk gave McGurty an idea and he began sawing the tree into slices. Before long, there were many new yellow, red, blue, and orange discs scatted around the farm. Strangely enough, one of the tree slices took root and over the years grew into a full tree bearing hundreds of discs like seedpods. McGurty had more discs than he needed or had space for, and now started giving them away and dumping them around the countryside “below Fabius” in ditches, abandoned farms, and wood lots. Eventually McGurty had to

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Page 119 – brush and ink spot art for Spice, 1946; page 120 – ink and scratchboard, Who Knocks?,“The Lake”, 1946; this page, top left – scratchboard, “The Soul Buyer,” Fantastic, Dec. 1963; top right – scratchboard, 3 Tales of Horror, (detail) 1967; bottom right – scratchboard, Knickerbocker, unpublished, ca. 1945; page 122, left – ink, and scratchboard,“Alice and the Allergy,” Weird Tales, Sept., 1946; page 122 right – ink and scratchboard, Weird Tales, ca. 1947.

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that were easier to spot and other devices strung up in tree branches, like Calder mobiles, as boundary markers for their property. But this in itself was too bland and simple an explanation for Lee. ee first met Alfred Krakusin, a diminutive, fast-talking professor of fine art at Colgate University in Hamilton New York, when he was a visiting summer

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cut down the disc-tree and the colorful discs are rarely seen these days. In upstate New York some farmers use cut pieces of brightly painted wood

lecturer at the college in 1946. Krakusin had been working on a process of casting relief bronze sculptures for many years and around 1959 formed a company called Sculptura to create metal copies of classical art. Sculptura had a show that summer in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, introducing Mesopotamian and Scandinavian art recreations. Krakusin enlisted artists, including Casimir Glinecki and

123 This page, top left – tempera,One Way Street (from photo), ca. 1955; top right – Coye photo of Syracuse house used for the painting, One Way Street, ca. 1954; bottom right – ink drawing, catalog spot art, ca. 1948; this page, bottom center – brush and ink on scratchboard, art “The Beasts that Tread the World,” Weird Tales, Sept. 1948; this page , bottom left – pencil art, Knickerbocker History of New York, unpublished, ca. 1945; page 124, bottom left – ink, and scratchboard, Fantastic magazine, “Heritage”, December 1962;page 124, top right – ink, and scratchboard, Sleep No More, “The Shunned House”, . 1945.

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Lee, to join him. This appeared an unusual enterprise for Lee to get involved with, yet he sold his house in Syracuse (a place he now believed had “outgrown its boots”), gathered his possessions, and in November 1959, rented the first of a series of homes in Hamilton. Lee had concluded that the sensible course to take at this stage in life, with the consent of his doctor, was to retreat from the city and live a simpler small town life. Krakusin traveled through Europe and the Middle East arranging the casting of ancient carvings. In Hamilton, one-inch-deep relief duplicates were created as wall art by Lee and a small

group of local artists in a former basket factory. By all indications things were going well, but Krakusin was a “wild Hungarian” with a hair-trigger temper and was known for his moments of irrational behavior. At different times over the next few years, he accused his artists of robbing him, and Lee of being involved with his wife.4 Tensions grew, until one day Krakusin showed up in the sculpture factory and fired everyone. Soon afterwards he sold Sculptura to Rubbermaid and would eventually commit suicide. Ruth had found a secretarial job with a doctor in the village which eased the economic situation. Lee liked the small town feel and sim-

plicity of Hamilton and decided to become part of the 2,200 permanent residents of the college town. After the debacle of Sculptura, Lee rented studio space over a downtown bakery in April 1962. Talk is always loose in any small town, and Hamilton had its puritanical airs. The popular conception of artists as eccentrics leading shady lives, leaving behind wives, mistresses, and fatherless children, in the wake of their artistic endeavors, has always been a specter hanging over visual art. Lee began to hear rumors and insinuations about himself bandied about town. The one statement that caught his attention was of leaving work uncompleted after being paid. This pertained to a diorama of Hamil-

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This page top left & right – pencil preliminary drawing and final scratchboard and ink for Dagon, 1963; this page , bottom right – scratchboard, Who Knocks?, “The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee”, 1946; this page, bottom left – scratchboard, Sleep No More, “He cometh and He Passeth By”,1944 page 126 – ink and scratchboard, art for Fantastic magazine, “An Apparition”, March 1963.

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ton village showing the Chenango Canal, a canal bridge, and adjacent buildings, from circa 1865. At the end of 1954, Lee had finished a model of a canal boat for the Hamilton Historical Commission and soon after proposed doing the diorama. The Commission decided to go ahead with the project with the stipulation that payment would be made as money was available.At that time Lee had to travel to Hamilton from Syracuse to do the work, paying for his own room and board, and buying hardware out of his own pocket.The diorama was nearing completion when Lee moved to Hamilton in 1959. “... I have been paid, including the boat model, $1,385.00. For the hours expended, the knowledge and research, and the skill required, it should be obvious that this was a labor of love [done] because of my friendship for two or three people connected with the Commission.” The money—paid over many years—was a bargain for the Commission.“It is my full intent, now that I have a shop established in Hamilton, to complete the few remaining details of the diarama [sic].”5 The Coyes had been stranded in Hamilton by Sculptura’s demise, and Ruth missed her friends in Syracuse, but they made the best of the situation and they would live and work in the college town for the rest of their lives. “[Hamilton] is a rather stiff town—not very intimate, although we have many friends [here],” Lee wrote in his diary.6

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arly in 1962, Lee came in contact with John Vetter, who was a single-minded collector and bookseller from Virginia specializing in H. P. Lovecraft’s works.Vetter had started buying original artwork used to illustrate Lovecraft works and he managed to secure the drawings Lee had done for “The Shunned House” and “The Colour Out of Space.” (By this time a cult of fans had developed around Lovecraft with the abetment of August Derleth.) Vetter also had business dealings with Derleth, and prodded Lee to contact Arkham House, with the aim of doing dust jacket art for them.Lee wrote to Derleth on May 29,1962:“after Weird Tales went out I did very little work in the horror field, but John Vetter has been after me lately, and has tried to line up work, and consequently got my enthusiasm raised to a high pitch.”1 Derleth responded that there was little money in the small press field, but Lee replied that the work would be a “labor of love.”2 By the late fifties, Ziff-Davis had moved from Chicago to NewYork,and was now publishing pocket-sized, digest versions of Amazing Stories, and a

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companion magazine, Fantastic (begun in 1953 for fantasy and darker fiction).3 Vetter convinced Lee to make a trip to New York and meet with Cele Goldsmith—the editor of both Fantastic and Amazing Stories—and any other publishing people in the city willing to see Lee.Vetter thought that Lee would have no problem soliciting art commissions by trading on his name recognition from the Weird Tales and Rinehart publishing days. Lee was afraid that he might “freeze up” after a ten year hiatus from producing horror art and Vetter decided to go along as his “talk man.” The meeting was delayed when Lee went into the hospital for a severe throat infection brought on by inhaling sawdust while making picture frames for an exhibition (although, he told Vetter, he

did get ideas for some drawings during a fever dream while in the hospital). Lee and Vetter arrived in New York on Friday, the 13th of July, and had meetings set up with Goldsmith, Edward Ferman, Don Schlitten, Donald Wollheim, and the art editor of Avon. Vetter, in their first face-to-face meeting, found Lee “painfully shy and ... [showing] an appalling lack of self-confidence.”4 Lee’s constant references to his samples as “the crap I brought along with me,” irritated Vetter to the point where he threatened to kick Lee’s backside the next time he said it. They met with Cele Goldsmith first, and went out for coffee. (Their meeting completed the serendipitous chain of events begun when Ziff-Davis had ultimately turned down Derleth’s first horror anthology in 1943.) She was at once friendly, and after looking through the first six drawings in Lee’s portfolio, she said she was convinced.The book contained Lee’s non-fantasy work, and she was excited by his Treasure Island character illustrations, recent watercolors, and the photographs of Lee’s silver sculptures. Goldsmith commissioned three

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covers for Fantastic, and promised to send him copies of classic stories that the magazine was in the process of reprinting, which needed new illustrations. The pair then went to Mercury Publications,publisher of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The editor, Avram Davidson, was away in California for the summer, and they met with the publisher, Ed Ferman. Lee left Ferman’s office with galleys for the novella “The Eyes of Phorkos,” which needed a cover painting. Lee was also asked to make up

some small spot illustrations, like those done for the magazine by Ed Emshwiller, as space-fillers. From there, they made the short walk directly to Ace, but Don Wollheim was unable to see them. They then dropped in cold to see Bob Blanchard, art director at Ballantine (at the time he was using the brilliant Richard Powers for most of his science fiction and horror paperback covers),but Blanchard had nothing definite to offer. They finished at Avon, meeting with the helpful art director Roy LaGrone, who also could not make any promises. That night,after dinner, Coye and Vetter celebrated at the members only Gaslite Club, the model for the later Playboy Club (Vetter’s boss had loaned him his private key pass), and in the smoke-filled bar lounge, they tossed down drinks and eyed the ladies in fishnet stockings and low-cut tops. Saturday at noon, Don Schlitten, a fan of Coye’s, and a record producer, had taken the subway down from the Bronx to meet Lee and Vetter as they were checking out of the hotel.

Schlitten had produced a spoken record, Lovecraft read by Roddy McDowall, earlier in the year, with liner notes provided by Derleth. Over beers at a nearby pub, they discussed doing a follow-up vinyl recording of Lovecraft stories read by Walker Baylor, with liner notes by Vetter and jacket art by Lee.Vetter pushed the idea that Lee should re-design the McDowall album cover for any second printing. Before they parted, Schlitten bought two Night Side drawings out of Lee’s portfolio, which helped defray Lee’s expenses on the trip. A week after the New York visit, Lee received four stories from Cele Goldsmith, including a black and white back cover assignment for Fantastic. Lee wrote Vetter, “Boy, is the heat ever on [...] and I love it. Looking back over the past few years [...] this is heaven.”At this time Lee was making half his income from creating store signs, including huge, elaborate woodcarvings for places like the Fountain Elms in Utica, the Mid-York Press in Hamilton, and the library in Canajoharie, New York. According to Vetter, “he hate[d] every damn one of them.” Even with the anxiety he felt about meeting deadlines,Lee flourished under the pressure. He knew that a tight schedule created a “serendipity factor” in his art where “mistakes” could be incorporated into a final design. Vetter was trying to talk Lee into sending cartoon work to Playboy magazine (at the time they were paying $80 for black and white cartoons and $200 or more for color work), but Coye had

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Page 127 – brush and ink scratchboard art for Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “The Dunstable Horror”, April 1964; page 128, bottom– ink and scratchboard, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, back cover for “A Night with Hecate,” Oct. 1963; this page, top left – cover for Short Stories, March 25, 1947; top right – ink, and scratchboard, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos 1969; bottom right – wood carved frog, ca. 1959; page 130 – watercolor, untitled, ca. 1947; page 131, top left – tempera cover art for Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “The Black Widow”, illustrating “The Mirror of Cagliostro,” June 1963; page 131, right – silver,“Don Quixote”, ca. 1965.

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doubts about Hugh Hefner being interested in his art. Lee didn’t know that Hefner, early in life, had wanted to be a cartoonist, and had been a pulp fan who appreciated weird art, fiction, and movies. Lee also considered entering the contest for the Gettysburg Centennial commemorative painting, but told people that he had no time to do the job. In reality he believed that Gettysburg had become a tourist trap. Lee wrote, in a “Chips & Shavings”column for the MidYork Weekly, that the event had taken on “… the air of a carnival....Gettysburg has been wild with those who seek to cash in on the death and destruction of a nation at stake, and the gullibility of the people who seek a thrill,and some romance,in a terrible struggle—[...] forgetting the ter-

rible part....” Lee finished the column by cartoon roughs, from ideas supplied by quoting graphic depictions of battle- Vetter,but did not think much of these. In November, Vetter called Goldground killings from letters sent home by smith at her home to tell her the story some of the solders to prove his point. he had just heard from Lee, of the oldsmith was delighted with the deserted farmhouse in upstate New work Lee was sending her. In mid- York “festooned with strange symbols August 1962, she sent him two more of sticks and stones.” Goldsmith, an stories to illustrate, and was looking for- astute editor, was having problems getward to a long association. She wrote to ting decent new fiction, and she was Lee to calm his anxiety over his first immediately interested in the idea for Fantastic.Vetter mentioned that Derleth illustration for the story “Heritage,” could do a credible job on the story, and “Your first efforts certainly do meet with had already given him the particulars of our approval—it’s a very fine drawing.” Lee’s tale, going as far as suggesting a She would eventually buy the cover title for the piece, “Sticks and Stones.” painting Black Widow. Lee was almost Derleth showed some initial enthusiasm finished with the pencils for “Eyes of for using the idea in a horror story.5 Phorkos” for the Magazine of Fantasy & In early 1963, Derleth commisScience Fiction, along with a few spot sioned Lee to do the Arkham House drawing ideas. He had also done some jacket design and art for Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Others, and Manly Wade Wellman’s Who Fears the Devil.For the Lovecraft book, Lee wrote Vetter,“as I read the stories, many of which are new to me, I think just a mood illo might do the job better than any specific story [illustration].” But Lee became fascinated with the character of Wilbur Whateley, and wound up using him for the final jacket art. Lee had more trouble with the drawing for Who Fears the Devil, showing John the Balladeer, a traveling, backcountry minstrel, who becomes involved in supernatural circumstances. He was not completely satisfied with the final results:“I think the jacket holds up fairly well, but I didn’t get enough detail around John’s feet.” Lee’s original pencil design had John held up on a

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page 132 top right – photo of slanted house atop Crumb Hill near DeRuyter, N.Y., ca. 1962; page 132, bottom left – sugar pine, whale carving,ca.1965.

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platform by a skeleton with horns and a bow tie. Lee received fifty dollars for each of these book jackets. At this time, Lee had also done a drawing for a fantasy fan,a friend ofVetter, showing the graveyard on the banks of the Miskatonic River in Arkham [pg. 165], the fictional New England town used in some of Lovecraft tales. Soon afterwards he worked up a drawing for Vetter of Cthulhu, the ancient octopuslike beings from Lovecraft’s 1928 Weird Tales story,“The Call of Cthulhu.”These pieces, together with the Dunwich art, got Lee to thinking, and he wrote Derleth, “[...] after reading your fine introduction to The Dunwich Horror, and making these three drawings, I have a

great yen to illustrate Lovecraft. I realize the cost of such a publication, but is there any chance that you would be interested in a volume of this nature?” Cele Goldsmith started sending Lee science fiction stories from Amazing Stories after Vetter had helped Lee draft a letter soliciting commissions. Lee also contacted rival science fiction publications Galaxy and Analog, but it is not known if he heard back from either of these publications. About this time,Vetter visited Lee’s studio in Hamilton,and was surprised by the manifold display of art he saw first hand: models, silver jewelry, wood carvings, half-finished signage, and preparatory watercolors for paintings.The clut-

ter of the small studio gave a sense of a prolific worker, and the sheer variety of art impressed Vetter all the more. At the end of February 1963, showing signs of his age, Lee had an internal hemorrhage which sidelined him for a few weeks. When he returned to work Lee asked Vetter for a photograph of himself, and drew Vetter’s likeness onto the back cover art for J. F. Bone’s (aptly-named) “For Services Rendered” in the April 1963, issue of Amazing Stories. Meanwhile, the art for the story “Natal Star,” was printed upside down in Fantastic [pg. 159]; the man in the picture is supposed to be hanging from the ceiling.This had happened to Lee’s art once before in Weird Tales. In the spring and early summer, Lee went back to look for the house of sticks and stones at Mann’s Brook, accompanied by Vetter and Art Meggett, one of the friends he had made in Hamilton, but they could not find any evidence of the site.They did stumble across other unusual houses, including a shut-up little farmhouse,

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This page, top left – wood, metal and stone, 3-D construct of barn (showing McGurty Discs), ca. 1955; right – drawing, wood-block and final woodcut print,“Freedie by the Old House”. 1954; page 134, top – ink and scratchboard, art for Weird Tales, 1946; page 134, bottom – watercolor, title unknown, 1959.

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strangely slanted, as if a giant hand had pushed it aside. He wrote to Derleth later in the year, “[...] an old fishing friend of mine who is a bit addicted to whiskey and can’t remember too well, has a recollection of seeing the same strange [sticks] contraption about 1947 on a nearby stream. [...] I thought this might be of interest to you. I’d sure like to find it, for the Mann Brook site that I saw has been washed out completely and my recent trip there produced nothing but a body completely covered with black fly bites.”6 Whatever kind of dead animal this might have been is never mentioned. At this time, Lee took over the “Chips & Shavings” column in The

Mid-York Weekly, published out of Hamilton by Robert Roberts, from Reed Alvord, and began writing about folklore,unusual bits of history,and people. Lee wrote Derleth of it,“I feel a bit embarrassed in speaking to a writer of your caliber about a column, but it has been fun and does have some interest hereabouts.The paper here is a political weekly and an ad sheet mainly and if there are too many ads and some man is running for welfare commissioner on their ticket they take the shears and cut [the column] where ever it comes.” Lee laid out the story of the Mann’s Brook stick house over the course of five installments of “Chips & Shavings” in the fall of 1963.

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Arkham to Carcosa n Friday, November 22, 1963, Lee cried in his studio when he heard the news from Dallas of President John Kennedy’s assassination. He had been a Democrat since the Depression, when he had first voted for FDR and his New Deal reform plan. By early 1964, Lee had noticed that assignments from Cele Goldsmith had stopped. “Don’t know whether it’s because she is dissatisfied with what I have done or it’s just too much trouble to send it up with the phone so handy. I felt, when I began a year and a half ago, that it would take some time to get into the thing solidly after ten or twelve years away. This assumption proved correct. I’m just getting back into the swing. After a lapse of that length, your ideas are bound to change,and the problem is to keep up with the new approach. This takes a lot of doing.” Lee was unaware that Ziff-Davis was cutting back production costs on magazines it considered marginal. It had taken August Derleth a year, after some prodding, to get back to Lee regarding the illustrated H.P. Lovecraft volume the artist had proposed. Derleth had decided to go ahead with a deluxe Lovecraft book

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call Three Arkham Tales, as long as Lee could match the quality of the Arkham drawings he had done for John Vetter. Lee was pleased with the news. “It rekindled a fire that has smoldered for some time, and now I hope it will burn with great gusto. I must make drawings for more HPL stories before my wad is completely shot.”1 Lee felt he needed to explain his motivation and wrote Derleth a few days later,“[...] these Arkham stories are very close to me because the place I came from near here is much the same as the Arkham country. My ancestors, who settled it, came from Connecticut shortly after 1800 and brought with them the feeling and the touch of Colonial New England.True, the gam-

brel roofs did not find their way into North Pitcher, but the architecture has a flavor, and certainly the customs and certain traditions smack of what must have been the colonial approach. “No meteorites hit the spot, but something did, and that country is as desolate and ghostly as that of the Gardner environment. Most of my painting and sketching has been from there, and a big part of my living, and as I go back and try to locate the places where I lived and worked and schooled, a feeling that something unearthly hit it comes over me.”2 Lee’s letters to Derleth are more alive and giving than Derleth’s short informational responses (the same is true of the many letters exchanged between Derleth and Lovecraft, where Lovecraft is the more generous communicant). At times, Lee, writing from Hamilton, would beg for a return letter and some assurances, which Derleth would dole out in small doses, but some of this can be attributed to the twenty to fifty letters that Derleth wrote in a normal day. Lee began working on the illustrations for the Lovecraft book in the spring of 1964, with the story “The Colour Out of Space.”These did not

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flow easily as he fussed over them, a Pall Mall cigarette dangling from his lips. Repeatedly, he found fault with his drawings. He insisted on emotional momentum in his work, and Derleth demanded the best that Lee could produce. Regarding the illustrations for “The Colour Out of Space,” Lee wrote to Derleth,“as soon as I could see them in the big pattern, that is beyond the pure horror, and in relation to my own country and experience, they became a reality.”3 It can be said that the July 13, 1962, trip to New York had been a success, if only for the new Ziff-Davis work that came out of it. But consider-

ing all the places visited and people Lee met that day, it’s easy to see his frustration in selling himself .The November 1963 issue of Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which contained the story “The Eyes of Phorkos,” had a wraparound cover by Hannes Bok (his last fantasy genre work) for Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” an admittedly much better story than “Phorkos.” Lee completed sketches for “The Eyes of Phorkos,” but a final painting was never realized.The record album Roddy McDowall Reads the Horror Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, released in 1962, had poor sales and a follow-up was never attempted by Schlitten. Lee’s reputation had not made any difference in swaying art editors’ opinions. Many were interested in meeting him, but few took the next step of commissioning work. Their rebuffs were all the more painful to Lee, convinced that his style could never be adapted to anything but horror, and now he had hit a wall of rejection even in that field. In the spring of 1964, Lee was contacted by Mike

Breen of WSYR, the Syracuse NBC affiliate TV station, to do a show around “The Work of Lee Brown Coye.” Two appearances were set for the Denny Sullivan and his Gang afternoon show on May 8 and May 29. Lee had been away from Syracuse for five years, but people there still remembered him. During his career, Lee had developed a knack for getting his name before the central New York public.There are many mentions of him in all of the area newspapers going back to the mid-1930s. In Syracuse he knew many newspapermen as drinking buddies. Whenever any news item or controversy pertaining to art came up, invariably Lee would be asked to give his opinion. In April 1965, Lee was evicted from his space over the bakery, and found two connected rooms nearby above the Bluebird restaurant, where he set up a new studio. He had lost a month of production time and spent $300 in making the move—money he could ill afford. In the new studio Lee settled into a routine, he was up early most mornings,stopping for coffee with his friend and village architect Art Meggett. Then he would go to his studio and attempt to work while cronies came in to talk or take a nip from the bottle he always had handy. Visitors would take time away from his work, but Lee would always accommodate anyone. Sometimes he would put visitors to work, and one day found a lawyer from the office next door chiseling at a block of wood, while a Colgate professor painted a canvas in his underwear (so as not to dirty his clothes), and one of the town characters sat in a cor-

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authors had the newly formed Science Fiction Writers of America arguing their case against Cohen, there was no similar organization fighting for the rights of artists, like Virgil Finlay and Coye, whose works were being reused sans payment. Ziff-Davis had originally bought magazine rights to the work it had published, and Cohen assumed he had the legal right to reprint any of it in any periodical coming out of Ultimate Publishing. Lee’s stomach and throat had always given him problems, and as he got older, other illnesses and hospital stays grew more frequent. His two packs a day of Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes no doubt did not help. As his health became sketchy, Lee had difficulty in working up illustrations or paintings, and the feeling that sculpture was a sympathetic mediner helping himself to a few. During that year Bernard Davis, of Ziff-Davis, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and decided to divest all his magazines (save for a computer magazine for which he probably could not find a buyer). In June 1965, he sold Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories to Ultimate Publishing Company, a firm started the month before by Sol Cohen, formerly a business manager for Entertainment Comics (better known as EC), and editor at Avon.With ownership of the titles, Cohen acquired rights to twenty-five-plus years of Ziff-Davis’ inventory of pulp fiction and art. Over the next few years,Cohen used this wealth of material—without paying reprint royalties to authors or artists—to flood newsstands with 17 different science fiction and fantasy magazines.While

um, compared to the inexactitudes and emotional strains of creating illustrations, grew in his mind. Lee had gone through this kind of emotional tremor before; he made many preparatory drawings before creating a silver or carved wood piece, but did not equate this kind of drawing with work done for paintings or illustrations. One senses that Lee would go through burn-out periods, and it was easier to shift focus than to invent excuses and explanations.There is also the fact that Lee enjoyed the physical effort of creating three-dimensional art. Lee had always made his own frames for his paintings.The woodworking gave him a sense of satisfaction analogous to sculpting and Lee felt a picture was unfinished without its own frame. The poet Robert Lowell once referred to picture frames on portraits as coffins, and this brings back to mind Lee’s youthful visits to Newcomb’s funeral home in North Pitcher. Lee was charging $300 for a painting at this time, and would say that $100 of that was for the frame. That spring Lee had gotten a large block of sugar pine and decided to do a whale sculpture. This is the block of wood that Lee’s lawyer neighbor would hack at when he came by. ugust Derleth, despite his robust appearance in promotional photos, also suffered from a variety of physical ailments. He had the mid-western propensity for eating large,and was especially fond of deep-dish cherry pie á la mode, which did little to improve his high cholesterol levels or keep his weight under 240 pounds. His poor health had

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Page 135 – ink and scratchboard, Weird Tales, “The Perfect Host”, Nov. 1948; page 136 – brush and ink on scratchboard dustjacket, 3 Tales of Horror, 1967; page 137, top left – Brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror, “Asenath”, 1967; page 137, top right – ink on scratchboard for Night Side,“The Colour Out of Space,”1947; page 137, bottom right –ink and scratchboard for Black Medicine, 1966; page 138, top left – ink and scratchboard for Worse Things Waiting, 1973; page 138, bottom – ink and scratchboard, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “Dunstable Horror”, April 1964.; this page, top left – ink and scratchboard, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “The Word of Unbinding”, Jan. 1964; this page top center – ink on scratchboard, “Alannah”, Who Knocks?, 1945; this page, top right – ink and scratchboard, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “Dunstable Horror”, April 1964; this page, bottom right – Ruth Coye, ca. 1957.

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first surfaced during World War II, when army doctors discovered a heart condition and hypertension. At the end of 1966, he had a “minimal coronary,” which sidelined him for a month. Lee’s own bouts of illness, and a hospital stay during 1966, delayed completion of the art for Three Arkham Tales now renamed 3 Tales of Horror. He was anxious to finish the project once his health improved. Eugene Magner, the Morrisville College librarian, saw the last of the interior illustration (showing a rat scurrying along an Arkham building ledge) in Lee’s studio and gave him the Latin inscription Anathema Sit, which could translate as either “let it be damned” or “go to hell and stay there”

to use as a legend. Lee finished the drawing on February 3, 1967, and mailed it to Derleth. The winter was already a long, hard one, with bills piling up, and Lee was glad to get an advance royalty check of $250.00 from Derleth onValentine’s Day. The first go at the book jacket had Lee mistakenly hand-lettering the title as 3 Tales of Terror. Meanwhile, Derleth had decided that the usual author photograph would not suit the deluxe format of the book, and asked Lee to create a portrait of Lovecraft.“I will be happy to undertake a drawing of HPL.However,it must be understood that I am not a portrait artist nor have I ever pretended to be....” Lee added,“[Lovecraft] has a beautiful face, and a man that can’t do something with it is not much.”4 Lee managed a cartoon of a thoughtful Lovecraft sitting at his writing desk, and mailed the finished piece with “misgivings.” Derleth had not expected a “caricature,” and was unsure whether or not the portrait was successful. He showed the drawings to visitors to Arkham House and gauged their responses—most approved of Lee’s interpretation. All surviving photos of Lovecraft show a long-faced, grimjawed man, with dark eyes. Lee’s portrait softened his features and gave the writer a rubbery resiliency in his limbs and posture. In September 1967, a fire broke out at the Fort William Henry restoration in Lake George,destroying the main structure where Lee’s Blue Whale nineteenth century cof-

feehouse construction was on exhibit. The building also housed life-sized figures of solders from the French and Indian War, and reproductions of period artifacts created by Lee.The coffeehouse model was in storage in another part of the restoration and survived, but the ersatz solders met a second death at the eighteenth century fort. 3Tales of Horror had all the makings of a good-looking book.The scratchboard art was some of the best Lee had accomplished since his Weird Tales days. Derleth ordered a printing of 1,500 copies and started an intensive Arkham House and fan publication campaign for the book months before the publication date of August 1967, forty-seven months after Lee first broached the idea to Derleth. It may have been the nervous strain of many deadlines that aggravated Lee’s nagging health troubles during this time. In June he was unable to use his right arm; a “floating rib” had caused nerves to tangle under his right arm and he underwent an operation to have it fixed. During the year he had been in the hospital four times, undergoing operations on three occasions, and was getting “rascally” from the forced inactivity. One Sunday afternoon,a week after getting out of the hospital, he tried to move a 100pound drum of investment for his silver work, and the effort immediately “raised hell” with his shoulder; the diagnosis was bursitis,and he lost more work time. Lee received advance copies of 3 Tales of Horror at the end of July, and was at once disappointed. The book was done in a larger size than typical Arkham House books, but the printer had

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Page 140 – brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror,“Three Servants,” 1967; this page, top left – brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror, “Great Empty Shell,” 1967; this page, top right – ink on scratchboard.“Heritage,” Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, Dec.1962; this page, bottom right– scratchboard spot illustration for Spice, 1946.

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assumed the usual size Arkham House book dimensions when making ready the printing plates, and this reduced all the illustrations, effectively turning the drawings into tarot card miniatures that minimized their impact.The jacket itself was more effective and did include the Lovecraft portrait by Lee. Between 1962 and 1970, Lee did nine book jackets for Arkham House—averaging one a year. The fully illustrated of 3 Tales of Horror had led Derleth to think about Lee doing another deluxe illustrated book, but as was his wont with Arkham House, Derleth would sometimes wait years before commiting himself to a project. Lee’s medical problems were not all physical. Some time in the 1960s, a physician had prescribed the anti-anxiety drug, Stelazine.This was one of the new, highly-toxic neuroleptic agents developed by the pharmaceutical industry–and pushed by them as tranquilizers–which doctors could administer to anyone diagnosed as tense, depressed, or anxiety-ridden.Overlooked by psychiatrists, and minimized by the drug companies, were some of the studies that showed that tranquilizers like Stelazine worked by blotting out a person’s ability to think, disabling good aspects of a personality as much as bad. While many of Lee’s problems were emotional, the intended use of Stelazine was as an anti-psychotic to treat schizophrenia—an acute mental condition that he did not have. But doctors were lead to believe that these drugs could work miracles across the board for patients with unspecified depressions. Stelazine was noteworthy at the time as

one of the cocktail of drugs (mostly painkillers for his bad back) taken by President Kennedy while in office. Lee was also taking Ritalin as a stimulant.A local doctor had prescribed both drugs and Lee had taken them diligently for years at the first sign of any slump in his mood. His constant financial worries did not help his frame of mind, and he spoke to the lawyer in the office next door, Warren Ashmead, on August 25, 1967, about declaring bankruptcy. Ashmead wrote letters to all of Lee’s creditors,buying some time.Some good news came that fall when the art group at nearby Colgate University contacted Lee about holding a retrospective exhibition of his career in the spring. On April 6, 1968, the day before the start of Lee’s exhibit at the Picker Gallery of Colgate, Lee was helping to set up. “...When my stuff was being brought in and was sitting around on the floor, there was a showing from New York on the walls. My stuff looked pretty old fashioned [by comparison] and I felt old and out of date.” Despite his feelings, the show was well received, and Lee garnered $4,000 worth of commissions. Meanwhile, the IRS had sent him a bill for $350 for unpaid taxes, and more ill health that summer curtailed his work time. By fall, the tax people were ready to shut Lee down unless he made payment

immediately, and Lee, in desperation, wrote letters to his best patrons explaining his plight. Bob Hager drove down to Hamilton from Syracuse to make sure Lee had the money in time. Lee had many loyal friends and was surrounded by a protective circle that included many doctors and dentists, and remarkably few people with art world connections. Hager, one of his art students in the mid-1940s, had become Lee’s dentist and described Lee as “an eccentric character, but a great guy.” California book dealer, pulp fan, and occasional small press publisher

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Page 142 – ink and scratchboard, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, “The Casket Demon”, April 1963; this page, top left – brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror, “Ephriam Waite”, 1967; this page, top right – ink and scratchboard, Fantastic magazine, “Night with Hecate”, Oct. 1963; this page, bottom right & left – silver jewelry, ca. 1963; page 144 top – ink and scratchboard, Murgunstrumm, 1977.

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got interested, through Gene Magner’s instigation, in doing a portfolio of Lee’s weird art.Arrangements were made, and Lee borrowed eighty-odd pieces of art from friends to send to California.After the portfolio, Gothics, was printed, Lee waited for the return of the art. A year passed, and after many letters, with no response, Lee set his lawyer Ashmead to write a letter.Lee finally got back the art, and one day, twenty-five folios arrived from NewYork.Lee sold these out of his studio, mostly to Colgate students, and some of this money went to pay his lawyer.Lee had no idea how many folios had been printed or sold. Lee learned, a few days before his sixty-second birthday in July 1969, that he would have to move out of his downtown studio space over the Bluebird Restaurant.The landlord wanted to combine Lee’s studio and a vacant office next door into an apartment. Lee looked at the few spaces available in town, including part of the Sculptura building, but found the rents too high for all of them. Making matters worse, commissions had also dried up and things were touch-and-go for months. Lee believed he would have to go out of business.“I can’t see any other way out except to just stay home—I’m not equipped to take a job any more, and I couldn’t take the humiliation.”5 A sense of self-doubt permeated his thoughts,“... being a failure is not easy—might better have taken the old man’s advice years ago and amounted to something—for example, working for Corona Typewriter Co. all my life.”After four months of uncertainly and anxiety, Lee finally talked the

landlord into renting out a smaller apartment and letting him stay in his studio. Lee stopped taking both Stelazine and Ritalin on Friday, October 30, 1970. Almost immediately, he gained more energy and wrote in his journal, “Think I overdid the drug business— didn’t realize I was doing it....” It was a balancing act for him to keep his emotions in check and still have the energy to work. He was still drinking every day—a fact that annoyed Ruth. n July 4, 1971, Derleth woke up early, feeling tired and out of breath.Per his daily routine,he walked to the Sauk City, Wisconsin, Post Office, but returned home winded by the effort. He sat down to rest on the porch

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and his appearance alarmed his mother and son; an ambulance was called. At 9:55 a.m., he was pronounced dead at the hospital.Three months earlier, Derleth had given Lee the go-ahead to prepare art for an illustrated edition of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (Lee had illustrated Hodgson’s short story,“The Hog,” for a 1946 Weird Tales),and mentioned more work he had for Lee.The two had never met face to face, but the news of Derleth’s death hit Lee hard. Lee had only just read the Hodgson book before Derleth’s death, but in March of 1972, he heard from lawyers for the Estate of August Derleth, making a settlement of $100 (the amount considered a “fair fee”) for “efforts to date”on the Hodgson book. At the end of 1972, a senior citizen of sixty-five, and at loose ends, Lee received a letter from Karl Edward Wagner, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, announcing his new publishing venture, Carcosa. Many horror fans believed that the death of Derleth meant the end of Arkham House, and a few fans had begun to fill in the void.Wagner, a University of North Carolina pre-med student, had banded together with David Drake, a local attorney, and Jim Croce, a psychiatrist, in an attempt to continue the Arkham House legacy of fantasy publishing. The first project from this odd collection of publishers would be Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman (another Chapel Hill resident and one-time prohibition roadhouse bouncer, New York reporter, and Weird Tales author). Worse Things Waiting had been previously listed as “forthcoming,”

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This page, top left – brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror, “The Well”, 1967; this page, top right – brush and ink on scratchboard for 3 Tales of Horror,“Wilber Whateley”, 1967; this page, bottom left – diorama of Tully salt well and Solvay Process works created by Lee Brown Coye, ca. 1954; page 146, left – brush and ink on scratchboard of H. P. Lovecraft for dustjacket of 3 Tales of Horror, 1967.

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in Arkham House publications. Wagner asked Lee if he would design a dust wrapper along the lines of those he had done for Derleth. Lee wrote back, “Outside of a few drawings and paintings for private collectors, I have done none of this type of work since August passed away. His death was a real shock to me ... because he was a dear and personal friend.It sort of took the starch out of me

.... Since those days, things have changed, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to make a living in my field for an artist with only a modest reputation.”Lee told Wagner that he was not interested in just doing the book jacket art, and proposed illustrating the complete book. Wagner was surprised at Lee’s offer and accepted it immediately. A weird fiction fan and, despite a gruff appearance, a brilliant and genuine character,Wagner, while in his teens, had discovered the work of Robert E. Howard, and was transported into the pellmell world of sword and sorcery, and horror fantasies. Before long, he was searching used bookstores for old issues of Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds, Strange Tales, Thrilling Mysteries, and other vintage pulps to satisfy his addiction. As a premed student, he decided to become a writer/ publisher and

created his own barbarian sword wielding character called Kane. Lee began producing illustrations for Worse Things Waiting at the start of 1973, and mailed illustrations, as he finished them, in small bundles to Wagner. As Carcosa received the drawings, Wagner, Drake, and Croce would meet impromptu to admire the artwork. Back on August 11, 1969, Stuart Schiff,a weird fiction fan,had visited Lee in his Hamilton studio, and chatted about Lovecraft and Derleth, and listened to the McDowell/Lovecraft record. Schiff got to look at what remained of Lee’s “horror box” and bought a few pieces. After Derleth’s death, Schiff was one of two fans offering to edit Arkham House’s magazine the Arkham Collector, but the lawyer for Derleth’s estate turned him down. (This was one of a series of bizarre antipathetic management decisions, including killing planned projects and a lawsuit against the co-founder of Arkham House, made by the publishing house’s legal managers at the time, the repercussions of which are still evident to this day.) Schiff’s own magazine, Whispers, would appear in the summer of 1973 (originally titled Whispers from Arkham, and renamed for legal reasons), in an effort to continue Derleth’s small press mission of disseminating news of weird fiction and publishing fantasy genre stories by old and new authors. Whispers was a semi-professional, small press magazine, that was published irregularly between 1973 and 1997.The whole operation was lodged in,and conducted from,Schiff’s home. Lee had sent Wagner the “Chips &

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This page, top left – scratchboard, a “Niss” from “The Soul Buyer”, Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, Dec. 1963; this page, right – ink and scratchboard, Weird Tales, “Serpent Princess”, Jan. 1948; page 148 – ink and scratchboard for Worse Things Waiting, 1973.

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around to write a story about [the sticks]. He had the same material you have, and was interested enough to outline [a story] and said he was going to write it up, but it went by the boards. [...] Believe me, what I wrote personally in the columns is the truth. It was weird stuff and had a big influence on my drawings.”6 eird Tales had been revived in 1973, but the antiquarian predilections of it editor Sam Moskowitz, lost the flavor of the original, and the new incarnation died an unnoticed death after four issues. With no real competition, Whispers became a showcase market for offbeat horror stories and art. Soon after starting the magazine, Schiff decided to do a Coye issue. He commissioned the macabre cartoonist Gahan Wilson to write an appreciation of Lee (while Wilson admired Coye’s work he knew little about him), and got Wagner to turn Lee’s sticks incident into fiction. Wagner reworked Lee’s account to fit Schiff’s space limitations, using letters written by the narrator instead of his preferred method of dialogue to advance the tale. The tenant of the stick farmhouse was based on Lee, and Wagner

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Shavings” clippings of his “stick” story after mentioning that Derleth had been working on his version of it. He thought that Wagner or Drake might want to attempt a piece of fiction based on it. Wagner thought the material read like a Lovecraft tale and wrote that it was so “outré that it’s doubtful any reader would accept that this really took place.” Lee told Wagner, “Derleth never did get

modeled a secondary character in the story on Derleth. Wagner’s story “Sticks,” appeared in the third issue of Whispers, in spring 1974, with an afterword giving the background of its genesis.Wagner asked Schiff to send half of the payment for the story to Lee, since it wouldn’t have been written without his input. The issue also featured the work of Lee Brown Coye, including photos of his 3D constructions, a Chips & Shavings story,and various examples of his horror artwork. Lee finished the last illustration for Worse Things Waiting in April 1973, often working twelve hour days since December. Included in this last batch was a selfportrait drawing showing him as a grinning, melting death’s-head. There were many delays with the first printer used by Carcosa for Worse Things Waiting, which continued when a second printer was given the job.The Carcosa crew was ignorant to the vagaries of book production and their final printer used paper remnants to cut costs. Wagner was thinking ahead and began sending Lee pulp stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Hugh B. Cave to mull over for future book projects.The stories by Price were not Lee’s “brand of booze as far as making pictures”(perhaps he remembered his first pulp cover in 1944 for Price’s “Detour to Kandahar” in Short Stories). The Cave material did excite Lee (both the author and the stories were unfamiliar to him),and he proposed working up some illustrations that Carcosa could hold onto until they were ready to publish a book.

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n the morning of the longest day of 1974, June 21, Karl Wagner and Dave Drake piled into Wagner’s twelve-year-old Falcon station wagon and drove thirteen hours from North Carolina to Hamilton,stopping only in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for lunch.When they reached Lee’s studio,Wagner was glad to see it was over a tavern.Wagner had warned Lee to be on the outlook for a shaggy, red-bearded bear of a person, and the travelers recognized Lee from his self-portrait as the hanged man on the dust jacket of Worse Things Waiting. Wagner noted, “... Coye did look like one of his own creations, long-bodied; cadaverously thin; brush of age-bleached hair that still showed traces of red; bright, lively eyes ....” Lee showed his visitors a jar containing bull testicles (a joke novelty given to him by a lawyer friend).Two black rabbits, Mulvahey and Jum Peters (named after characters in a Hugh B. Cave story), had the run of the studio and one scratched Lee’s hand during the visit, which spurred him to autographed a scrap of watercolor paper in blood for Drake.

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The next day, they drove out to the Mann’s Brook site of the “stick house” and hiked through the apple orchard, hoping to find some trace of the sticks Lee saw in 1938. The area had been completely replaced with fresh forest and was now strewn with “no trespassing for any purposes” signs.These convinced them to turn back. On the trip back to Hamilton, they drove past a bar called “Buckets of Blood” and managed to avoid stopping. Lee, still the tombstone tourist, had

become friendly with the Hamilton cemetery custodian and was given keys to the Civil War-era crypts. Lee held the Victorian view of cemeteries as being public parks, open to all, and it was inevitable that he would serve as a guide to the little houses of the dead for the clutch of horror aficionados. At first it was hard to see in the gloom of the crypt; a bay window across from the entrance was the only source of illumination, and the air was noticeably cooler. Lee saw the vandalism done to some of the glass-faced caskets since his last visit, and it saddened him.“It’s a shame what some of the kids do when they have nothing better to occupy their time.” Anyone entering a burial crypt knows the sense of occupancy that holds sway over the stillness, and Lee could have been talking to the dead instead of his guests. The simple one-room structure and single window in the crypt allowed a natural occurrence of the camera obscura effect (light rays passing through a small hole, from bright daylight into a darkened chamber, projecting an image of

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the outside), and Lee demonstrated the technique to Wagner and Drake. The camera obscura phenomenon has been known by artists for many centuries. Before the chemistry of photography was invented,Vermeer had used the effect to help them obtain precise perspectives, and representation of light and form. Lee had once described the crypt in a letter to JohnVetter,“One of the cemeteries here has two family crypts in it. I had the pleasure of getting into one of the crypts some time ago, and it was quite a sight.The first burial was in 1865 and the last one was 1913. There were about 12 coffins set on iron brackets fastened to the stone walls.There was one baby in a tiny casket with a glass top.That had turned phosphorescent like swamp fire and you could see the little thing about as it was buried. Beside it is a vase with very dead flowers in it.There is no date, but the person who let me in was there about 30 years ago and it looked the same. Most of the coffins have glass tops and you can see the inmates in various conditions of decay. Some have just dried up like brown leather, some are a bit porous, and one old gentleman who passed away in the 1870s has developed streaks of phosphorescent light in his face and hands.In the dim light the phosphorescence gleams sort of greenish. One casket had rotted out at the bottom and the pelvis and bits of rotten cloth hang out. One bracket has rusted away and let one end down, exposing a not-toohealthy leg partially covered with cloth.” Aptly enough, a storm was brewing when they left the crypt. The old station wagon refused to start and Wag-

ner glanced at Lee, who raised an eyebrow.They decided to walk into town under darkening skies to get help, while Drake stayed with the black Falcon, bravely reading xeroxed copies of old pulp stories. Before they left the next day, Lee thought that Drake might be able to get some story ideas from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, and gave him his copy. He wrongly thought that he would have no further use for the book. t high noon on December 1, 1974, a grease fire began in the BlueBird restaurant kitchen and smoke sped up through air vents in the building. Lee saw the black smoke seeping into his studio, grabbed the dust masks he used

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when woodworking, and rushed out. The acrid smoke was already seeping up to the second floor hallway, and as he met other people leaving their offices,he handed them air filters and led several people down a smoke-filled staircase. After the fire was out, Lee surveyed the damage—a large portion of the roof and the upper story’s masonry had given way. For the second time in his career he suffered the destruction of his workplace. His tools and metalworking equipment were damaged, and the few art pieces left in the studio destroyed. Stuart Schiff had borrowed the contents of the horror box, with the idea of purchasing or using pieces in Whispers, and this art was saved from the conflagration. This time Lee was uninsured, not being able to get a policy due to his studio’s location over a restaurant kitchen. He carted his studio’s salvage to the Baptist Church basement and his friend,Art Meggett, gave him workspace in the “rear end” of his architectural office, but there was no room for metalworking and the noise would not have been acceptable in Meggett’s more businessoriented building. After talks with the landlord, an arrangement was worked out to divide the office and make a studio for Lee. chiff asked Lee if he would be interested in doing new Weirdisms for a special Weird Tales issue of Whispers and Lee got the Blavatsky tome back from Drake. Lee received copies of Worse Things Waiting at the end of the 1974. After all the trials and tribulations, Carcosa’s first book had turned out a fine

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Page 149 – ink and scratchboard, Murgunstrumm, 1977; page 150 – Brush and ink on lined paper, untitled, 1980; this page, top left –ink and scratchboard for Worse Things Waiting,“Song of Slaves,”1973; this page, top right – pencil on lined paper,“Saint Dennis”, ca. 1980; this page, bottom right – ink and scratchboard, Weird Tales,“Country House”, Sept. 1949; page 152 left – ink and scratchboard, 3 Tales of Horror, “Beings They Are Going To Let In,” 1967;; page 152, bottom right – ink and scratchboard title page art, Sleep No More, 1944.

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production, with metallic ink lettering on the spine of the hard covers and the interior set off with blood red end papers.The text pages used old style hot metal typesetting. The book would go on to be nominated in 1975, at the First World Fantasy Convention in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode

Island, for best short fiction collection, with Lee separately nominated in the best artist category. Coye and Wellman went on to win the award in their respective categories. During the summer of 1975, author and editor Les Daniels sold his publisher, Scribner, on the concept of an oversized horror anthology using Lee’s illustrations. Lee would do a drawing for each of the twenty-five horror tales making up Dying of Fright, Masterpieces of the Macabre, which including two stories Lee had previously illustrated for Derleth’s (Rinehart) 1940s horror anthologies: “The Yellow Sign” and “Squire Toby’s Will”. Lee would get $35 for each picture and, like the first Rinehart book, had a tight deadline. In his introduction, Daniels pronounced Lee “perhaps the most important living American illustrator in the domain of the macabre.”

Carcosa had scheduled their next book a collection of pulp horror stories written by Hugh Cave entitled Murgunstrumm & Others. Lee wrote Wagner, “With all due respect to Wellman, HPL, etc., Murgunstrumm is a horrid gray mass of unmitigated horror, more vivid than any I have ever had the pleasure of reading.”1 The jacket flap gave a succinct account of the stories in Murgunstrumm & Others,“[...] haunted houses, ravenous vampires, slobbering monsters, fiends human and inhuman, nights dark and stormy, corpses fresh and rotting,” in short—all the ingredients dear to Lee’s heart. Cave had begun writing stories in the 1930s for the “shudder pulps”—the grisliest, most over-the-top, lurid, terror magazines, before going on to write for Good Housekeeping. Lee worked on the Murgunstrumm art off and on from early in 1973 through the end of 1976, turning in the last drawing to Carcosa a few days before Christmas. On NewYear’s Day,1977,Lee woke

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This page, top left –ink and scratchboard for Midnight Sun, 1973; this page, top right – ink on scratchboard, Murgunstrumm, 1977; this page , bottom right – scratchboard illustration for Who Knocks,“Dear Departed,” 1946; page 154 – woodcut print,“American Interior”, 1954.

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up with a sharp pain on the left side of his chest and could not move his arm. He was rushed to the hospital. On January 9, he had surgery to remove a clot in his brain caused by a stroke. Out of the operating room, he fell into a coma and was breathing with the aid of a respirator—the immediate prognosis was bad. Ruth wrote Karl Wagner on April 11, 1977: “He is still fed through a tube directly into his stomach. He has been through such a terrible ordeal with no hope of a flicker of normalcy again. I feel he has had too much and only hope he does not last much longer. He, of all people, would not want this!” Lee, against all medical expectations, came out of his coma, and his doctors marveled at his “iron constitution.” Over the course of the year, he passed in and out of a comatose state, but slowly his senses cleared to the point where he was sitting up in bed, fully conscious, though still partially paralyzed. Before long, Lee was using parallel bars to learn to walk again, and also relearning how to use a pen. His weight had dropped to 116 pounds, but foremost in his mind was drawing again. Murgunstrumm & Others was published in the summer of 1977, and garnered good reviews in the genre. Lee and Cave made the final ballot of the World Fantasy Awards held at Fort Worth in 1978.The book won for best collection, and for the second time Lee was awarded the best artist trophy. Cave later admitted that he was in a state of shock accepting the award, and blurted out what was on his mind: that Lee’s art had more to do with the success of the

book than his stories. After more then a year bed-ridden, Lee’s spirits had begun to flag but he was distracted from his convalescence by Julie Harris performing her onewoman show, “The Belle of Amherst,” in the hospital. Harris and Lee had met through her husband, the Syracuse newspaperman,Walter Carroll. Lee had known Carroll since the early 1950s, when they both use to shared stories over drinks. Ruth served as a lifeline to the outside world, fielding concerned letters from friends and the Carcosa coterie. Every time some progress was made, it seemed, there would be another setback: more surgery, followed by new therapy. Slowly, people began getting letters from Lee, handwritten in a painfully large-looped cursive script,

and mailed by Ruth. Manly Wade Wellman wrote back to Lee on March 15, 1980, “I figure you for somebody who won’t take a whipping. Defiance is a king point in a good man.” His physical therapy had gotten him to the point where he could write and even make sketches in a school composition pad he found in his hospital room. One sketch made on lined paper for Ruth showed Saint Dennis. He had planned to create a sculpture of the saint for her in 1971. “[...] thought of Saint Dennis who walked around the country with his head under his arm after being decapitated [....]Thought something like this would appeal to Ruthie since it combines silver sculpture with some of my weird ideas.”2 When he felt ready, he wrote to Wagner, asking for manuscripts to illustrate, and outlining plans for

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This page, top left – scratchboard Weirdisms for Weird Tales, ”Imp,” 1948; page, top right – ink and scratchboard, Murgunstrumm, 1977; this page, bottom left – silver jewelry, ca, 1965; page 156– ink and scratchboard, Weird Tales,“The Perfect Host”, Nov., 1948.

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future projects. Carcosa was glad to send him stories by Hugh Cave for the collection Death Stalks the Night (this project had been in the works since the mid1970s when stories and art were left out of Murgunstrumm due to size constraints). Doctors resuscitated Lee from cardiac arrest on February 17, 1981, and again little hope was given. Again, a determined Lee fought back and, within a few months, was drawing and working on new illustrations. He finished three new drawings for Wellman’s tale “Can these Bones Live,” which appeared in the small press magazine Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The new work showed that Lee was still capable of populating a nightmare world with his bizarre people. Then blockage in his right kidney and fluid build-up in his pancreas kept him from drawing. He had improved enough by May to begin thinking about work again, on the second Cave compendium, but it was obvious that his kidneys were failing. He went through more surgery. On September 5, 1981, Lee Brown Coye suffered a fatal heart attack.The artist was seventy-four years old and had spent nearly the last five years of his life in hospitals and nursing homes.Wagner eulogized Coye as a “... kindly, gentle man— enormously talented and possessing the unsettling combination of a certain morbid genius with a whimsical sense of humor.” Lee’s body was cremated and his ashes buried in the Tully Cemetery beside his mother and father.

in 1983, but it wasn’t until The Blair Witch Project hit the movie theaters in the summer of 1999 that anything akin to the story appeared on screen. Some viewers familiar with the story immediately noticed the affinity to Wagner’s and Coye’s story, especially in the discovery of the stick figures in the woods and the creepy, desolate house seen in

the climax of the movie. Wagner, by the early 1980s, had decided to concentrate on his own writing and let Carcosa expire quietly. He had also begun to drink heavily and had separated from his wife. A harddrinking workaholic, Wagner never learned how to say no to editors, and after the death of his father, and a ome producers had shown an inter- strange police car chase and arrest, est in adapting “Sticks” for television began a downward, self-destructive spi-

S

ral. His body was found on the floor of his bathroom on October 13, 1994. A lifelong friend, John Mayer, has provided a harrowing account of Wagner’s last years and how “his liver had practically exploded” at the end. Living only to the age of forty-nine, Wagner left a legacy as a publisher, editor, writer, and chief barnstormer for “dark fantasy” and horror fiction, helping to bring horror fiction from a small, fan-oriented niche into a full-fledged publishing category. Ruth passed away on May 9, 1993, at the age of eighty-four. In 1995, Death Stalks the Night, proofread and left in typeset galley by Carcosa at the time of Lee’s death, was finally published by Fedogan & Bremer, using all of the Coye art that could be found. Lee never got around to doing the dust-jacket and this was done by another artist. As an artist, Lee Brown Coye had been an outsider and a wide-ranging generalist. At the end, he believed his career had not amounted to much. As he himself said, “too much booze, too much medicine, and not enough ambition.”3 The survival of such creative polymorphs as Coye tends to be discouraged by modern movers of art. It is likely that Coye could not have flourished in the twentieth century art world if he had been born even ten years later. In this scenario, he would have missed the Leonia art colony, the Depression federal art programs, regionalism and social realism, and the Whitney Annuals, and begun a career at the onset of World War II (with a higher

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This page , top left – scratchboard, (detail) “3rd Sister”, Fantastic, January 1963; this page 157 top right – ink and scratchboard illustration for Weird Tales,“Weirdism”, ca. 1948; page 158 – photo by Bob Hager of Lee Brown Coye at North Pitcher, New York, ca. 1966.

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probability of being drafted). With the post-war death of many illustration markets, and the advent of abstraction in fine art, ultimately Coye (a phantasmagoric realist at heart) would have had no choice but to become a fulltime cog in an advertising agency or work within the framework of a small commercial art studio. Coye never really flourished as a lone wolf, but he was able to work as a full-time artist for most of his life, despite selling himself short on many commissions. His independence was won in artistic isolation. (By falling just outside the gravitational pull of the New York City art world, he managed to keep a fresh quality of personal discoveries in his work). It was his habit not to get into hard negotiations with customers, and some people were willing to take advantage of him by offering a pittance for work. Certainly, various levels of self-sabotaging were evident throughout his life—all in the name of creative freedom. A special warmth for Coye continues to exist among weird fiction fans. While Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay have, since the demise of the original Weird Tales, elicited many books and art collections of their work, Coye has long stayed in an art fog, which is all the more striking considering the memorable distinctness and originality of his illustrations. It seems that Coye, a seminal pulp artist at the very least, has been harder to package, losing some momentum with the invisibility of his art, and the concomitant lack of any real critical or biographical assessment.

While most artists pursue lives of quiet work and small satisfactions, what keeps them at it has always been a mystery. Tom Wolfe wrote of “...all the wretched, squirming, wriggling, desperate unknown artists... .”4 attempting to break through to some form of recognition—hopefully in the their lifetime.Art students from Colgate would come to Coye’s Hamilton studio to question him

about art, and he envied their youthful aggressiveness—a trait he remembered having in his own youth. Misinterpretations, owing to prejudice, and a tunnel vision of what is vital art, has encased many artists in tombs similar to the forgotten crypt Coye liked to visit in Hamilton. Art critics like to believe that this is the natural outcome of the winnowing of time and taste, but

unseen art is a blind spot in a distorted historical perspective of creativity, and this includes much twentieth-century art.The sheer volume of art created in the last hundred years has overwhelmed the art world’s critical apparatuses and created pockets of unduly neglected art. It is also for the best perhaps that Lee did not live to see the development of museums as mirror images of multinational corporations marketing artists like star entertainers. Some artists create because they can do nothing else; some choose art because it’s in their nature; it might be that creativity is the only thing that keeps some artists sane. All of these applied to Coye. His career charted a zigzagging course that reveals much of the by-ways and off-roads of American art in the twentieth century. His is a roadmap quite different from the super highways of the famously successful artists. Coye’s intensity and persistence never quite hit pay dirt, but eventually he reached a hard-won spot in American art on his own terms. Shortly before his stroke, he told an interviewer, “All of my experiences through the years have added up. I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of more schooling. I didn’t see the point of it [....] If you think you’ve got something, stay with it. That’s the trouble with many young people: they get discouraged easily. [A] professor of mine in Syracuse told me to just keep at it, so I did. I kept going and now I can’t stop.” This can be juxtaposed with the refrain he repeated time after time in his diary “Life is a trap.”

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Page 159, top left – scratchboard, “The Black Stone, Sleep No More, 1944; page 159, top right – scratchboard, “His Natal Star,” Fantastic Stories of Imagination magazine, March 1963; page 159, bottom left – ink and scratchboard for unknown issue of Weird Tales, 1947; this page, left – ink and scratchboard, “The Whippoorwills In The Hills,””, Weird Tales, September 1948; This page, top right – ink and scratchboard, art for Weird Tales , “Dhoh,”July 1948.

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This page, top left – ink and scratchboard,“Four for Jehlam,” Weird Tales, January 1949; this page, top right – ink and scratchboard, “Black Dog,” 1947; this page, bottom right – ink, and scratchboard, “The Kennel,” Sleep No More, 1944; this page, bottom left – scratchboard, “The Black Stone, Sleep No More, unused art, 1944; page 162, top left – scratchboard for Treasure Island, unpublished, ca. 1946; page 162, top right & bottom left – ink and scratchboard illustrations for Weird Tales,“Weirdisms”, ca. 1948.

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Published Illustration Checklist (c)–cover art; (dj)–dustjacket; (i)–illustration (+ signifies more than one); (number of illustrations given when known); (p)–painting reproduction; (ph)–photograph; (r) art reprint; (w) Weirdisms 1932 Golden Book Magazine

July

1932 The Seventh Ogre with Leo Kaplan (i+) (House of Leo Hart, Rochester, N.Y.) 1937 “Bait” promotional booklet for anglers (c); (John Flack Advertising) The Vicar of Azay-Le-Rideau by Honor Balzac (J. F. Campbell, Syracuse, New York) PM, (Production Manager) magazine, vol. IV, no.2, Oct.;“The Art of Lee Brown Coye” magazine insert (The Composing Room, N.Y.) 1938 The Land is Large by Emerson Waldman (dj) (Farrar & Reinhart) The Art of Bundling by Dana Doten (i+) (The Countryman Press & Farrar & Reinhart, N.Y.) 1939 Scylla the Beautiful by Albert & Helen Fowler (dj, i+) (Republican Press, Hamilton, N.Y.) Beat! Beat! Drums! a Poem of the Civil War by Walt Whitman; (broadside) (Braeside Press, Syracuse, N.Y.) 1944 Sleep No More:Twenty Masterpieces of Horror for the Connoisseur, edited by August Derleth, (dj, i+); (Farrar & Reinhart, N.Y.)

1945 Short Stories magazine; February 25 (c); March 25 (c) Weird Tales magazine vol 38, no.4, March (i); no.6, July (c); vol. 39, no.2 November (c, i); Spice magazine, November (c,i+); December (c, i+) 1946 Spice magazine, January (c, i) Weird Tales magazine no.4, March (c); no. 6, July (i); no. 7, September (i3); no. 8, November (i3); Who Knocks? Twenty Masterpieces of the Spectral for the Connoisseur edited by August Derleth (Farrar & Company, N.Y.) Book of Knowledge 1947 Night Side: Masterpieces of the Strange & Terrible edited by August Derleth (dj, i+) (Reinhart & Company, N.Y) Short Stories magazine; March 25 (c) Weird Tales magazine no.9, January (i4); no.10, March, (i3); no.11, May, (i2); no.11?, July, (c, i, w); no.12, September (i, w); vol.40, no.1, November (i5, w);

1948 Weird Tales magazine no.2, January (i4,w); no.3, March, (c,i6); no.4, May, (i4,w); no.5, July, (i3,w); no.6, September (c,i4); vol.41, no.1, November (i5,w); American Artist magazine, October (i+,p)(interview with LBC) 1949 Weird Tales magazine, no.2, January (c, i3,w); no.3, March (i,w); no.4, May, (i2); no.6, September (i2, w); vol.42, no. 1, November (i3, w); 1950 Weird Tales magazine, no.2, January (i2); no.3, March (c, i, w); no.5 July, (w); vol.43, no.1, November (i, w); 1951 The Normal Cerebral Angiogram by Arthur Ecker, M.D., Ph.D; medical drawings by LBC; (Charles C Thomas Publisher, Springfield, Illinois) Weird Tales magazine, no.3, March, (w); no.4, May, (c); no.5, July, (w); no.6 September (c, i); vol.44, no.1, November (i); 1952 Weird Tales magazine, no.5, July, (i);

1962 Fantastic magazine, vol. 11, no. 12 December (Ziff-Davis)

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1963 Amazing Stories magazine, April, back cover, (i) (Ziff-Davis Publishing) Fantastic magazine, vol. 12, no. 4; June, No.6; Oct. No 10, (i, back cover); no. 11 November; no. 12 Dec. (Ziff-Davis Publishing) Who Fears the Devil, by Manly Wade Wellman (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi) The Dunwich Horror & Others by H.P. Lovecraft (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi)

1964 Fantastic magazine, January Vol.13, No.1;April (i3); At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City Wisconsin)

1965 Approach literary magazine no. 57, Fall, (c, p, ph) Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H.P. Lovecraft (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi)

1966 The College Bookman, summer (c) A Lee Brown Coye Miscellany (i) (New Albion Books, Fairfax CA) Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (dj) (Arkham House) The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces, edited by August Derleth, (i), (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi)

1967 Gothics art portfolio, 16 prints of Weird Tales, Fantastic & Reinhart art from the 1940s and 1960s, (New Albion Books, Fairfax CA)

Strange Gateways by E. Hoffmann Price (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi) 3 Tales of Horror H.P. Lovecraft (dj, i+) (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi)

1969 Anubis (r) (fanzine) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth, (dj), (Arkham House, Sauk City,Wi)

1970 Other Dimensions, by Clark Ashton Smith (dj) (Arkham House, Sauk City Wisconsin) Strange Fantasy, magazine, Fall no. 13 (r) (Ultimate Publishing Co., Flushing, N.Y.) Weird Mystery, magazine, no. 2,Winter (r) (Ultimate Publishing Co., Flushing, N.Y.) 1971 HPL, (i), (Frierson, Meade & Penny) 1973 Worse Things Waiting, Manly Wade Wellman (Carcosa, Chapel Hill, N.C.) Fantasy Classics #1:The Terror, monthly anthology (Fantasy House, North Hollywood, Calif.)

1974 Midnight Sun, (fanzine) No.1 Gary Hoppenstand, (Columbus, Ohio) Whispers, magazine Vol. 1, No. 3 (LBC issue); no. 4, July Far Below and Other Horrors, ed. Robert Weinberg (c) (FAX Collector Editions, West Linn, Oregon) 1975 Whispers, magazine Vol. 2, No. 2-3; June #6/7; Dec #8 Toadstood Wine, fanzine (c, r), (A.S.P. incorporating Moonbroth, Space and Time, Fantasy and Terror,Whispers, and Wyrd) Nightshade, fanzine 1976 Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre edited by Les Daniels (Charles Scribner's Sons) Fantasy Crossroads, fanzine (i+), May, (Jonathan Bacon) Whispers, magazine, Dec No. 9 1977 Murgunstrumm & Others by Manly Wade Wellman, (Carcosa, Chapel Hill, NC) First World Fantasy Awards (anthology) ed. Gahan Wilson (Doubleday & Company, N.Y.) Whispers: an Anthology of Fantasy and Horror, ed. Stuart David Schiff (Doubleday, N.Y.) Whispers, magazine No. 10 1978 Whispers, magazine No. 11/12

1979 Whispers 2, ed. Stuart David Schiff (i), (Doubleday, N.Y.) Whispers, ed. Stuart David Schiff (i), (Jove paperback, New York) 1981 Whispers 3, anthology edited by Stuart David Schiff (Doubleday, N.Y.) Sorcerer’s Apprentice, fanzine, (i3), (last illustrations done by LBC shortly before his death), (Flying Buffalo) 1982 Whispers, magazine No. 15/16 Fantasy Tales, magazine, Spring, #9 1985 The Mage, (r, i12), (Colgate University Student Association, Hamilton, N.Y.) 1986 Fantasy Tales, magazine,Winter, #16 1994 The Best of Whispers, ed. Stuart David Schiff, (dj) (Borderlands Press/Whispers Press)

Page 164, bottom – ink, spot cartoon for Spice magazine, 1945; this page – ink and scratchboard, “Arkham,” 1963; page 167, left – ink and scratchboard,untitled,unpublished,1944; page 167,bottom right – ink, showing sticks from “Chips & Shavings,”1963; page 169 – ink and scratchboard, Murgunstrumm, 1977; page 170 – scratchboard “The Handler,” Weird Tales, Jan. 1947; page 171 – scratchboard “Castaway,” Weird Tales, Nov. 1947; page 172 – scratchboard “Shadows on the Wall,” Who Knocks, 1945.

1995 Death Stalks the Night, by Hugh B. Cave (Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis, Minn. –art commissioned by Carcosa in the 70s) 2001 Chips & Shavings and Another Writing by LBC, chapbook of some of LBC’s columns from the early 1960s, edited by Michael Waltz. (c, r), (Sidecar Preservation Society)

UNPUBLISHED ILLUSTRATIONS

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c. 1933-Sinbad the Sailor, The Book of Jonah; 1934 - Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allan (some of these drawings were recycled for The Art of Bundling); 1938 - Johnny Pye & the Foolkiller; 1944; -untitled World War II album; 1945 Knickerbocker History of NewYork;1947 - Candide; 1971 House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (this was commissioned by Derleth shortly before his death and a fee for work done was paid by the executor of the estate to LBC— it is unlikely any art was actually created).

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Notes 1

1 2 3 4 5

1 2

1: Out of Sheer Art Chips & Shavings column,“... Scrying Stones & Dolmen,” Mid-York Weekly Aug. 22, 29; Sept. 12, 19, 26, 1963; this is Coye’s own retelling, in five parts, of the mysterious artifacts of “sticks” he came upon while fishing a pristine brook during the spring of 1938 in upstate NewYork. 2:Tully Tea Room “Tully takes Pride,” Tully Independent, Jan 10, 1977. Interview with Helen Gilchrist (LBC’s sister), June 29,2003,by author. Chips & Shavings column Mid-York Weekly ** 1963. Tully Times,June 1921. Elizabeth Luther Cary, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1926:“Many types of art are now on exhibition”. 3: Leonia Crandall, Cindy; “The Tale of the Whale,” Morrisville Chimes, May 10.1976. Taped interview with Ruth Coye by Chuck Westfall;June 6,1985.

8

1 2 3 4 5 6 7? 1 2 2 4

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

4:“Lean Brown Cow” LBC diary entry for Sunday,June 13,1971 Phone interview with Helen Gilchrist by author, Dec.5,2002. Phone interview with Byron Fellows by author, Nov 15,2002. Taped interview with LBC in Hamilton, N.Y., May 26,1964,by Joseph Trovato ibid. E-mail from Leo Kaplan to author Nov.4,2002. Roberts, Don; Rockwell Kent,The Art of the Bookplate,2003 (Fair Oaks Press). LBC letter to Derleth,Apr.21,1967. 5: Cazenovia Days Benton, Thomas Hart An American in Art 1969 University Press of Kansas. Rose, Barbara, American Art Since 1900, NewYork 1975. LBC interview,Trovato,ibid. LBC interview,Trovato,ibid. LBC interview,Trovato,ibid. Letter to LBC from Hervey Allen,July 30,1934. Letter to LBC from Hervey Allen, Dec. 6, 1934.

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

1 2

In his letter Hervey refers to the artist doing the illustrations as “Wyatt”. Supposedly in the School Executive, a trade magazine for public school administrators, but the author’s search of issues from the time period has turned up no indication of this comments regarding the Cazenovia murals being made there.

3

6: Syracuse Sketches Anon,NewYork Time X,X,1934. Phone interview with Byron Fellows by author, Nov 15,2002. LBC interview,Trovato,ibid. Art Digest,May 1,1938. Letter fromVrest Orton to LBC,spring 1938. Letter by LBC to Syracuse Post-Standard “Morning’s Mail,”date unknown,ca.Christmas 1939. LBC diary entry for Sunday October 16,1966. 7: Fulltime Anon,Syracuse Post-Standard,x,x,1940. Anon, Syracuse Herald, “Whitney Museum to Exhibit Study of D.,L.& W.Station,Jan.17,1941. Taped interview with Ruth Coye by Chuck Westfall;June 6,1985. Letter from Rev. Gustav Ulrich to LBC, May 27, 1944.

2

8: August Detour Letter from Derleth to Elizabeth Bullock, Editor Ziff-Davis.Feb.26,1944. In the publishers’ defense Derleth and Wandrei were attempting to market a massive omnibus by the then mostly unknown Lovecraft. De Camp, L. Sprague; Lovecraft, a Biography, (Doubleday) 1976 . Letter from Derleth to Elizabeth Bullock, Editor Ziff-Davis.Feb.26,1944. ibid. Vetter, John,“Lovecraft’s Illustrators” Dark Brotherhood,Arkham House,1966. ibid. New York Times, “Books of the Times” Orville Prescott,date unknown,1945. 9: Drawing with Razors Letter from Hannes Bok to John Vetter; June 1, 1962. “Fond remembrance of the Pulps”, Anon The Colgate Maroon,Nov.13,1973.

4

1

3

4 5 6 7

1 2 3 4

1 2 3

“The Bloody Pulps,” Charles Beaumont Playboy Sept 1962. Letter from Karl Wagner to Scott Phoenix;March 5,1973. 10: Corpus Illustrum Taped interview with Robert E.Hager, conducted by Charles Westfall,June 28,1985. Lee Brown Coye, “Illustrator of Fantasy and Weird Tales” interview by Ernest W. Watson American Artist, Oct. 1948. Reilly, Jim, “Lee Brown Coye Master of the Mouldering Corpse,” interview with Robert Coye, LBC’s son, Syracuse Herald-Journal, Oct. 30, 1996. Watson,op.cit.ibid (note 2). Letter from Dr. Raymond Pieri to LBC, Feb 17, 1964. Interview with Robert Coye, conducted by author,Sept.13,2003. The Alexeieffs had invented a push-screen frame, basically a board with thousands of pins embedded into it.The pins were pushed into the board at various heights, using specially shaped tools, and lighted to create tonally shadow pictures which could be filmed one frame at a time. But this unique method was too labor intensive (even by film animation standards), and for commercial work the Alexeieffs would create multiple versions of an object, with subtle differences, and by replacing the objects for each film frame shot,create the illusion of the objects metamorphosing through “animation.” 11: Home Again LBC diary entry for Friday,August 11,1967. Letter to Gene Magner from LBC, n.d. Letter from Robert E. Hager to author, Nov. 30, 2002. “30 Syracusans Organize Onondaga Art Guild”, Alice F. Keegan, Syracuse Post-Standard, Nov. 6, 1949. 12: Shadows on the Wall Gene Magner, Lee Brown Coye Miscellany, New Albion, Fairfax, California,1966 Letter from LBC to Helen Fowler,Fall,1957. Ibid.

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1 2 3

4 5 6

1 2 3

4 5 6

13: McGurty Discs “Chip & Shavings” column Mid-York Weekly, Aug.22,1963. Updike, John, Hugging the Shore, (Knopf, New York) 1983. Vetter, john, “Famous Fantasy Artists #1—Lee Brown Coye”, Fantasy Collector, Sept. 1962, George Bibby Roseville Calif. LBC diary entry for Friday April 14,1967 Open Letter from LBC to Village of Hamilton, May 31,1962. LBC’s Diary entry, Nov. 26, 1966. 14: Gothic Redux Letter from LBC to Derleth,May 29,1962. Letter from LBC to Derleth,June.29,1962. Ray Palmer had long since left Ziff-Davis to start his own publications, Fate, and Mystic, in the late 1940s, and help usher in the UFO craze of the 1950s with a spate of books and magazines on occult matters. Letter from JohnVetter to Derleth,July 16,1962. Letter from JohnVetter to Derleth,Nov.28,1962. Letter from LBC to Derleth,September 17,1963.

1 2 3 4 5 6

15: Arkham to Carcosa Letter from LBC to Derleth,April 3,1965. Letter from LBC to Derleth,April 8,1965. Letter from LBC to Derleth,May 21,1965. Letter from LBC to Derleth,May 10,1967. LBC diary entry for Friday,September 22,1969. Letter from LBC to Karl Wagner, September 14, 1973.

1 2 3 4

16: Sticks Letter from LBC to Wagner,Sept 5,1973. LBC diary entry for Wednesday,May 5,1971. LBC diary entry for Friday,June 6,1969. Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1975.

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Selected Bibliography Benton,Thomas Hart,An American in Art.1969,University of Missouri Press,Columbia,Mo. ———— An Artist in America,1968,University of Missouri Press,Columbia,Mo. Birkhead,Edith,The Tale of Terror,1963,Russell & Russell,NewYork,N.Y. Cave,Hugh B.,Magazines I Remember,1994,Tattered Pages Press,Chicago,Il. Daniels,Les,Fear,A History of Horror in the Mass Media,1975,Charles Scribner’s Sons,NewYork,N.Y. De Camp,L.Sprague, Lovecraft,A Biography,1975,Doubleday,NewYork,N.Y. Dennis,James M.,Renegade Regionalists,1998,University of Wisconsin Press,Madison,WI Derleth, August,Sleep No More,1944,Farrar & Rinehart,NewYork,N.Y. ———— Who Knocks?,1946,Rinehart & Company,NewYork,N.Y. ———— The Night Side,1947,Rinehart & Company,NewYork,N.Y. DeVore,Howard,The Hugo,Nebula & World Fantasy Awards,1998,Advent Publishers,Dearborn,MI Gruber,Frank,The Pulp Jungle,1967,Sherbourne Press,Los Angeles,Calif. Haining,Peter,The Art of Horror Stories,1986,Chartwell Books,Secaucus,N.J. ———— Weird Tales :A Selection,in Facsimile,of the Best from the World's Most Famous Fantasy Magazine, 1990, Avalon Publishing Group,NewYork,N.Y. Hearn,Michael Patrick;Clark,Trinkett;Clark,Nichols B.;Myth,Magic,and Mystery,One hundred years of American Children’s Book Illustration;1996;Roberts Rinehart,Norfolk,Va. Hughes,Robert,Goya,2003,Alfred A.Knopf,NewYork,N.Y. Jaffery,Sheldon & Cook,Fred.,The Collector’s Index to Weird Tales,1985,Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green,Ohio Jaffery,Sheldon,The Arkham House Companion,1990,Starmont House,Mercer Island,Wash. Joshi,S.T.,H.P.Lovecraft:A Life,1996,Necronomicon Press,West Warwick,R.I. ———— SixtyYears of Arkham House,1999,Arkham House,Sauk City,Wis. Karels,Carol,Leonia,2002,Arcadia,Charleston,S.C. Klee,Paul,The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918;1964, University of California Press,Berkeley,Calif. Lesser,Robert,Pulp Art,1997,Gramercy Books,NewYork ,N.Y. Litersky,Dorothy M.Grobe;Derleth,Hawk...and Dove,1997,National Writers Press,Auorora,Colo. Long,Frank Belknap,Howard Phillips Lovecraft,Dreamer on the Night Side,1975 Arkham House,Sauk City,WI Marchand,Roland,Advertising the American Dream.1986,University of California Press,Berkeley,Calif. Meltzer,Milton,Violins & Shovels,The WPA Arts Projects,1976,Delacorte Press,NewYork ,N.Y. Owings,Mark,& Binkin,Irving,A Catalog of Lovecraftiana,1975;Mirage Press,Baltimore,Md. Rose,Barbara,American Art Since 1900,1975;Preager Publishers,NewYork,N.Y. Pepsi-Cola Company’s 3rd Annual Exhibition,Paintings of theYear,1946,National Academy of Design,NewYork,N.Y. Petaja,Emil,and flights of angels,the life and legend of Hannes Bok,1968;Bokanalia Memorial Foundation,San Francisco,Calif. Tymn,Marshal B.;Ashley,Mike,Science Fiction,Fantasy,and Weird Fiction Magazines,1985,Greenwood Press,Westport,Conn. Weinberg,Robert,The Weird Tales Story,1999;Wildside Press,Doylestown,Pa. Wolfe,Tom,The Painted Word,1975,Farrar,Straus & Giroux,NewYork,N.Y.

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Acknowledgments Over the last two years, I have immersed myself in the life of Lee Brown Coye,but I could never have presumed to write a biography of him without the generous help and patience of many of his friends and family. I would like to thank, foremost, Robert Coye, who welcomed me into his home and allowed me complete access to his father’s papers, art, and photography. He endured many of my questions and was a constant guide throughout the process.To Chuck Westfall I owe unlimited thanks for sharing his passion for Lee’s art, as caretaker of the Coye collection at the Morrisville College Library, and for opening up his personal art collection to me and allowing access to taped interviews of Ruth Coye.There are many things I might have missed if it weren’t for him. I shared many hours of conversation, in person and over the phone regarding Lee’s early days, with his sister Helen Gilchrist and her daughter Heather. To both my heartfelt thanks. Robert Hager, artist and photographer, is another devoted friend of Lee’s who gave me hours of his time. Dr. Patricia Miller, for insights into Lee’s medical art days. David Drake, for Carcosa background and helping to prod the powers that be into action.April Derleth who cleared up some questions I had regarding Arkham House. Constance Vetter, for sharing info and art owned by her late husband John. Leo Kaplan, for his valuable input on The Seventh Ogre.Byron Fellow for info on the advertising business in Syracuse from the 1930s and 1940s.

I would also like to thank Jane Frank, of Worlds of Wonder, for her thoughtful comments and help in making images available to me.And to Harry Miller,Wisconsin Historical Society; Diane Butler, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University; Eleanor L. Preston, Tully Area Historical Society; Professor Kenneth B. Grant, University of Wisconsin Colleges; Judy Throm, Smithsonian Archives of American Art; Sallie Bailey; Peter Ruber; Carolyn Berry, of Skylark Studio; Carolyn Davis, Librarian at Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library; Charlotte Blandford of Swarthmore Library for looking into the Fowler collection, part of the Friends Historical Library, for me; Nancy Johnson, Special Collections, SUNY Oswego; and Mindy Ostrow, Tyler Art Gallery, SUNY Oswego, for their help beyond the call of duty. And Marion Hildebrand and Bill Drew at the SUNY Morrisville College Library Others, that have been generous in their time and attention include: Ray Bradbury; Robert Weinberg; Malcolm Ferguson; John D Squires; Warren Ashmead; Hugh B. Cave, Michael Waltz; Peg Ladd (Cazenovia Town Historian), Dr.Arthur D. Ecker; Betsey Horner and Mary Herbert of Cazenovia; Margaret Lane, of the Cazenovia Central District Board of

Education; Sarah Kozma at the Onondaga Historical Association; Don Schlitten; Ned Brooks for help in finding some obscure fanzines; Jim Wagner, for help in clearing permission for art; Karen Convertino, at the Everson Museum of Art, for assistance in gaining info on Coye art in their collection.To all the good folks at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street–a resource of knowledge beyond compare–a special thanks. And finally Karan, the best wife a guy could ever hope for.

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Index A abstract art 58, 92, 94, 102 Abstract Expressionist 106 Advertising Club of Syracuse 57 Alexeieff,Alexander 98 Allen, Hervey 40, 52 Alvord, Reed 64, 132 Amazing Stories 64, 127, 130, 132, 136, 168 American Artist magazine 167 American Mercury magazine 50, 66 American Museum of Natural History 24 American Painting Today exhibition 106 American Scene 36, 60 Analog 130 Anderson, Ruth E. 50, 52 animated movies 96 Anthony Adverse 40, 50, 52, 169 Anubis (fanzine) 168 Approach literary magazine 114, 168 Arkham Collector 146 Arkham House 63-64, 79, 127, 130, 140, 144, 146, 168 Arno, Peter 72 Arsenic and Old Lace (play) 106 Ashmead,Warren 142, 169 Associated American Artists Gallery 62 Associated Artists 46, 48, 55, 57-58, 94, 114 Astounding Stories 64, 79 Avon publishers 127-128, 136 B Bacon, Peggy 54 Bailey,Virginia 72 Baldwin, Dorothy 110 Ball, Faith 64, 66 Ballarmine, St. Robert Francis 116 Balzac, Honoré 48, 52, 167 Barks, Carl 22 Barnum, Phineas Taylor 10 Baylor,Walker 128 Beaumont, Charles 80 Belle of Amherst (play) 154 Benét, Stephen Vincent 50, 52 Benton,Thomas Hart 35, 40, 44, 48, 52, 60, 62 Black River scow 116 Black Widow (painting) 104, 130-131 Blair Witch Project,The (film, 1999) 156

Blaisdell, Dr. 98 Blanchard, Bob 128 Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna 84, 150 Bloch, Robert 70, 79 Blue Whale (3-D construct) 112, 140, 153 BlueBird Restaurant 138, 144, 150 Bok. Hannes 79, 82, 90, 92, 136, 158 Booth, Franklin 90 Bosschere, Jean De 36 Bradbury, Ray 68, 79, 90, 92, 169 Brandywine School 24 Braque, George 94 Breen, Mike 136 Brown, Shubel 10, 12, 18 Buchanan, Lamont "Monty" 79-80, 88, 90 Bugby,Will 15 Bullock, Elizabeth 166 Burchfield, Charles 52, 54, 88 C Cabinet of Dr Caligari,The (film, 1919) 27 Campbell, J. F. 48, 167 Canfield Casino 57 Carcosa 144, 146, 148, 152, 154, 156, 168-169 Cardiff Giant 10, 12 Carmer, Carl 52 Carroll,Walter 154 Catholic Church 116 Cave, Hugh B. 10, 12, 148-149, 152, 154, 156, 169 Cazenovia Central School 36-37, 39 Cazenovia Republican newspaper 44

Cerf, Bennett 34 Cezanne, Paul 90, 94, 101 Chaney, Lon 18 Chapel Hill N.C. 144, 168 Chapman, Charles Shepard 23-24 Chenango Canal 124 Child, Charles 50 Chips & Shavings 36, 47, 130, 132, 146, 148, 169 Clark Music Company 46 Clark’s History of Onondaga 10 Cohen, Sol 138 Colgate University 122, 138, 142, 144, 169 Contes Drolatiques (Droll Tales) 48 Coopertown’s Farmer’s Museum 12 Cornwell, Dean 23 Corona Typewriter 18, 22, 144 Corona Typewriter Company 18, 22 Cortland N.Y. 11, 19, 30, 34-36, 38, 42 Cortland Bakery 42 Countryman Press 50, 167 Coye Tea Room 16-18, 34 Coye, George 11-12, 16, 29 Coye, Ida May 12, 26-27 Coye, Robert 46, 106 Coye, Ruth 20, 22, 24, 26-28, 30, 34, 42, 50, 52, 56-57, 60, 96, 103, 109-110, 116, 124, 126, 139, 144, 151, 154, 156 Coye,William 12, 15-18, 30 Creeps by Night 64 Crough, Patricia 94 Crystal Restaurant 102 Cthulhu 63, 129-130, 168 D Daniels, Les 152, 168 Davidson,Avram 128 Davis Digest 103 Davis, Bernard 64, 136 Davis, Stuart 44 De Camp, L. Sprague 63 de Chirico, Giorgio 102 de Kooning,Willem 44, 106 Death Stalks the Night 156, 169 Decameron 48 Demuth, Charles 45 Denny Sullivan and his Gang (tv show) 136

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Derleth,August 34, 63-64, 66, 68, 70, 79-80, 90, 92, 100, 127-128, 130, 132, 135-136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 152, 167-169 Desastres de la Guerra (Goya etchings) 88 Deutsch, Boris 93 “Devil and Daniel Webster,The” 50 Dewitt, N.Y. 72 Disney,Walt 35 Dix, Otto 68, 104 Dole Pineapple Company 45 Don Quixote 131 Doten, Dana 50, 167 Dr. Seuss 50 Drake, David 144, 146, 149-150

Dreiser,Theodore 50 Dreyfus,Victoria & Max 60 Druids 119 Duchamp 22 Dulac, Edmund 34 Dunn, Harvey 23-24 Dunwich Horror,The 130, 168 Dust to Dust (painting) 71, 93 Dying of Fright 152, 168 E Ecker, Dr.Arthur 94, 96, 98, 167 Edison,Thomas 84 Emshwiller, Ed 128 Erie Canal 10, 42, 44, 52, 72, 116 Expressionism 27, 106 F Fadiman, Clifton 50 Fantastic magazine 7, 64, 68, 104, 123, 127-132, 134, 136, 139, 141, 143, 151, 168 Fantasy Crossroads 168 Farrar & Rinehart 40, 50, 52, 64, 66 Fedogan & Bremer 156, 169 Fellows, Byron 28, 30, 60 Female Perineum,The (medical film) 98 Ferman, Edward 127-128 Finlay,Virgil 64, 79, 82, 84, 90, 92, 136, 158 Flack Advertising 28, 37, 42, 47-48, 60, 167 Flack, John Brooks 28, 30, 37, 45-47

Force, Julianna 54 Fort Lee, N.J. 24 Fort William Henry 140 fourth dimension (whitestructures) 101 Fowler,Albert & Helen 52, 54, 114, 167 Franklin Motor Company 45 Free Hand Perspective and Drawing 18 Frieda Crosby, (Freedie) 94-96, 102, 104, 111, 123 G Galaxy magazine 132 Gaslite Club 128 Gauguin, Paul 94 Gershwin, George 60 Gettysburg, PA 130 Ghost on the Knoll,The (watercolor) 52, 55 Gilchrist, Paul 20, 26, 34 Glinecki 60, 72, 100, 116, 122 Gnagy, Jon 116 Golden Gate International Exhibition 48, 56 Goldsmith, Cele 127-128, 130, 135 Good Housekeeping magazine 152 Gothics portfolio 144, 164 Goya 46, 88, 92 Grabhorn Press 34 Grand Central Art Gallery 60 Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural 64 Greenwich Village 24, 54 Grosz, George 68, 92, 94, 98, 109 Groton High School 20, 22 Guernica (Picasso painting) 93 H Hager, Robert 100, 102, 116, 142, 157 Halloween 72, 106 Hamilton Historical Commission 124 Hammett, Dashiell 64 Harris, Julie 154 Harryhausen, Ray 98 Hart, Leo 32, 34, 167 Hartman the “Hypno-Mentalist” 105 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 63 Hefner, Hugh 130 Hess, George 22 Hodgson,William Hope 144, 169 Hopper, Edward 8, 22, 35, 48, 52, 54 “horror box” 70, 72, 146, 150

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Hotel Syracuse 28 Howard Johnson 72 Howard, Robert E. 79-80, 146 Hull, George 12 Hunchback of Norte Dame (film, 1923) 18 I International Exhibition of Modern Art 22 Irving,Washington 54, 72, 74 Isis Unveiled (see Blavatsky) 84, 150 J Johnny Pye and The Fool-killer 31, 47, 50, 52-53, 169 Johnston, Robert 24-25, 36 K Kandinsky 22, 102 Kaplan, Leo 30, 32, 34, 167 Karloff, Boris 64 Keepsake Diamonds 28 Kennedy, John F. 135, 142 Kent, Rockwell 34, 45 Kirkville, N.Y. 116 Klee, Paul 86, 88, 102 Kline, Hibberd V. B. 46 Knickerbocker Holiday (film, 1944) 74 Knickerbocker’s History of NewYork 7172, 74-75, 77, 92, 169 Kodak Cine-camera 98 Krakusin,Alfred 122, 124 L Labonski, Michael 102 Lafayette Famous Artists Playhouse 106 LaGrone, Roy 128 Lane Advertising 56-57 Leonia School of Illustration 23-24 Lewis, Grace 104 Life magazine 44, 60 Lincklaen, John 8, 38 Loomis gang 10 lost wax technique 100 Lovecraft, H. P. 50, 52, 63-64, 66, 70, 79-80, 90, 92, 127-128, 130, 135136, 140, 145-146, 148, 152, 168 Lowell, Robert 138 Luce, Henry 35 Lugosi, Bela 105-106 lustmord 98

Lyendecker, J. C. 88 M Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 128, 130, 136 Magner, Eugene 138, 142 Manchester,Vermont 50 Mann's Brook 7, 34, 47, 102, 132, 149 Marsh, Reginald 54 Masereel, Frans 72 Masters, Edgar Lee 50 Matisse, Paul 22, 70, 94, 101 Mattingly, Paul 24

Mayer, John 156 McCormick, Howard 23-24, 26 McDowall, Roddy 128, 136 McGurty, Philip 120 Meggett,Arthur 132, 138, 150 Metropolitan Museum 54, 56-57, 60, 106, 108 Michel, Evelyn 82 Mid-York Weekly 130, 132 Miro, Joan 70 Mondrian, Piet 94 Montgomery Ward catalog 70 More, Hermon 93 Morrisville College 140, 169 Murgunstrumm 143, 151-157, 168 Museum of Modern Art 54, 116 N National Academy of Design 93 New Jersey State Museum at Trenton 24 New Vic Players 106, 109 New Worden Hotel 57 NewYork City 22-24, 27, 36, 4546, 50, 57, 60, 62, 64, 80, 88, 93, 122, 158 New York State Exhibition of Watercolor 60 NewYork World (newspaper) 24 NewYorker magazine 50, 72 Newcomb,Will 14, 16, 27-29, 138 Newell, Peter 23 Night Side 65, 77, 81, 87, 92, 95, 97, 99, 103, 117, 128, 139, 167 Normal Cerebral Angiogram 98, 167 North Pitcher, N.Y. 12, 16, 27, 48, 135, 138, 157 O O’Brian,Willis 98 O’Keeffe, Georgia 45, 93 Oakton Company 116 Office of War Information 62 Olmsted,Anna 36, 40, 42, 52, 54, 57, 102, 109 Onondaga Art Guild 102, 106 Onondaga Historical Association 116 Onondaga Pottery 42

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Orton,Vrest 50, 52, 54 outhouse 119-120 Oxford, Maryland 40 P P.M.’s sunday supplement (newspaper) 94 PM Production Manager (magazine) 48, 50 Pal, George 98 Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes 138 Palmer, Ray 64, 166 Paramount newsreel 62 Parker, Claire 98 Peacher, Dr.William 96 Pelican Ink 78 Pepsi-Cola “Paintings of the Year” 93 Picasso, Pablo 22, 58, 70, 93-94, 98, 101 Picker Gallery 142 Pieri, Dr. Raymond 98 Playboy Club 128 Playboy magazine 128 PM (production manager) magazine 9, 48 Poe, Edgar Allan 50, 63 Polk’s Business Directory 58 Pollock, Jackson 44, 82, 101, 106, 108 Post-Standard, Syracuse 36, 52, 54, 109, 116 Powers, Richard 128 Price, E. Hoffmann 88, 148, 168 Providence, Rhode Island 63, 152 Puppetoons (films) 98 PWAP 36, 38, 40, 42, 44 Pyle, Howard 24 R Rackham,Arthur 34 Rail City 117 Random House publishers 34, 64 regionalism 35, 44, 60, 106, 156 Reinhardt,Ad 94 Renoir,Auguste 101 Riehlman, Roy Walter 18 Rip Van Winkle 13 Ritalin 142, 144 Rivera, Diego 42, 52 Rivers of America series 50, 52 Robert Roberts 54, 132 Rockefeller Jr., John D. 42 Rockefeller Center 42, 66, 79 Rothko, Mark 106

Rubbermaid 124 S Saint Dennis 151, 154 Salinas N.Y. 10, 145 Saratoga Springs N.Y. 57-58 Sargent, John Singer 20 Saturday Evening Post,The 23-24, 50, 88 Schiff, Stuart 146, 148, 150, 168-169 Schlitten, Don 127-128, 136 School Executive magazine 166 Schrafft store 57 Schulz, Charles 22 Science Fiction Writers of America 138 Sculptura 122, 124, 126, 144 Scylla the Beautiful 13, 21, 43, 52, 54, 114, 167

Segar, Eizie 22 Seurat 94 Sherer,Adelaide 66 Shiel, M. P. 70 Short Stories magazine 80, 83, 86, 88, 90, 148, 167 Sime, Sidney 36 Sinbad the Sailor 34, 47, 169 Slayton Hotel (Tully, NY) 15-16 Sleep No More 63-68, 70, 75, 77, 79, 87, 95, 117, 123, 131, 151, 167 Sloan, John 22 Smith & Brothers Typewriter Company 12, 22 Smith & Wesson 12 Smith Premier Typewriter 12

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Smith,William 8, 38 Smith-Corona 22, 30, 45 Sorcerer’s Apprentice fanzine 156, 169 Southern Culture Institute at Blue Ridge 57 Soyer, Raphael & Moses 44 Spice magazine 9, 13, 19, 21, 25, 29, 41, 47, 59, 67, 71-72, 81, 83, 111, 113, 121, 125, 155, 167 Spitz,William 58 St. Joseph Hospital 96 Steinway piano 45 Steinweiss 48 Stelazine 142, 144 sticks 7, 31, 34, 47-48, 102, 119, 130, 132, 148149, 156 Suggestions for a Course of Instruction in Color 18 Syracuse China 42 Syracuse Herald 166 Syracuse Hospital 96 Syracuse Museum of Fine Art 36, 42, 46, 48, 52, 56-58, 94, 102, 106, 112, 114 Syracuse Psychiatric Hospital 109 Syracuse University 20, 22, 46, 96 T Ten-Dollar Gallery 46 The Art of Bundling 41, 47, 50, 52-53, 55, 167, 169 The Grumps (comic strip) 15 The Seventh Ogre 29, 31-34, 37, 47, 167 3-D construct 68, 98, 117, 120, 123, 148, 153 3 Tales of Horror 55, 121, 138-143, 145, 151, 168 Thurber, James 72 Ticonderoga Pulp & Paper Company 40 Time magazine 35, 106 Toadstood Wine (fanzine) 168 Toonerville Folks (comic strip) 15 Toronto Saturday Night 24 Treasure Island 15, 67, 72, 82, 128 Tully Times 15 Tully Valley 10, 110, 113 Tully, N.Y. 8, 10-13, 15-18, 110, 112114, 119, 145, 156 U

Ulrich, Gus Reverend 38, 60 Ultimate Publishing 138 Updike, John 119 V Vertical Composition No. 2 (painting) 105-106, 108 Vermeer 150 Vetter, John 127-128, 130, 132, 135, 139, 150 W Wagner, Karl 144, 146, 148-150, 152, 154, 156 Waldman, Emerson 50, 167 Wandrei, Donald 63 Ward, Lynd 27, 48, 70 Weinberg, Robert 84, 168

Weird Tales 13, 33, 63-64, 66, 68, 70, 75, 77, 7984, 86-92, 95, 97, 99-100, 102, 109, 113, 117, 121, 125, 127, 129-130, 132, 134, 139140, 144, 146-148, 150-151, 155, 157-168 Weirdisms 77, 81-82, 84, 87, 91, 107, 117, 150, 157 Wellman, Manly Wade 130, 144, 152, 154, 156, 168 Welty, Eudora 70 Wheeler,Willard C. 15 Whispers 146, 148, 150, 168-169 Whitestructures 33, 101-102, 108-109 Whitman,Walt 24, 167 Whitney annual 54, 94 Whitney Museum 36, 54, 57-58, 93 Who Fears the Devil 130, 168 Who Knocks? 59, 65, 70, 103, 167 Wilson, Gahan 148, 168 Winsor & Newton 78 Wolfe,Tom 158 Wollheim, Donald 127-128 Wood, Grant 44 Woollcott,Alexander 36 World Fantasy Award 152, 154, 168 Worse Things Waiting 139, 144, 146-151, 168 WPA 38, 44 Wright, Dick 116 WSYR 104, 136 Wyeth, N. C. 40 Wylie, Philip 66 Y, Z Yeats,W.B. 84 Ziff-Davis 64, 70, 127, 135-136, 168

Pages 173 & 176 – brush and ink on scratchboard, Knickerbocker (unpublished), ca. 1945; this page – scratchboard, Weird Tales, ca.1949; page 175 – ink on scratchboard, letterhead logo done for John Vetter, ca. 1963.

About the author Luis Ortiz has worked as a graphic designer, art director, editor, and computer graphics manager of a New York City advertising agency. In the early 1990s he was a member of the Slimy Babies writers' workshop (a group of professional fantasy, science fiction, and horror authors), which met in the homes of its various members. He lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife Karan and eight or nine turtles and tortoises.He can be reached at [email protected].

A graphic genius of phantasmagorical originality, LEE BROWN COYE's pictures are the visual expression not only of his own emotional turbulence, but also the turbulence of his times. The vast majority of his work, however,has been unavailable since its original publication.As a result, the full measure of Coye's contribution to illustration had never been widely appreciated. LEE BROWN COYE was born in 1907 in Syracuse, New York. His first artistic interest was in drawing and cartooning.After graduating from central New York State public schools, he moved to Leonia, New Jersey, to join the art colony there—but with the start of the Depression, he was forced to become an advertising agency art director. His bad timing continued when he quit the advertising field to work as a full-time artist just before the start of World War II.

The Life & Work of

LEE BROWN COYE

His luck changed when he began exhibiting at the Whitney Museum annual shows in New York City, and had a watercolor brought by the Metropolitan Museum for its permanent collection. Also, he was one of the famed artists connected to the original legendary magazine Weird Tales from 1945 to 1951. Arts Unknown is the first biography/ art book on this uniquely macabre and eccentric artist, and it will surprise those unaware of his fine art, non-genre book illustrations, cartoons, and sculpture credentials.Inside,there are more than 350 illustrations, including never-before-published art.

ISBN 1-933065-04-4 / $39.95 USA

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