Wallace Smith’s one hundred and thirty-fifth birthday snuck up on me. However, I couldn’t let it slide. Smith was too widely-talented, too much of a Renaissance Man—and much too forgotten today—for me to disregard the anniversary of his nativity. Wallace Smith was a reporter on foreign wars, a fiction author, a screenwriter and—most importantly for us—a graphic artist adept in wildly different styles. Since I’m short on time, I’ll be quoting heavily from this Alchetron article. I've rearranged the paragraphs somewhat.

Wallace [Smith] was one of the finest artists in the newspapers business and switched back and forth between cartooning and writing. He became Washington correspondent for the Chicago American at the age of 20, remaining with that newspaper for over a decade. According to the book The Madhouse on Madison Street, Smith was "one of the most colorful reporters who ever worked for the Hearst papers," and was born with the last name of Schmidt, which he changed to Smith during World War I.

He was sent to Mexico and did illustrated reporting on several campaigns of Pancho Villa against the Carranza regime. In 1920 he originated the “Wise Cracks by Joe Blow” comic panel feature for the Chicago American. In 1921-22 he was assigned to California to cover the Roscoe Arbuckle trials and the William Desmond Taylor murder case. The articles bylined by Smith (for the Chicago American) and Eddie Doherty (for the Chicago Tribune) were so inflammatory that Under-Sheriff Eugene W. Biscailuz, fearing for their safety, offered to provide them each with a bodyguard, but they both declined.

Returning to Chicago, Smith provided the illustrations for Ben Hecht's controversial novel, Fantazius Mallare: a Mysterious Oath, which resulted in a $1,000 fine for obscenity in U.S. District Court for both Hecht and Smith. A novel of decadence and mystic existentialism, Fantazius Mallare is a story of a mad recluse—a genius sculptor and painter who is at war with reason. Rather than commit suicide, his doting madness dictates that he must revolt against all evidence of life that exists outside himself. He destroys all of his work and then seeks out a woman who will devote herself to his Omnipotence. What follows is a glorious trek into a horrifying enlightening insanity.

Both the text and the artwork for Fantazius Mallare were very much in the Decadent mode. Ben Hecht and Wallace Smith were taken to court on obscenity charges.

Smith was said by Ronald Clyne to have gone to jail for the Mallare artwork, but apparently this was an exaggeration - [Smith] and Hecht were, however, fined $1000 each for "obscenity"; and $1000 was quite a lot of money in 1924. The particular points we should be curious about are where were the rest of the Wallace Smith artworks? He could hardly have developed that style in the handful of drawings that have been published; and what happened to the copies of Fantazius Mallare seized by the US government? The book did not seem to be as scarce as would have been expected if they had seized even half of the 2000-copy edition. MacAdams was able to answer this last question to some extent - after the obscenity conviction, the publisher made another 2000 copies and sold them `under the counter'.

Also during that period, Wallace worked on a play called The Purple Mask, about a masked vigilante/hero during the Mexican Revolution. For that production, he crafted several excellent design paintings.

During his assignments in Mexico, Smith closely observed the peasants for whom Pancho Villa waged war. In his 1923 book, The Little Tigress: Tales Out of the Dust of Mexico, he wrote sympathetically about their plight and brought them to life in his trademark stark black-and-white drawings. In the next few years Wallace wrote short stories published in a variety of magazines including Liberty, The American Magazine, and Blue Book Magazine.

At this time he also did illustrations for other books, designed book jackets, frontispieces and end papers. In 1923 he illustrated The Florentine Dagger by Ben Hecht, and frontispieces for Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim and The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen.

In 1924, (...) Wallace Smith asked for and received permission to gain access to the arena during the [Pendleton Round Up Association] rodeo for the purpose of making sketches of bucking horses. After three busy days working in the arena and sitting on the north arena fence, he came up with his answer to the thought of creating a bucking horse that would properly symbolize the round up's slogan, "LET 'ER BUCK". The life of that vivid frontispiece of his book, Oregon Sketches, had pleased the bronco-busters so much that they adopted it as the official poster of the annual Pendleton Round-Up.

And just like that, an iconic work of American art was born.

[Soon after all the uproar] Smith moved to Hollywood, embarking on a successful, decade-long, screenplay-writing career. His services were in high demand - he wrote or contributed to twenty-six screenplays, often enhancing them with detailed scene sketches. Smith's work included screen adaptations of his novels The Captain Hates the Sea and The Gay Desperado and also Two Arabian Knights, The Lost Squadron, Friends and Lovers.

He died of a heart attack in his home in Hollywood on January 31, 1937, and was survived by his wife, Echo Smith.

And just like that, barely forty-nine years old, Wallace Smith was gone. I titled this blog entry “Unbridled Talent” for a reason. Look at the two illustrations above of riders on (unbridled and dangerous) horses. Who among you would ever guess that the same artist created both images less than two years apart? I don’t know about his skills as a fictioneer—writing for Blue Book technically makes Smith a pulp writer, by the way—or if he was any good at screenplays. All I know is what I see, and what I see is a man whose muse was like a mustang or wild cayuse—or a nightmare—ignoring fences and running hither and yon.

Within the short period of about half a decade, Wallace Smith produced caricatures/cartoon art*, art in the Nouveau/Deco style of Harry Clarke and art somewhat akin to the Brandywine/N.C. Wyeth school—all of it world class. His work for Fantazius Mallare has been compared to that of Harry Clarke, who was almost exactly a contemporary. If Smith was imitating Clarke, he most likely only had a couple of years to learn how to do so. It could all come down to a mutual admiration for Aubrey Beardsley. As it is, I rank Smith right alongside the Irishman. Meanwhile, Wallace’s paintings of Mexico and the West compare well against almost anyone from the Brandywine school. Just look at the aptly-named “Decadent” art for Fantazius Mallare and then compare it to the powerful, masculine bronc-buster of “Let ‘Er Buck”. There are not just stylistic, but also spiritual, gulfs between the two…and Wallace Smith pulled off both triumphs.

*R.S. Sherriffs, another fan of Aubrey Beardsley and who created a phantasmagorical edition of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, also worked as a top-drawer political cartoonist for decades.