 The Fadeaway Girl was the particular hallmark of COLES PHILLIPS (1880-1927). Phillips pictured fashionable young women, using the device of tying the figure into the background by either color, value or pattern. This approach produced an intriguing poster-like effect of great simplicity, yet it was based on the most careful preliminary planning of shapes to carry out the illusion of the full figure. The idea of the fade-away leaves the viewer to fill in the extra information toward completion of the picture. Fade-away also had the effect of placing beauty in the imagination. The filling-in of Phillips's flattened outlines meant the viewer was allowed to think and imagine, rather than simply to look. When Life Magazine began to use color on its covers in 1908, the Fadeaway Girl made her initial appearance and was an instant success. For many years thereafter she appeared in a variety of guises, but was always the patrician beauty. In April 1928, ten months after Phillips died, The Saturday Evening Post published "The Making of an Illustrator" by his widow, Teresa Hyde Phillips. Of the artist's inspiration Teresa wrote, 'His arrangements of the masses, small and large, were to him much more exciting than the color or the idea, or whether the girl was pretty. Pure design, in other words, was his real love, and the fact that he made his reputation as a painter of pretty girls was more an accident than anything else.'" Phillips prided himself on being a good businessman-artist. His pictures, both for magazine covers and for advertising compaigns such as Holeproof Hosiery and Palmolive, were the product of a meticulous, cerebral craftsman. When he was interviewed in 1915, he expressed his belief that "illustrating, whether of the commercial or highbrow kind, is profitable only when you do your best all the time." For Phillips, his "best" translated to a sophisticated style that helped change America's perception of beauty. |