Tom Adams (illustrator)
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Tom Adams | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | December 9, 2019 | (aged 93)
Occupation | Illustrator |
Spouse |
Georgie Adams (m. 1972) |
Children | 5 |
Thomas Charles Renwick Adams (March 29, 1926 – December 9, 2019)[1][2] was a US-born Anglo-Scots illustrator and painter. Long active in a variety of visual formats, he is known for his work in book cover art, portrait painting, poster, advertising and album art. He is most widely known for his book cover art for the paperback editions of Agatha Christie.[3]
Family background and influence
Adams was born into a family of town and urban planners. His grandfather,
Early life and career
Adams served for two years in the navy (1944–1946). He then trained at the
In 1965, Adams joined his father, the late James W.R. Adams OBE, eminent town planner and landscape architect, who was planning and design consultant to the Poster Advertising Planning Committee, for whom he helped produce a book: Posters Look to the Future.
Creative activities
In the 1960s and 1970s he became involved with several distinguished poets, including
During this period, Adams met Virgil Pomfret and joined his artists' agency. Apart from a few gaps when pursuing other activities (like running art galleries), Adams remained with Pomfret for many years. With Pomfret's representation, Adams began a career as a book cover illustrator, most notably for the early John Fowles's novels The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman and the now famous paperback covers for Agatha Christie (Collins UK and Simon & Schuster USA). A book on these cover paintings, Tom Adams’ Agatha Christie Cover Story with commentary by Julian Symons and Introduction by John Fowles was published in 1981 by Dragons World.
He also designed several covers for Raymond Chandler.[5] Adams also provided the illustrations for the hardback editions of John Fowles' The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.[6] He also created the covers for Patrick White's The Vivisector,[7] David Storey's Saville. Ghost Story by Peter Straub[8] and Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun.[9]
Around this time, having completed a private commission to paint a portrait of
Tom Adams worked in films from time to time, mostly science fiction, including
The Agatha Christie paperback covers
Agatha Christie was no newcomer to the paperback format. Indeed, she was part of Allen Lane’s famous ten-book launch of Penguin Books. The success of Penguin Books in the UK and PocketBooks in the US—niche paperback publishers—in the years following WWII, inspired traditional publishers to produce paperbacks. By the early 60s, Collins decided it wanted to do something more artistically distinct with Christie’s paperback covers. Impressed with Adams’s cover for John Fowles’ The Collector, Collins engaged Adams.
He was commissioned to do a trial cover of A Murder Is Announced, which was published with his cover in 1962. Everyone involved was pleased with the outcome. As a result, Adams ended up doing covers for many of Christie's paperbacks, often more than once. The covers he primarily did not create art for were the pre-1926 books which Fontana did not have the publishing rights to. PocketBooks in the US very much wanted more realistic covers. For this reason, most of Adams's covers for the US editions feature a single dramatic or portentous scene from the novel than spans the front and rear covers. The two exceptions are "Nemesis" and "The Mystery of the Blue Train".[11] Fontana in the UK was much more open to Adams's creative input. Thus, the UK covers were often akin to a stylized tableau or surrealist collage. Adams ended up doing the covers for Agatha Christie paperbacks for twenty-eight years (1962-1980), thus becoming connected with her intimately in the minds of many readers.
Technique and style
Adams's book cover artwork, while usually instantly recognizable, runs to quite distinct modes. Some covers are still-life tableaux; some are depictions of a scene in the novel; some are surrealist collations of items and images. Organizing the vast majority of them, however, is Adams's unique exploration of a form that was vital for much of twentieth-century art: the collage.
Adams's unique take on this was to bring the collage back into the realm of the painterly. Seen in this light, even Adams's covers that seem like still lifes are, in actuality, juxtapositions of elements and objects that normally are not in such proximity. It is this uncanny proximity—despite (or, rather, precisely because of) the near photo-realistic accuracy—that creates the unsettling effect.
This element also goes to explain one of the most distinctive features of Adams's art: the combination of a sought-after realistic accuracy with an unsettling, surrealist, if not alienating, effect. As Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie's first biographer, put it, Adams's drawings are "alarmingly realistic."
Doctor Who
Adams' design for the
Awards and publications
Adams won various awards for illustration, notably the American Society of Illustrators, The American Art Directors Association, and The Design and Art Directors Association, UK. His work is in numerous private collections and he exhibited in London, Toronto, Tokyo, Dublin, Sydney, Marbella, and more recently in Exeter and Torquay, the setting for many of Agatha Christie's mysteries. He designed, printed and published his own limited editions.
Two monographs have been published on his work: Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story (published as Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes in the United States), Paper Tiger, 1981 and Tom Adams Uncovered, HarperCollins, 2015.
References
- TheGuardian.com. 3 February 2020.
- ^ "Tom Adams (1926-2019)". 17 December 2019.
- ISBN 0-89696-144-3.
- ^ O. W. Saarinen (24 March 2008). "Thomas Adams". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2 September 2019.
- ^ Scott Dutton (25 January 2009). "Raymond Chandler by Tom Adams". thewaterworks.ca. Archived from the original on 18 October 2009. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ^ Bob Goosmann (January 2004). "Collecting John Fowles". fowlesbooks.com. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ^ Ross Burnet. "A White Bibliography". burnetsbooks.com.au. Archived from the original on 20 August 2006. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ^ Rick Kleffel (18 March 2002). "Lonely Old Men". trashotron.com. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ^ "Colonel Sun (1968)". mi6-hq.com. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ^ Tom Adams Gallery
- ^ Morris, David (6 June 2019). "INSIGHTS: Collecting Tom Adams US Christie paperbacks". Collecting Christie. Retrieved 28 July 2021.