The Arts & Culture Journal

Frances Webster has illustrated a fine selection of images based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece The Great Gatsby. These illustrations display a wonderful transformation of ideas, which have been enticed from the printed word and translated through Frances’ busy and experimental style.

The book, published in 1925 during alcohol prohibition and the pre-Depression boom years, is a critique on the American Dream. The story is narrated from the point-of-view of bond salesman Nick Carraway as he finds himself embroiled in high society, in West Egg, near New York. Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire who the story revolves around, comes to signify the great dichotomies of the age, as his wealth is revealed to have been gained through bootlegging.

Frances’ illustrations beautifully work the aesthetics of the age. By employing black and white she captures the classic motifs of tall, period New York buildings yet simultaneously moves away from the clinical structure that so often categorised them. The collage technique mirrors the way that the story unfolds for Nick Carraway and it embraces the flighty, affluence of the high society through rich imagery. And the Juxtaposition of flags and typeface styles, for example, really pin the illustrations historically.

However, it is the human form, with its curves and layers, which break open the illustrations. Faces are facades, which hide fears and terrible truths and Frances quite literally portrays this in her collage style. Like the character Daisy Buchanan, whose past shares a chequered history with Gatsby himself, the eyes of the faces are broken open on different layers; revelations and emotion revealed.