Step into the Gatsby-esque splendor crafted by Milan’s Balbusso Twins, Anna and Elena, whose illustrious images in Beehive Books’ luxury edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald shimmer with glamour and avant-garde flair. Each Platinum-winning image is a story, told with the flourish of an illustrator’s pen and the boldness of a modernist’s vision.
By: Anna and Elena Balbusso
When we were contacted by Josh O’Neill of Beehive Books to illustrate The Great Gatsby, we immediately felt at ease. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece gave us the opportunity to look at artists and artistic movements that have long inspired us: the painters of the historical avant-gardes (futurism, cubism) as the Italian painters Giacomo Balla and Mario Sironi and the American painter Lyonel Feininger. Illustrating a novel is like making a film; we must imagine its characters, environments, costumes, sets, lights, colors, feelings, emotions, and passions.
We wanted our illustrations to conjure the energy of the Roaring Twenties but with a contemporary interpretation. In all our work, two souls coexist, one pictorial artistic and one graphic design, because our training is multidisciplinary.
We chose to mix abstract, geometric shapes with figurative elements to create an elegant and sophisticated feel inspired by Art Deco and Bauhaus, striking the balance between the illustrative and decorative through plays of patterns and lines. The style we rendered the characters draws influence from Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings, early twentieth-century fashion illustration, and classical Hollywood’s black-and-white films. The portraits of Gatsby and Daisy were inspired by the actors Robert Redford and Mia Farrow from the 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, directed by Jack Clayton.
