A tall, scholarly-looking gentleman stepped up to a ticket window in Grand Central Station and shoved a bill under the brass wicket. "Let me have a five-dollar ticket please." Surprised, the ticket agent looked up, asked, "Where to, sir?" "Oh, nowhere in particular-anywhere," came the astonishing reply. Other travelers awaiting their turn at the window craned their necks. The ticket man's eyes blinked, "Beg pardon, sir; afraid I didn't understand you. You wish a ticket for . . ." "I've got no special destination in mind," smiling patiently, "just anywhere five dollars will take me."

Ida Presti - Paris,1935 Credits: Guitar Review 31

The agent turned to his ticket rack, ran his hand dubiously over the pasteboards, faltered: "This is most unusual sir, if I understand you, I'm really at a loss, can't you. . ." The traveler interrupted. "Five dollars will take me to any number of interesting places. Just let me have any five-dollar ticket that comes first to mind and-please-there are other passengers waiting."

Bobri, unpredictable in his art, is original in his behavior which, contrary to the implication of the incident at the ticket window, is actuated by highly intelligent purpose. That ticket to "anywhere," for example, is a device to grasp the hand of fate, to be led into new and unpremeditated experiences. Arrived at his chance destination, Bobri will wander about, with or without his sketchbook, according to his mood, and in due time will return with something consciously or unconsciously added to the drawing account of an exceptional background.

So much for factual information. What can be learned of Bobri's creative processes? That can best be answered by saying that today's problem was solved yesterday, perhaps way back in those Constantinople days, or even in the gypsy wanderings in the Crimea. Putting it

Drawing by Bobri, Credits to Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson, Watson-Guptill Publications, Inc., 1946.

another way, he works from background to foreground. He asserts that often his approach to a design is as unpremeditated as the purchase of a ticket to "anywhere." Out of the subconscious-isn't that the same thing as background?-comes an idea. The pencil begins to play with it. The embryo grows. Memory, imagination and skilled hands are all at work. Can Matisse help, or Picasso-or Goya? I think we see him in one of our reproductions. Originality, after all, is a matter of fertility; fertility comes from soil that has been fertilized. Bobri draws upon the great out of the past: unhesitatingly borrows from Constantin Guys; the Persian miniaturists; also the classic Greeks, and thus avoids the limitations of an uninstructed imagination.

A good commercial artist is a fine artist in the marketplace. Such an artist is continuously replenishing his esthetic storehouse against the recurrent grind. Bobri spends hours at his easel; he does wood carving; he draws from the nude model; he sketches incessantly; he engages in cultural pursuits not directly related to graphic art but none the less inspiring as sources of design ideas.

Bobri's New York studio, naturally enough, is a busy place. He carries on his work with the assistance of two or three artists who, like himself, are Americans by adoption and who likewise have been trained with characteristic European thoroughness. Whatever comes from Bobri's studio is as meticulous in technical execution as it is original and effective in design. Behind it all is a canny sense of merchandising without which no amount of artistic genius is useful in the field of advertising art.

Background. Keep that in mind when studying the work of V. Bobri. Not the background of accidental environment-though that is a considerable factor-but the background of self-directed experience

Dionisio Aguado and Fernando Sor. Credits: Guitar Review 31

and culture. That background is an indistinguishable component of his creative genius. To arrive at some acquaintance with it let us turn to an excellent, though brief, biographical sketch by S. Yalkert, a friend of the artist, who outlines the prominent events in an unusual career. It gives more than a hint of an appetite for adventure which in the more tranquil environment of later years finds outlet in graphic innovations.

"Bobri," writes Mr. Yalkert, "was born Vladimir Bobritsky, in Kharkov, Ukraine. He was a pupil in the Kharkov Imperial Art School, where the curriculum was an admixture of penal servitude and antique exaltation. All professors were admired, respected. Students goose-stepped in uniform and were proud of it. All wore hair shirts for the Muse. In an atmosphere of self-flagellation and voluminous output those who could not pass were forever disgraced. Those who remained learned anatomy, the old masters, the moderns, manners, style, how to draw and how to argue.

"At seventeen he was already designing sets for the Great Dramatic Theatre (as distinguished from the Small) of Kharkov, and was one of the first to introduce Gordon Craig's methods.

"He fought during the Revolution in several armies, with and against. After the Revolution, came a long and enforced period of travel and a kind of montage of activity. As a refugee he traveled on a handmade passport, eight closely printed pages in Polish, so skillfully wrought that it left no doubt as to his talent and feeling for calligraphy, since it successfully passed the expert examination of the English, French, Italian and Greek consular authorities. With it he fled to Feodosia, thence to Constantinople. In the mountainous, peninsular Crimea he worked as a wine presser for the Tartar fruit and wine growers. Later he came in contact with Russian, Hungarian and Spanish gypsies, studied their lore, the pecularities of the different tribes; Having met with a band of gypsies in the Crimea he earned his way as a guitar player in their chorus. It is his long love for the guitar which makes him today a finished musician (secretary of the Society of the Classic Guitar) and composer (Danza En La, performed in New York's Town Hall in 1936).

"Wandering through the Greek islands he was hired to do ikon painting for a Greek monastery on the Island of Halki. In Asiatic Istanbul he painted signs. In Fera he played the piano in a nickelodeon, lectured on art-free lance, unknown to the museum's administration but to the complete satisfaction of button-holed tourists. In an abandoned Turkish mosque he made an important archaeological find, a Byzantine mural, which later was restored by the Turkish Government. It was in Constantinople that for two years he did the decors and costumes for the Ballet Russe of Constantinople in order to earn his passage to America.

"Through all those wanderings his knapsack always had a watercolor box, a drawing pad. The record was kept with constant sketching of people, stories, folklore, folk music and crafts. And there were always the museum and the gallery, the theatre and the cafe. Art school had not ended in Kharkov. It is this scenario which has yielded its many parts to the concentrated, contemporary field of design."

That is Bobri's background prior to his coming to New York. His experiences in America, if less dramatic, have been consistent with his flair for adventure. Soon after his arrival he was operating his own textile printing establishment. In 1925 he was called in by the art director of Wananiaker's in an experiment with modem advertising. His radically different newspaper layouts were more than the management could stomach and both artist and art director were dismissed. But Saks Fifth Avenue saw, admired and beckoned. Bobri here found enthusiasm for his innovations.

Bobri's more recent work is well-known to all whose interests embrace the field of commercial design. It is always prominent in the Annual of Advertising Art.