In the past month we’ve lost two absolute legends of the Illustration community, Robert E. McGinnis [above left] at the age of 99 on March 10 and Brad Holland [above right] at the age of 81, following heart surgery on March 27.

Renowned for his paperback covers—over 1300 of them!—hundreds of magazine illustrations, dozens of classic movie posters, and numerous gallery paintings, Bob McGinnis was an artist’s artist and, quite simply, one of the best of the best.

He started his career as a teenage apprentice at the Walt Disney Studios before enlisting in the Merchant Marine during World War II. Following the war Robert joined the Fredman Chaite Studios where he created all sorts of advertising art while working with Frank McCarthy and Robert “Bob” Peak.

A chance meeting with Mitchell Hooks in 1958 led him to be introduced to Dell Publishing and he began a career painting a variety of paperback covers for such authors as Donald Westlake, Edward S. Aarons, Erle Stanley Gardner, Richard S. Prather, and the Michael Shayne and Carter Brown series. Bob also created illustrations for a wide variety of magazines including Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. Movie posters followed, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, The Odd Couple, Barbarella, and Splash among many others. He’s the subject of a documentary film, Robert McGinnis: Painting the Last Rose of Summer, directed by Paul Jilbert; it can be difficult to find, but is well worth the search.

Robert was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1993.

Cathy and I were fortunate to get to know Bob a little and work with him on his art book, Tapestry: The Paintings of Robert E. McGinnis, which was published by Underwood Books in 2000; I also was lucky to have served as art director for his 2007 calendar, Dangerous Dames, published by Andrews McMeel. We would receive hand-written letters from him fairly regularly to catch up and he was always thoughtful, kind, funny, humble, and gracious: Robert McGinnis was a true gentleman and he will be deeply missed.

 

Above: Bob painted Harlan Ellison as the protagonist for the cover of his rock novel Spider Kiss.

Above: Bob was always painting, always working, and near the end of his career he was creating covers like this one for the Hard Case Crime paperbacks.

I regret that I never had the opportunity to meet Brad Holland, but I admired and respected his work from the first day I saw it in the late 1960s. A self-taught artist, he was hired by Hallmark Cards when he was 20 years old and pretty much learned on the job, designing all manner of cards and illustrated books. Too good, too restless, and too ambitious to be satisfied as a staff artist for a corporation, Brad resigned in 1967 at age 23 and moved to New York City to pursue a career as a full-time freelance illustrator. He became a monthly contributor to Playboy that same year illustrating their Ribald Classics series and in 1970 became a frequent contributor to The New York Times op-ed page. By 1986, Holland was so firmly established as a prominent presence in the art community that The Washington Post described him as “the undisputed star of American Illustration.” Brad was an energetic art activist and one of the founders of the Illustrators’ Partnership of America (IPA): he heightened illustrators’ awareness regarding the growing influence of stock illustration houses and led the opposition to the Orphan Works Bill of 2008 with its potential threat to artist rights. While the bill did pass the Senate and gained wide support in the publishing community (no surprise there), it lost support in the House of Representatives and failed passage.

Brad was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2005.

During his lifetime Brad Holland’s paintings had been exhibited in museums around the world, including one-man exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Clermont-Ferrand, France and the Museum of American Illustration, New York. He supposedly was working on a retrospective book of his art: if true, I hope someone will step in and see that it’s published.

Above: Brad was long gone from Hallmark long before I got there, but he was still talked about with awe and a great deal of affection. This is a Hallmark pop-up book he illustrated of A Christmas Carol.

 

Above: Art Paul, the renowned art director for Playboy loved Brad’s art that he gave him the monthly assignment of illustrating their their Ribald Classics series, which he did for a number of years. Four samples are shown above.

 

Above: Though best known for his editorial work, Brad was no stranger to painting book covers, too, as shown here.