Celebrating Cover Art with Princeton Connections

by Stuart Mitchner

When The Great Gatsby marks its centenary this year, Francis Cugat’s cover design should share the renown that has placed Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s novel at or near the top of The Modern Library’s list of the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century.

The visual excitement of Cugat’s Gatsby (1925) is a striking departure from the bland, dated covers of Fitzgerald’s previous novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). While the jacket image for his story collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), by fashionable magazine artist John Held Jr., creates a cute, cartoonish take on the Roaring Twenties, it appears faded and quaint next to Cugat’s vision, which transcends the period, occupying a realm of art all its own. On top of that, it’s likely that Cugat’s cover design actually influenced Fitzgerald’s visual conception of the crucial Valley of Ashes passage in Chapter Two, as implied in Fitzgerald’s 1924 letter asking his editor Max Perkins not to give anyone “that jacket you’re saving for me” because “I’ve written it into the book.”

The watchful despairing eyes in Cugat’s image evoke Gatsby’s inspiration, his love and his doom, Daisy Fay Buchanan, “whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs…. sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.” It isn’t just that Cugat has evoked one of the visions haunting the heart of the novel, he’s found a way to visualize Daisy as Gatsby imagines her — the “colossal vitality of his illusion” that “had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.”

Cugat’s Fee

For reading Fitzgerald’s mind (and Gatsby’s dream) with imagery true to the poetry that illuminates the novel, Scribner’s paid Cugat $100. Not much is known about the artist except that he was born in Barcelona in 1893, the older brother of bandleader Xavier Cugat; that in 1925 he moved to Hollywood, where he designed sets for Douglas Fairbanks movies like The Gaucho (1927); and that he was credited for technical contributions to 68 films, including Frank Borzage’s I’ve Always Loved You (1946) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man.

The original gouache artwork Cugat called Celestial Eyes belongs to Fitzgerald’s alma mater Princeton University, where it is preserved in Firestone Library’s Graphic Arts Collection.

Remembering Frank Stella

Any celebration of cover art with Princeton connections originating with Fitzgerald (Class of 1917, no degree) almost inevitably becomes a celebration of the graphic work of Princeton graduate Frank Stella (Class of 1958), who died last May. Stella walked the campus of Old Nassau 40 years after Fitzgerald, majored in history, played lacrosse, wrestled, and ventured into New York’s art world even before he graduated. In Mark Bernstein’s Princeton Alumni Weekly article from November 2006, Stella appears as “a short, wiry young man” sitting on a sofa “doodling” during a meeting of the Nassau Literary Magazine, to which Scott Fitzgerald contributed stories, reviews, and poetry during his time at Princeton. “Within 18 months” of Stella’s graduation, says Bernstein, “at a time in life when most of his classmates were sitting dully in law school classes or fumbling through their first jobs,” the Nassau Lit doodler “was one of the most important artists in the world, a comet who exploded abstract expressionism in a series of black, almost brutally minimalist paintings.” For art historian Robert Rosenblum, the Stella effect was to “close the door on what art could do.”

My trip through the “open doors” of numerous Frank Stella monographs began with Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (Princeton University Press 2018), with commentary by Mitra Abbaspour, Calvin Brown, and Erica Cooke. The book focuses on a period between 1984 and 1999 in Stella’s printmaking career when he accomplished four print series: the Had Gadya (a song traditionally sung at the end of the Passover Seder); Italian Folktales, compiled by Italo Calvino; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi.

A cover that particularly interested me displays Stella’s 1974 work Untitled (Concentral Square). The book is Lawrence Rubin’s Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, A Catalogue Raisonne (Stewart, Tabori & Chang 1986). Admittedly, I was still seeing the world in the afterglow of Cugat’s Gatsby, but it was hard not to relate Stella’s spectrum of abstract color forms — the dark blues, the greens and yellows — to Cugat’s cover, including the yellow in title letters, the glow at the bottom and even the red of the disembodied lips. Christie’s reports selling the painting on May 16, 2024 for $6,100,000, a cost even a first edition of The Great Gatsby, which has sold at auction for as much as $180,000, is unlikely ever to match. As of this writing, a dealer in Florida is asking $970,000.

Recent Arrivals

Two books distinguished by striking cover art, both with Princeton connections, have recently come to my attention: Martin Mittelmeier’s Naples 1925 (Yale University Press 2024), translated from the German by Princeton resident Shelley Frisch, and Reflections from a Vibrant Past: The Poetry of the Witherspoon-Jackson Community by the Rev. Gregory S. Smith (Arts Council of Princeton 2025), which is comprised of poems by Smith celebrating members of Princeton’s historic African American community, both past and present, including native son Paul Robeson. The complexity of the pastor’s mission is reflected in his son’s dramatic book cover art.

Of more interest in the context of Frank Stella is Jenny Volvoksi’s engaging cover for Naples 1925. According to Shelley Frisch, whose translation of Reiner Stach’s monumental three-volume biography of Franz Kafka has earned universal acclaim, the designer took inspiration from 1920s travel posters for Naples and southern Italy. While the bottom half is an abstract rendering of the shore of the Gulf of Naples, with Mt. Vesuvius in the background, the top half presents a deconstruction of the same geometric elements. No doubt I’m still under the spell of Cugat’s vision, but a strong breeze off the Gulf of Naples has just wafted those daylit geometric elements into a Neapolitan nocturnal abstraction of deep blues, bright yellows, and reds strangely like the night world of Celestial Eyes.

In case the colors suggest something lighter, Naples 1925 is a long way from Fitzgerald’s 1920s French Riviera. According to the publisher, “In the 1920s, the Gulf of Naples was a magnet for European intellectuals in search of places as yet untouched by modernity. Among the revolutionaries, artists, and thinkers drawn to Naples were numerous scholars at a formative stage in their journeys: Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Sohn‑Rethel, Asja Lacis, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others. While all were indelibly shaped by the volcanic Neapolitan landscape, it was Benjamin who first probed the relationship between the porous landscape and the local culture. But Adorno went further, transforming his surroundings into a radical new philosophy — one that became a turning point in the modern history of the discipline.”

Among numerous positive reviews, several offer hope for readers with travel in mind (“What a trip! Mittelmeier is the perfect philosophical travel guide”; “Equal parts travelogue and philosophical meditation.”) Frisch gets her share of notice for the “pellucid translation,” and author and translator are recognized by Dominic Green in the Wall Street Journal: “Well-written — and well-translated.”

Hemingway Weighs In

Fitzgerald’s friend and rival Ernest Hemingway had his own view of Cugat’s cover art. A picaresque chapter in Hemingway’s posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) ends as Fitzgerald presents him with a copy of The Great Gatsby. Besides finding the dust jacket “garish,” Hemingway remembers “being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste, and slippery look of it. It looked like the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction.” Fitzgerald told him “not to be put off by it, that it had something to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story.” Hemingway took the jacket off to read the book. As it turned out, he himself would soon be complaining about the classic-themed jacket art for his novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), both published by Scribner’s. Of the latter, with its Venus and Mars motif, he said, “I cannot admire the awful legs on that woman.”