Hal Foster on illustration vs. fine art

SABA...Do you see a difference, in your opinion, between the art of illustration and the gallery arts, do think that they are you very different in fact, or it's just a difference in terms of the way they're published?
FOSTER: Well, the fine art. It takes a lot of studies, awful lot of work to finally achieve it.
SABA: The same is true of illustration, though, isn't it?
FOSTER: Illustration, you mean book illustration?
SABA: Or your type of illustration. Just simply that illustration that's somehow looked on as lower-class than gallery art. I don't think it is, myself.
FOSTER: Well, it is, in a way, because I couldn't afford to draw a page every week, and have it called fine art. It'd take too much study, of architecture and costumes, foliage, fashions. All these things have to, that go into a gallery painting, would have to go into...

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FOSTER: A good painter can put so much feeling, so much atmosphere into his work that an illustrator can't. An illustrator must draw and color for reproduction, and right there, there's a line drawn. You have to use colors that the printer can imitate. They used to be able to, the plate-makers, they used to be artists. I have some proofs that are really masterpieces of their work, but they did every color and every tone and everything, and those are all gone out of business. They're too expensive. Now they have a reproduction system. I've been through a printing place where they print, or make the plates for cartoonists, and a bunch of girls there, with plates in front of them, and one woman, the superintendent, she goes around and marks certain colors, and certain half-colors and certain quarter-colors. Pretty good, but nothing like the old, of course, the old engraver.
SABA: It really would be nice to see the comics still treated the same way, wouldn't it?
FOSTER: Too expensive.
SABA: I guess so.
FOSTER: Everything has to be done cheaper.