The Androgyny and the Ecstasy of Patrick Nagel
Masses of jet-black hair swept up into “Gibson Girl”-esque up-dos juxtaposed by flat expanses of ghostly white flesh, Patrick Nagel’s portraits are distinct and often-imitated. With the release of Duran Duran’s Rio album — for which he designed the cover — in 1982, Nagel’s portraiture became emblematic of the greatest elements of the aesthetic of the decade: crisp, lean, provocative. But what do Nagel’s prints say about him, his time, and the patrons of his work? Though clearly a trendsetter and technically skilled illustrator, whether his work transcends the current flood of eighties kitsch to the level of art is a question that can only be answered by contextualizing his prints in the discourse of design and art of his time.
Patrick Nagel was born in Dayon, Ohio in 1945. After serving as a paratrooper in Vietnam, he studied graphic design, receiving his BFA in 1969 after studying at both the Chouinard Art Institute and California State University, Fullerton. His career as an illustrator began to take off in about 1978, when he was commissioned to illustrate the cover of Tommy Jones’ album “In Touch”, which would serve as a prelude to his later commission by Duran Duran. His career peaked in the early 1980s, where his work was featured in many major magazines of his day (and ours). He died unexpectedly from a heart attack for an Aerobathon for the American Heart Association in 1984.
Though Nagel’s work is at times evocative of the Japonisme niche of the broader Art Nouveau movement, his work is decidedly Deco: instead of the gaiety and abandon that characterizes Nouveau masters, Nagel’s figures (at least those rendered later in his career) tend to be more emotionally- and structurally-reserved. Influenced by classic Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, his portraits are markedly asymmetrical and starkly composed. His prints are evocative of Eastern masters such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, and follows in the vein of Japanese-influenced Western artists such as James Whistler — who managed to reference Japanese textiles and sensibilities of composition even within the context of his famous portrait of his mother, now thought of as an essentially American work. Nagel’s work is even evocative of Mary Cassatt’s Japonisme detours, such as the meditative Woman Bathing. Elena G. Millie, curator of the poster collection at the Library of Congress, drew similarities of his work to that of other French Japonisme legends Pierre Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec in terms of visual contrast and composition in her foreward to the sole book published on Nagel’s work and legacy, “Nagel: The Art of Patrick Nagel”.
To date, critical commentary on Nagel’s work is limited, and his reception mixed. For the New York Times, former art critic for Newsweek Peter Plagens dismissed Nagel as a “nightclub ‘elegant’ poster artist…whose works decorate hairdressing salons and white-shag-carpet condos from Coral Gables to La Jolla.” However, another writer for Newsweek, Chris Kaye, recently defended his work, saying “Nagel’s work deserves more than the mall,” and that care needed to be taken of his artistic legacy. In a 2006 article for Design Week, graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy fondly recounted buying armfuls of derelict “lad mags” and cutting out illustrations by artists including Patrick Nagel, bemoaning the era when illustration and design began forging separate paths.
Other modern artists have also paid homage to his work: Barb Choit, an artist based in New York City who experiments with the processes of film and photography, appropriated Nagel’s illustrations for her debut solo show in New York, titled Nagel Fades. Inspired by their aforementioned washed-out omnipresence in salons throughout the United States, Choit’s work examined the mortality of art works. Poster artist Craig Drake’s figures — such as his stark, nearly-monochromatic rendering of Princess Leia Organa — have also drawn clear inspiration from Nagel’s sterile aesthetic. Ghosts of his sensibility have also found their way onto television, where his style was a major influence on the character designs used in Comedy Central’s new series Moonbeam City.
Despite the ubiquity of Nagel’s idealized “woman of the eighties,” there has been little critical scrutiny made to Nagel’s complex portrayal of his subjects’ gender representations. Though his coy, sexual imagery populated such lad’s mags as Playboy, he rendered his male subjects in a similarly-delicate fashion, whose hair styles flirted the line between the “Gibson Girl”/Shimada bundling and Ivy League-inspired “prep” cuts of the day. Similarly-androgynous were his portrayals of certain female subjects, such as the woman depicted in the untitled work generally referred to as Striped Pants: clad in a diagonal bee-stripe skirt, a topless woman with a tight haircut and stern stance glances back at us coolly through black aviators. Though widely perceived to have been a merchant of feminine ideals to lusty male readers, the posturing and style of his subjects of both genders points instead towards a common androgynous denominator.
Nagel was regarded by his publisher Karl Bornstein as an elegant, stylish eccentric who had great respect for women, a respect especially paradoxical in the face of his profession of rendering three-dimensional women in a mere two. Nagel purposively portrayed commanding women such as Joan Collins in his work with a majestic air, but was also quoted by Bornstein as saying: “I don’t think I want to know these women too well. They never come out in the sunlight. They just stay up late and smoke and drink a lot.” His daughter Carole confirmed her father loved strong women, stating his work captured a femininity in an age in which women were gaining more power. According to his friend and assistant Barry Haun, Nagel wanted to produce more male imagery, the little of which he had already been produced had been well received. Though a fair number of representations of the male form can be found in Nagel’s work, perhaps his work would have been scrutinized more critically if his wish had been granted.
Today, Nagel’s body of work can be spotted in a diverse assortment of locations: on covers of back issues of such periodicals as Playboy, Harper’s, Psychology Today and Architectural Digest, hanging on set walls in films such as The Watchmen or the cult classic Heathers, printed on numerous T-shirts, or on the runway (in the case of designer Kitty Boot’s runway collection from 1997). His base of patrons is just as diverse: the aforementioned Joan Collins (whom herself modeled for Nagel), and current head coach of the Green Bay Packers Mike McCarthy are counted among his collectors, as is Robert Miles Runyan, revolutionary of corporate communication design and creator of the iconic “Stars in Motion” logo for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, whom kept multiple serigraphs of Nagel’s in his own bedroom.
Looking back at Nagel’s legacy, we find an assemblage of finely-tuned works representing a nuanced, androgynous sexuality. For an artist whose work is so influential and beguiling, more people should not merely state what was about Nagel — to look beyond a mere demographic of his collectors to the content of the work itself. Then, surely, more critics of fine illustration will appreciate Nagel’s delicate art, inevitably wondering to themselves what more could have been? ■
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Frolick, Stuart I. “Runyan: The House That Design Built.” Graphis 43.(1987): 18. Art Source. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.
Nagel, Patrick. Nagel: The Art of Patrick Nagel. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1989. Print.
Patrick Nagel. (1984, Feb 10). New York Times. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.
Rozwadowski, Thomas. “Family Life, Green Bay a Good Fit.” Green Bay Press Gazette. Jun 29 2008. ProQuest. Web. 23 Sep. 2015 .
