The Caricature Art of Robert Grossman

Illustrator, sculptor, comics artist, animator Robert Grossman has had an astounding career spanning the last 60 years. To say he's the greatest airbrush artist/caricaturist of all time isn't hyperbole, it's an understatement. Picking just a few samples from his incredible body of work is a near impossible task (he's created over 500 magazine covers alone!), but I'm presenting some of my favorites. If anyone deserves to have a career retrospective/anthology it's Bob Grossman. Check out these beautifully rendered, consistently brilliant and memorable illustrations, most chosen from the 60's-80's. As Steven Heller wrote: "his mordant wit is never duplicated".

Bob has continued turning out wonderful  drawings and comic strips regularly for, among others, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and the NY Observer where I was been proud to have alternated with him, Victor Juhasz and Philip Burke as a regular cover artist for 20 years (1994-2014).

Robert Grossman passed away in his sleep in March 2018 at age 78.
  
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robert-grossman-illustrator-who-caricatured-presidents-and-designed-airplane-poster-dies-at-78/2018/03/20/19b8209c-2c4c-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html?
utm_term=.faf9f9cbce98

my thanks to Stephen Kroninger, John Wendler, Peter Kuper, Steven Heller, Jim Engel & Ed Edo Dennis

Robert Grossman was the editor of The Yale Record, and created this parody cover
of The New Yorker

Grossman cartoon from the Yale Record, reprinted in harvey Kurtzman's HELP!
magazine

art by RG for MONOCLE (1963)

comic strip for MONOCLE

First cover for TIME: Curtis LeMay/George Wallace/1968

From EYE magazine/1967
http://drewfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/05/rock-pile.html

LBJ channels "Punch"

Mick Jagger

Ronald Reagan/Rodant

John Lindsay

Tom Jones

Howard Hughes

Alexis Smith

Mr. Spock

Chrysler chairman Lynn Townsend (Esquire)

Poster art for the "1970 Senators for Peace and New Priorities" Rally at Madison Square Garden held on March 12, 1970.  

various drawings for The Realist...

Tricia Nixon

Sammy Davis, Jr/Richard Nixon

early seventies NBC TV stars

From the Beatles Illustrated Lyrics book
Back in the USSR

Joe Namath

Hugh Hefner

From AUDIENCE magazine, the evolultion of a Playboy Bunny...

 A 1972 Chicago Sun-Times supplement.  The Marx bros are depicted playing "Pinchy-Winchy"-a game they played where you pinched the cheek of the guy next to you as described in the article, (right after mentioning singing "PEASY WEASY")

Groucho

William Burroughs

Dean Memminger

Milton Berle

George McGovern/Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon/Charles Colson

Nixon & Kennedy

Henry Kissinger

Dick Clark

J. Edgar Hoover

Jimmy Connors

Bobby Riggs

Joe Frazier

Co-author of "Candy" Mason Hoffenberg

Colonel Sanders

Agent Sam Cohn

Jerry Garcia

http://drewfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/11/robert-grossman-mad-covers.html

John Denver

John Entwistle & Ringo Starr

Gerald Ford

Ford and Kissinger

at the NY Democratic convention, 1976 (New York mag)

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter/Gerald Ford

Carter/Brezhnev

Jimmy Carter

poster art by Robert Grossman

Children's Book Cover

Joe Paterno

Clark Gable

Marlene Dietrich

Laurel & Hardy

Various Grossman ads...

Earl Scruggs

Julia Child

unused poster art for "The Wanderers"

Steven Spielberg/ET

Jerry Lewis

George Burns

Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown

agent Sue Mengers

Cary Grant

John Lee Hooker

Elvis button

Barbra Striesand

Sigmund Freud on the Tonight Show

1978 poster art by RG

poster art by Bob Grossman

cover art for Donald Westlake novel

Ed Koch

Jackie Gleason/Art Carney

Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart

Monica Lewinsky

Robert A. Heinlein

George W. Bush

Barack Obama

Mitt Romney

"Celebrating Kurtzman" Panel Discussion 3/19

portrait of
Harvey Kurtzman 

On March 19th, New York's Society of Illustrators (128 E. 63rd St) will host a two hour panel discussion and graphic presentation in conjunction with the upcoming Harvey Kurtzman retrospective (opening 3/9 and curated by Monte Beauchamp and Denis Kitchen) "CELEBRATING KURTZMAN" with graphic humorists Drew Friedman, Robert Grossman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, and moderated by Peter Kuper:

All about "The Art of Harvey Kurtzman" show:
http://www.societyillustrators.org/The-Museum/2013/Harvey-Kurtzman/The-Art-of-Harvey-Kurtzman.aspx

the rough cover art for MAD # 1 by Kurtzman
will be on display at the show

Space is limited for the panel discussion, so if you plan to attend, it would be smart to purchase your tickets ahead of time.

Celebrating Kurtzman A panel discussion with Drew Friedman, Robert Grossman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and moderated by Peter Kuper

	March 19, 2013  6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
	Legendary artists Drew Friedman, Robert Grossman, Al Jaffee, and Arnold Roth will discuss the life and works of Harvey Kurtzman with a panel moderated by Peter Kuper.   Tickets $15 non-members, $10 members, $7 students/seniors Click here to purchase ABOUT THE ARTISTS Drew Friedman is an award-winning illustrator whose work regularly appears in dozens of major publications.  For years he was renowned for his "stippling" style of caricature, employing thousands of pen-marks to achieve photographic verisimilitude, but in recent years Friedman has switched to painting.  His painstaking attention to detail and parodies of Hollywood icons is widely admired.  Friedman's work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Observer, Esquire, RAW, BLAB!, Rolling Stone, and MAD Magazine.  He is a graduate of SVA and studied under such legendary masters as Will Eisner, Ed Sorel, Stan Mack, Arnold Roth, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman.   Robert Grossman is a New York artist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone and many other publications.  Grossman also works as a sculptor, filmmaker, and author and has published numerous titles including ZooNooz and O-MANLAND, an online compilation of strips focusing on the 2008 presidential race.   Al Jaffee is best known for his satirical work in MAD Magazine, and today remains a regular contributor having only ever missed one issue of MAD in the last 57 years. Jaffee's trademark feature, the Mad Fold-in, was created in 1964 and a four-volume boxed set of hardcovers,The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010, was published by Chronicle Books in September 2011.  In 2008 Jaffee was honored by the Reuben Awards as Cartoonist of the Year. He has also received the National Cartoonists Society Advertising and Illustration Award in 1972, its Special Features Award in 1971 and 1975, and its Humor Comic Book Award in 1979.  Arnold Roth has been a humorous illustrator and cartoonist all his life and, for most of that time, has freelanced, snatching a living by hustling one assignment after another in a highly competitive market.  Roth's big breakthrough came in 1957 when he started working onTrump, Playboy's satiric magazine, and on Humbug, a more penurious production, both the inventions of Harvey Kurtzman.  His work has appeared regularly in major magazines including Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Holiday, Time, The New York Times, The New Yorkerand countless others.  In 1983, Roth was elected president of the National Cartoonists Society and the next year received the NCS Reuben Award as Cartoonist of the Year.     Peter Kuper's illustrations and comics appear regularly in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and MAD, where he illustrates SPY vs. SPY every month.  He has written and illustrated many books including Comics Trips, a journal of an eight-month trip through Africa and Southeast Asia.  In 1979 he co-founded the political comix magazine World War 3 Illustrated. More info about the panel: http://www.societyillustrators.org/Events-and-Programs/Lectures/2013/Celebrating-Kurtzman/Celebrating-Kurtzman.aspx This was my 2012 Harvey Kurtzman memoir for THE COMICS JOURNAL: "SERIOUSLY FUNNY": http://www.tcj.com/seriously-funny/

Aunt Bee, or Not Aunt Bee?

Gloria Dehaven

A photo has circulated on various "when they were young" and "urban legends" sites with the claim that it's a young, hot and pouty "Francis Bavier", aka "Aunt Bea" of The Andy Griffith Show. The caption claims the photo is from "around 1936", but It's actually a publicity still of actress Gloria DeHaven from 1949 for the film Yes Sir, That's My Baby which co-starred Donald O'Connor.

Dehaven, born in 1925 was 24 when the photo was taken. Frances Bavier, born in 1902, would have been 47 in 1949 and never posed for any "Cheesecake" photos. When she was younger she was a Broadway stage actress:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Bavier

 Another clue that the claim is bogus: the real spelling of Bavier's first
name is "Frances", not "Francis", and her beloved character's name on
the show was spelled Bee, not Bea, (a common mistake), as captioned
with the photo:

Francis Bavier – better known as Aunt Bea on the Andy Griffith Show.
(Photo taken around 1936)

 Some publicity photos of Gloria DeHaven from Yes Sir, That's My Baby:

.

a scene with Donald O'Connor

and the film's poster (featuring BOOPKINS):

 Here's a photo of the younger Frances Bavier...

and another:

If you are looking for Aunt Bee posed in a sexy two-piece bathing
 suit, you've come to the right place:

my portrait of "TV Babe" Aunt Bee, originally
 published in TV GUIDE

Thanks to Richard Samson

Portrait of Charles Bukowski

 The Laureate of American lowlife                                                                  
Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.

Portrait of author Charles Bukowski, now available as a large (very) limited edition print, can be ordered here:
http://www.drewfriedman.net/prints/bukowski.html

Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro in 1994.

 This is my newly completed portrait of Charles Bukowski, who I never met, although I illustrated a series of his short stories ("Notes of a Dirty Old Man") for High Times magazine in 1993 when he had (briefly) become a regular contributer. (Robert Crumb has also drawn Bukowski and his stories on numerous occasions) Bukowski was very pleased with my depictions of his sad characters and sent this letter to the editor, Larry "Ratso" Sloman:

This is the artwork for the story he's referring to, "There's No Business like Show Business",
from the April 1983 issue of High Times:

                                                                            Bukowski biography notes via Good Reads