Hannes Bok

Hannes Bok, pseudonym for Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964), was an American artist, as well as an amateur astrologer and writer of fantasy fiction and poetry. He painted nearly 150 covers for various science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction magazines, as well as contributing hundreds of black and white interior illustrations. Bok’s work graced the pages of calendars and early fanzines, as well as dust jackets from specialty book publishers like Arkham House, Shasta, and Fantasy Press. His paintings achieved a luminous quality through the use of an arduous glazing process, which was learned from his mentor, Maxfield Parrish. He was the first artist to win a Hugo Award.

Wayne Woodard was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1914, the third of four children born to Irving and Julia Woodard who had married at the age of seventeen. The eldest child died in infancy, the youngest when she was two. Julia had a nervous breakdown; she was thirty years old.

Young Wayne lived with his father after his parents split up but Irving discouraged his son from drawing and artwork. Wayne left home after high school graduation in Duluth, Minnesota in 1932 and re-located to Seattle where his mother and surviving brother lived. Wayne began submitting drawings to pulp magazines under the pseudonym Hannes Bok — a play on Johannes Bach.

These were tough times and Bok could not afford art materials. For a time he lived with some other artists near a dump and used whatever he could scavenge as a ground for his work. One surviving painting is done on a piece of metal torn off a wrecked car.

Bok hitchhiked across the country in the mid-30s and met his idol, Maxfield Parrish. Parrish recognized the young man’s talent and gave him oil paints and brushes. Back on the West Coast, Bok was befriended by a teen-aged Ray Bradbury who brought him into science fiction fandom. In 1939, when Bradbury attended the first fan convention in New York, he took along some of Bok’s work to show to publishers.

Frederik Pohl was among several editors who comissioned work from Bok and the artist soon moved to New York. From 1939 to his death in 1964, Bok turned out 150 magazine covers, 600 or so interior illustrations, and a number of book jackets. In 1953 he shared the first Hugo for science fiction art.

Bok’s color techniques were adopted from Maxfield Parrish: layers of transparent glazes separated by thin coats of varnish. It was a time-consuming method but it gave luminosity to his work.

Bok was not an easy man to know and alienated many people over his life. From about 1947 on, he became withdrawn and bitter and increasingly poor. Still, he remained a fixture in science-fiction illustration. As a young fan, Trina Robbins had a life mask made by Bok.

Frederik Pohl recalls a visit with Donald Wollheim to Bok’s apartment. He was put off by Bok’s personality and then horrified to realize that the man had no teeth, not even dentures:

“He’s been living mostly on cornflakes,” Donald told me. “He pours milk, or sometimes water, over them until they’re mush, and then he gums them down.”

“Jesus,” I said. “How long can he go on like that?” Donald just shook his head, but not very long after that I got a definitive answer. That was when we got the word that Hannes had died in his sleep.The death certificate said “heart failure,” but when I talked to Donald he didn’t believe it. He shook his head and said, “Starvation.”

Bok and the sci-fi writer Emil Petaja were life-long friends and shared an apartment in Los Angeles 1937-1938. Petaja founded the Bokanalia Foundation in 1967, three years after the artist’s death. According to a published statement, the foundation was set up “with the help and encouragement of Harold Taves of Seattle and Ray Bradbury of Los Angeles and the Golden Gate Futurians of San Francisco … . The avowed intention of Bokanalia is simply to keep the great imaginative art of Hannes Bok from slipping into oblivion, and to make new (better than pulp) prints available to his many admirers all over the world”. Between 1967 and 1970, Petaja published three portfolios of Bok’s art. Those portfolios include Variations on Bok Theme, (black & white portfolio, 1967); The Famous Power Series, (black & white portfolio, with text by Bok, 1969); and A Memorial Portfolio, (color portfolio, with booklet with text by Petaja, 1970).

Petaja also authored a commemorative volume, And Flights of Angels: The Life and Legend of Hannes Bok (Bokanalia Memorial Foundation, 1968). Along with brief contributions from Wollheim, Roger Zelazny, Jack Gaughan, and others, And Flights of Angels contains Petaja’s long biographical essay on the artist, a checklist of Bok’s published artwork and writings, and reproductions of a substantial number of drawings, prints and illustrations. Later, under the SISU imprint (and on behalf of the Bokanalia Foundation), Petaja published an illustrated volume of Bok’s poetry, Spinner of Silver and Thistle (1972), as well as editing The Hannes Bok Memorial Showcase of Fantasy Art (1974).

Sources:

• Bok, Hannes, and Petaja, Emil. And Flights of Angels: The Life and Legend of Hannes Bok. San Francisco: Bokanalia Memorial Foundation, 1968.
• De La Ree, Gerry, and Nigra, Gene, editors. A Hannes Bok Sketchbook. Saddle River, NJ: Gerry de la Ree, 1976.
• Petaja, Emil, editor. Hannes Bok A Memorial Portfolio. San Francisco: The Bokanalia Foundation, 1970.
• Petaja, Emil, editor. Variations on Bok Theme. San Francisco: The Bokanalia Foundation, 1967
• Pohl, Frederik. "Hannes Bok: Futurian Artist in Chief". The Way the Future Blogs. Retrieved 2013-04-11.
• Pohl, Frederik. "Hannes Bok, Part 2: The Story With The Unhappy Ending". The Way the Future Blogs. Retrieved 2013-04-11.
• Wrzos, Edward. Hannes Bok: A Life in Illustration. Lakewood, Colorado: Centipede Press, 2012.