Avati Art: Writing the Book on Illustration

The artist may no longer be here, but his heart and soul are still vibrant and immortalized in his work and the people with whom he connected through it.

That spirit lived on at The Monmouth Museum, on the Brookdale Community College Campus, Lincroft, on Friday night when many people turned out to see the posthumous showing of more than 65 paintings, photographs, book jackets and a video of the late artist/illustrator James Avati.

Many locals, who were models for the paintings that became the cover art for many highly regarded and classic books, showed up as well as many of his nine children, most of whom are spread out across the country.  Only one, Sally Avati, still lives in Red Bank where she grew up.

Her father, the showing artist Jim Avati, grew up in Little Silver and lived in Red Bank until the late 1980s, when he moved to California and passed away in 2005 at the ripe old age of 92.

Avati was a well-respected, intelligent and openly friendly local artist who had many friends and acquaintances in the area, so the exhibition room was abuzz with the continuous exclamations of people who recognized themselves or acquaintances in the realistic depictions of characters in the novels.

One woman, who came to the exhibit with her two young granddaughters, rushed up to a painting of a young girl in a long dress and said, "Look, that was me then. Now I’m here with my grandchildren."

Sally Avati said that many people came up to her at the show to point out that they were models for her father. "The woman with the grandchildren had been our neighbor when I was about four years-old," she said. "The painting that she was pointing to was for a book called The Inquisitor’s House. She was in two or three of his paintings."

Many famous and not so famous authors may have written the books that Avati depicted in his cover art, but he wrote the book on the art of paperback book covers. In fact, there is a book on his work and his life by Piet Schreuders and Kenneth Fulton called The Paperback Art of James Avati. A copy of the book is on display, and for sale, at the Monmouth Museum gift shop.

Avati was a master of the form and was instrumental in changing the art on paperback book covers from a more abstract style to a more realistic one. During the 1950s and into the 1960s an “Avati School” of cover artists developed. Stanley Meltzoff, a family friend and colleague of Avati’s, was one of them.

But, Avati was the one who was consistently asked to create the covers for New American Libraries' best authors. They included C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and J. D. Salinger’s, Catcher in the Rye as well as many books by Pearl S. Buck, to name a few. Many of those covers were on display in a case at the exhibition.

According to the book about him, Avati painted a total of 27 covers for works by Pearl S. Buck. Ten of the cover paintings are featured in the exhibition including The Good Earth, Come my Beloved, Letters from Peking, and A Chinese Garden.

The authors relate that Avati's painting for the cover of The Good Earth was instrumental in this book becoming an immediate bestseller. He developed an identifying design format for this series consisting of a circle theme against a white background. Those paintings are on display on the far wall near the ramp.

Avati’s collection of paintings was left to the family estate and were stored by his friend Meltzoff in Fair Haven. After Meltzoff died, his wife Diane moved to California where she died about four years ago.

"There were hundreds of paintings and we had to get them out of their building," Sally Avati said. "Since I was the only one living locally, we brought them to my house, but first we had to build bins to store them in."

The artist’s daughter said that her father was always working and created a large body of work, but he occasionally sold paintings along the way to help support his ever growing family, "Sometimes he would give them away, to the author or to the publishers."

Occasionally she hears of a painting coming up at auction. She said she recently heard that a cover for Catcher in the Rye sold for $24,000. On the other hand, she said, one recently sold for $1,800. "I think it matters who wrote the book," she noted.

Sally remembers that her dad’s paintings were hung all over the house: "I grew up with them and didn’t think much about them. Some of them were large because he did wraparound covers that covered the front and back of a book. It was just my dad’s job."

She added that she remembers him reading the books, making sketches, hiring the models and taking photographs. In the meantime, he had to get approvals from the publisher and the author for every step along the way.

Elaine Macina, an Eatontown resident, said she knew Avati in the early 1980s. She had not modeled for him, but she did visit his studio where he was working on a painting for a book jacket.

He showed her the photographs that he shot with models in the costumes of the period the book was written about. Then he showed the painting he was working on that day.

"I was amazed because he was making the clothing in the photograph look so much prettier than it really was, especially the elaborate dress on the woman," Macina said. 'It was kind of seedy in the photo, but vivid in the painting."

When the paintings came into the family’s hands, they had to catalog them and get an appraisal, which they did. They decided to try and sell some of them.

"My dad had a large family and now there are many grandchildren some of them are getting close to college age," Sally said. "This is what my dad did all of the time. He sold a lot.”

Sally, along with her sister Jennifer who lives in California, eventually contacted the Monmouth Museum and asked if they would be interested in an exhibition of her dad’s work. When they agreed, the hard work began.

First the family had to decide on how many and which ones to include. Most of them had to be framed and made ready for hanging. Then they had to put on their curator hats and figure out how to hang them. They chose a chronological order because Avati worked through many decades.

Sally said they sold one of the paintings within the first half hour of the show. It was cover art for a book from the 1950s called Alien Land. There was also a bid on a second painting. She said that some, like The Good Earth are priced at between $15,000 to $16,000, some are priced at $3,200 and others at $1,500.

During the show, people kept approaching Sally and telling her that her father’s work should be exhibited in New York City. Who knows, maybe that’s where it will go next.

The Painting World of Jim Avati will be at the Monmouth Museum through Sept. 4.

For information, please call the museum at 732-747-2266.