Customer Reviews

Paint by Number: The How-To Craze that Swept the Nation

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a really neat-o! book.

It's a short book, beautifully illustrated with paint-by-number paintings on almost every page (including paintings completed by J. Edgar Hoover, Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman, and others). There are also lots of photos of advertisements, packaging and promotional displays used to sell the kits. The author discusses Max Klein & Dan Robbins, the men who started the paint-by-number "craze", and some of the other artists who worked on the kits. Despite heavy criticism from the art community, the kits were enormously popular in many countries.

I used to love doing these kits when I was a kid in the '60's and '70's. It may not be "art" but if nothing else I think people learn a little something about colors, shading and composition while working on these kits.

This is a beautifully-designed, lavishly illustrated, great-looking, smart book - every page a treat - that is part art book, part pop adventure story, part trenchant cultural history and analysis. Without the irony or condescension heretofore prevalent in discussions about the 1950s' remarkably popular and widespread middlebrow hobby of painting by number, William L. Bird, Jr., a curator at the Smithsonian, starts from the beginning and tells all.

Leonardo da Vinci seems to have thought of it first, as a way to teach painting. In 1952 (after considerable work in the lab and at the drawing board) mass culture combined with smart American commercialism to sell eager Americans first, the rest of the world later - this surprisingly controversial and intensely pleasurable hobby: paint by number. The paintings and their deeply satisfying means of production were denigrated by cultural critics - and loved by millions of regular folks - and Andy Warhol, too.

Students of popular and consumer culture and advertising, those curious about a popular phenomenon that provoked the critics of art and culture to attack relentlessly - or anyone interested in reading about the fun of these paintings and how they came to be - will love this perfect book. The author's mind is flexible and fertile; he takes us on a terrific tour. Clever and funny in places, with a bibliography hundreds of articles and books long. Great book.

William Bird Jr's Paint By Number traces the history of a movement which swept across the country and created many a budding novice artist. Chapters provide plenty of color photo examples of a changing industry which recognized an unfulfilled desire in the common man to be an artist. The gorgeous displays and ads for the medium are compelling, even for the non-artist reader.

Bird does a decent job summarizing this kitschy topic in a succinct manner. In a sense though the length of this book is its worst enemy. He could have either been even more brief and cut about 50% of it to focus on the main issues rather than repeating himself. Alternatively, he could have truly explored the characterization of the individuals behind the craze as well as probed the American psyche and increased the length by 50%. Straddling the middle, Paint By Numbers ends up being pleasant but vaguely dissatisfying.