Boris Artzybasheff’s Myths of the World

Boris Artzybasheff’s art was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of American cartoonists who were delighted by his illustrations of anthropomorphic machinery and other technological artefacts. These were the illustrations which made Artzybasheff popular with advertisers and the commissioners of magazine covers in the 1940s and 50s, and their continued popularity today has tended to overshadow his earlier book illustrations, in the same way that W. Heath Robinson’s drawings of improbable inventions overshadow his own illustrated books. Anthropomorphic machines were still in Artzybasheff’s future when he produced twenty wood engravings for Orpheus: Myths of the World in 1930, one of several books by Padraic Colum which retell mythological stories. In the introduction Colum explains why he named a book about world mythology after a Greek icon: I have called the collection “Orpheus,” naming it after the minstrel who, according to the poet of the Argonautica, sang “how the earth,…