VISUAL ART
Illustrator famous for his pointed political cartoons
Robert Grossman, a prolific and outlandish illustrator who made President Richard M Nixon into Pinocchio, put President George W Bush in a dunce cap and tied a jet in a knot for the Airplane! movie poster, died last Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
His son Alex Emanuel Grossman said he was found dead Friday morning but is believed to have died of heart failure the night before.
On magazine covers and in newspaper pages, Grossman chronicled and caricatured a half-century’s worth of politicians, pop-culture figures and social issues. He had a knack for causing a stir with his colourful images, whether they be one-shot covers for magazines like Rolling Stone and Time or serial comic strips for the New York Observer or New York magazine.
Although he created plenty of nonpolitical work his most memorable efforts often involvedskeweringpoliticians.
A 1972 gatefold cover for National Lampoon depicted Nixon with a very long nose, one that seemed to run off the page; when the foldout was opened, the rest of the nose appeared, and on the end of it was perched a tiny Henry Kissinger,depictedasjiminycricket. For a 2006 Rolling Stone cover, he put Bush on a stool in a corner wearing a dunce cap.
Grossman also drew President Ronald Reagan in Mickey Mouse ears and Bill and Hillary Clinton in a Stone Age serial called The Klintstones.
In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, he was asked about the complaint that caricatures of presidents and candidates were undignified. “Undignified?” he said. “Virtually anything has more dignity than lying and blundering before the whole stupefied world, which seems to be the politician’s eternal role.”
Robert Samuel Grossman was born on 1 March, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Joseph, owned a silk-screen printing shop, and his mother, was a homemaker and the shop’s bookkeeper.
He graduated from Midwood High School in Brooklyn and received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale in 1961.
While at Yale he edited the humour magazine The Yale Record, creating a parody issue of the New Yorker and drawing its spot-on 0 Grossman’s poster for the hit comedy Airplane! cover, which had the magazine’s name as the Yew Norker. Apparently the real New Yorker did not take offence, because his first job out of college was as an assistant to the magazine’s art editor.
Grossman, though, spent virtually all of his career as a freelance illustrator, and he was hired a lot. He drew more than 500 magazine covers.
Steven Heller, a former art director at the Times and now the co-chairman of the MFA design department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, said Grossman was one who found the 1960s and beyond to be fertile ground. Grossman, he said, gave his work a distinctive look.
“Grossman kind of redefined the genre of caricature byintroducingtheairbrushas a tool,” Heller said. “He gave it a kind of sculptural but at the same time comic form. And at the same time he also captured likenesses with brilliant precision and great wit.”
Grossman, whose mentors included Harvey Kurtzman of Mad magazine, found a nice niche in the early 1970s when New York magazine gave him a regular space to fill under its weekly politics column. “It was Watergate time and there was much talk about bugs and bugging,” he recalled in an interview in 2012. “I drew someinsectsnamedhaldebug and Ehrlichbug serving their master, the terrifying Richard M Nightcrawler.”
During the early days of the 2008 presidential campaign, he would reach back to the very beginning of his career for an inspiration. In the early 1960s he had drawn a black superhero named Captain Melanin.
“It was the civil rights era,” he said. “Suddenly in early 2007 there was Barack Obama, whose extraordinary poise and charisma seemed to be inspiring messianic hopes in a portion of the population. So it wasn’t hard to imagine for him a secret identity with the ability to fly and to lead stranded whales to safety by walking on water.”
He created O-man, who lived in O-manland and went up against characters like Milt Rhomboid and Rich Gingnewt. He said it wasn’t hard to imagine for him a secret identity with the ability to fly and to lead stranded whales to safety by walking on water. O-man’s adventures appeared in The New York Observer, then in The Nation, then on a website Grossman created to continue them.
But his best-known work might well have been the poster he created for Airplane!, the 1980 disaster-movie parody that became a box-office hit.
He also drew the occasional book and album cover and made animated commercials.
Grossman’s first marriage, to Donna Lundvall ended in divorce in 1980. His second marriage, to Vicki Anne Morgan, ended in divorce in 1987. In addition to his son Alex, his survivors include his partner of 24 years, Elaine Louie; another son, two daughters, two brothers and five grandchildren.
In a 2008 interview, Grossman explained why, of the various jobs that fit under the big tent of journalism, he preferred illustrator. “Reporters labour under the terrible requirement that what they report must be true,” he said.
“Opinion writers need to endure the less stringent demand that what they opine be at least plausible. Nobody ever expects what cartoonists do to be either true or even plausible. That’s why we’re all as happy as larks.” Newyorktimes2018.distributed by NYT Syndication Service.
“Grossman redefined the genre of caricature by introducing the airbrush…he gave it a kind of sculptural but comic form, and captured likenesses with precision and great wit”