Dali House

As well as the great art that catches my fancy and the assorted curiosities of creativity that life tosses my way, Dali House is a shrine to my influences, and though he doesn’t appear in any books on art history, Jon Gnagy is one of them.
He taught me to draw, as he did millions of other kids who saw him on TV back in the ’50s and ’60s. Starting 60 years ago next month, he was, in fact, television’s first art instructor, a genuine pioneer.
A quick visit to Google turns up many, many pages about Gnagy. There are a couple of websites taking his name in vain to sell T-shirts and other junk, including JonGnagyBeard.com. Apparently the term “Jon Gnagy beard” is one of the catchphrases from the Howard Stern show.
But other than that, all the websites are full of fond reminiscences, including some dues paid by successful (though not exactly famous) contemporary artists like Steve Griffin and the cartoonist Steve Cadigan. I know that another artist who did achieve fame learned his craft from this same guy: “Jon Gnagy taught me to draw,” Andy Warhol said.
And on the chat board at Newarktalk.com I found his granddaughter Christine chipping in at the end of a discussion to say thanks for all the “heart-warming enthusiasm” shown there for her “Jonny Pop”.

“I BELIEVE that you have unexplored talent,” Gnagy famously intoned in the manuals that came with his learn-to-draw kits (which are still on sale today, by the way, 25 years after he died).
“My conviction grows stronger every year as I find thousands of people just like you searching to express something. If you have not made a professional career of art I’d like to talk to you all the more.”

Jon Gnagy was born in tiny, remote Pretty Prairie, Kansas, in 1907, the son of Hungarian-Swiss Mennonites. He started drawing at age of 11 – untaught, of course – and was soon winning prizes at the State Fair, earning a reputation as the “blacksmith” of art. By 17 he was art director of a small firm in Tulsa, producing posters that won national awards, then he studied aerodynamics in Wichita and helped design the first low-wing monoplane built in America while illustrating ads for Cessna, Stearman and Beechcraft.

Gnagy’s small oil painting “Corn”, from 1945.

During the Depression, Gnagy got his first artistic schoolin’: evening classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. Encouraged, he headed for New York, with a dollar in his pocket for each of his 24 years. The outlook was grim, but on his second day he landed one plump plum job: a string of ads for the Aluminum Company of America that would run in the Saturday Evening Post. His fellow starving artists called it sheer luck; he called it “ignorant nerve plus enthusiasm”, a phrase that stuck with him. He always considered enthusiasm, from the Greek for “god within you”, the most irresistible force in the world.
Gnagy worked for 18 years as an art director in Philadelphia, and during the war designed posters for factories – probably those “Loose lips sink ships” numbers – and trained volunteers for something called the National Camouflage Exhibit. This led to an ironic second career, lecturing college teachers, and that in turn to television.

On May 16, 1946 (give or take a couple of days – the exact date is disputed), “Radio City Matinee”, a show swiped from radio, became the very first television program transmitted from NBC’s brand-new, 61-foot antenna atop the Empire State Building, flung out to the 200 or so owners of TV sets within 80 miles. And Jon Gnagy’s segment, called “Draw With Me” – one of its several 10-minute variety bits – was the first on the air.
Maggie McNellis modelled funny hats, a Mrs Smith demonstrated flower arranging, an architect moved miniature furniture around a tabletop room, comedian Eddie Mayhoff told jokes, famous chef George Rector whipped up a treat, and Jon Gnagy began teaching America how to draw.
When Gnagy’s time was up, NBC founder David Sarnoff phoned to congratulate him, Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of the TV camera and picture tube, gave him a hearty handshake, and the floor manager coined a phrase when he said, “Jon, your show is pure television!” (though it’s hard to conceive what exactly that meant at the time).
The other presenters on the show came and went, but Jon Gnagy stayed there, on the air, for 14 years, hosting 700 live shows. He was never paid for the telecasts, instead earning a royalty from the art sets he promoted. More than 15 million of them have been sold.

On the first episode, Gnagy had his goatee and wore an artist’s smock and beret, the stereotype that stayed past dessert. He showed viewers step by step how to draw an old oak tree, his crayons melting under the studio lights and his chalk squeaking, but by the autumn, the smock and beret long gone, he was so popular that he got a show of his own: television’s first spin-off.
Gnagy’s granddaughter, Liz Seymour, set up a tribute site 10 years ago commemorating the 50th anniversary of the launch of her dad’s show.
“This artist,” she says, “was neither foreign nor elitist, no Jose Ferrer saying oo-la-la and wearing shoes on his knees as he roamed about the Moulin Rouge. This was a plain-speaking Midwesterner dressed in a plaid shirt and dark trousers. The format of his show was so simple – one character in a single, shallow set, and a minimum of camera angles – that it became a training ground for all the new directors, cameramen and sound technicians starting out in a burgeoning industry. Here was a show that was accessible to everyone, and it was called “You Are An Artist”.
“When it went out of syndication in 1970, it held the world record for the longest continuously running show on television. The formula was simple and irresistible: a man, an easel, a piece of charcoal and a sketch that was completed and framed in 15 minutes. At its height Gnagy’s show reached 60 million households, and his learn-to-draw kits reached even more.”
Not everyone loved him. In 1951 members of the Museum of Modern Art’s committee on art education complained in the New York Times that Gnagy’s “superficial tricks and formulas” were hampering “the creative and mental growth of children”.
“The principles my grandfather taught,” Liz Seymour writes, “were too basic to be called tricks. After all, the cube, the ball, the cone and the cylinder – the building blocks of every Thursday-night broadcast – were old news in Caravaggio’s day. What was new, and startling in its power, was the medium of television, which made those principles available on a scale never before seen in the history of art. The thousands of carefully shaded pumpkins, covered bridges and cocker spaniels taped up on refrigerators weren’t the products of stifled imaginations, they were shouts of amazement from people who had suddenly discovered, as Jon Gnagy said at the beginning of every show, ‘If you can draw these four simple forms, you can draw a real picture the first time you try’.”
Jon Gnagy died on March 7, 1981, in Idyllwild, California.