Signet 755
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser

One of Avati's own 
favorites
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

After his marriage to Jane Hamill and the birth of their first child, Avati was called up for military service during World War II. He spent 3 1/2 years in the Army, serving as a radio operator in Belgium, Holland and elsewhere in Europe; in Biarritz, he gave art lessons for several months. 
When he returned to America, Avati settled in Red Bank, New Yersey and decided to go to work as a commercial artist. He did illustrations for magazines such as McCall’s, Collier’s and Ladies Home Journal, but soon found such assignments cliched and took a job as a carpenter instead.
In 1948, agent Seymour Thompson put Avati in touch with Kurt Enoch at the New American Library; the result was Avati’s first paperback cover: Signet 706, The Last of the Conquerors. Enoch and art director John Legakes were so impressed with Avati’s style that they assigned him to produce dozens of additional Signet covers, including new covers for new printings of books whose original covers had been illustrated by Robert Jonas. In 1949 and 1950, he also made several covers for art director Don Gelb at Bantam Books (such as Bantam 766, Jassy, in 1950). An Avati school of paperback art quickly sprang into being. Illustrators including Geoge Erickson, Mike Hooks, Cardiff, Stanley Meltzoff, Tom Dunn and Rudy Nappi all began to work in the dark Avati style. The flood of imitators finally became so heavy that Avati himself wound up developing a new and different approach to cover painting. 
At one point, Kurt Enoch offered him the position of art director at Signet, but Avati felt that would entail too much work and he turned Enoch down. He did, however, serve for a while as consulting art director. 
Many of the images on Avati’s covers came from the films he remembered seeing as a boy. He suggests today that this may be one reason why his work was so popular among members of his own generation, who shared his experience of those films. Looking back on this Signet period, his “Golden Age”, Avati tends to underestimate his own talent: he claims that his success was, rather, due to, a lucky combination of naivite, despair and ambition. 
He dreamt of becoming a fine artist, but felt that his technique was inadequate. Like many others, his intention was to use paperback work as a sort of art school. He painted from photographs which he took himself, originally hiring models from the Silver Studios in New York and later taking pictures of ordinary people, nonprofessionals. He even used himself as a model on occasion..
His paintings were done in oil on prepared hardboard. Finished works were generally sized about 90 cm x 120 cm (35”x 47”), with the head of the main figure roughly 6 cm (2 ½”) in diameter. A new world of stylistic possibilities opened up for Avati when, in 1962, he again did a cover for Bantam Books. Leonard Leone was art director at Bantam by tha time, and he encouraged Avati to stop doing fully–detailed paintings and to concentrate only on essentials. A man and a woman, a chair, the corner of a bed; those were the important elements, and the rest of the cover could remain white or could be used for lettering. 
Reproduction and printing techniques were more advanced at Bantam, and this too was an attraction; after more than a dozen years at Signet, Avati now began working regularly for Bantam. He continued working for Leone through the ‘60s, and was also able to provide covers for art director Barbara Bertoli at Avon Books.
Today, his cover paintings are done primarely for Dell and Avon.
His favorite covers are those he did for The Farm (Signet D1260), An American Tragedy (Signet 755) and The Woman of Rome (Signet S844).

(from The Book of Paperbacks by Piet Schreuders, Virgin Books,1981)
 

Signet S 844
The Woman of Rome
by Alberto Moravia

A book as dark and brooding 
as the cover suggests