Robert Grossman
Encyclopedia
Robert Grossman is an American painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author.
In a career spanning nearly fifty years, Grossman's illustrations have appeared over 500 times on the covers of various national publications. TIME
, Newsweek
, Rolling Stone
, Esquire
, TV Guide
, Sports Illustrated
, The Times
, The Nation
, The New York Observer, The Atlantic Monthly
, The New Republic
, Evergreen Review
, New York
magazine, National Lampoon, and The New York Times
have all published illustrations by him. His work has appeared in children's books, including The 18th Emergency (text by Betsy C. Byers), and What Could a Hippopotamus Be? (text by Mike Thaler). He has created album covers for Columbia
, Epic
, Warner Bros.
, and United Artists
.
, in Manhattan, NYC.
Grossman attended Yale University
, where he served as editor of The Yale Record
, "America's Oldest College Humor Magazine" (it predates the Harvard Lampoon
by four years), and in 1961 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts.
A Yale Record parody of The New Yorker
(called The Yew Norker) led to an introduction to art director Jim Geraghty, and an art editor position at the weekly. During this period, Grossman created "Captain Melanin," "the world's first African-American superhero," for the satirical journal Monocle
.
In 1963, Grossman began a freelance illustration career. In 1979, Galerie Vontobel of Zurich, Switzerland showcased Grossman's art in a solo exhibition
.
Grossman created the familiar airplane tied in a knot for the 1980 film comedy AIRPLANE!
.
For the 1970 comedy recording Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
, Grossman painted a quartet of caricatures of The Firesign Theatre
. The painting depicts the players as animal / human hybrids, with the animal portions signifying each member's Zodiacal sign (each was born under a Fire Sign).
Rolling Stone magazine issued a series of posters featuring Grossman's cover paintings of George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Bob Dylan, The Who, Jerry Garcia, and Crosby Stills and Nash.
(he favors compressed air over piston) in order to render the sculptural forms which are his paintings' most readily identified characteristic. Since with an airbrush a skilled user may lay in areas of shadow and light with either crisp or soft edges, the shapes possess a high degree of visual verisimilitude. Grossman is sometimes credited with spearheading a resurgence of the tool in illustration; for decades it had been used primarily for photo retouching. Pete Hamill
writing in the international journal of visual communication Graphis and Steven Heller
in Innovators of American Illustration note that Grossman's approach to the airbrush has been widely imitated. His "mordant wit" is never duplicated, adds Heller.
On the evolution of technique in his illustration, Grossman has said, "I was impressed by the way David Levine
and the Push Pin
artists were using line to develop a bulgy three-dimensional feeling in their work. I found an old airbrush in my dad's shop and discovered a jiffy way to outbulge them all. For a while I diligently pursued outline-less-ness as the secret to a real stereoscopic three-dimensional look. I felt my line work belonged to a different world that had nothing to do with the airbrush and went its separate way. Lately I find a strong line reasserting itself in my pictures."
(many of which can be viewed at Grossman's portfolio website). Unlike most sculpture, they are not intended to be walked around, but are constructed to be photographed from a single point, under particular lighting, printed, and shown to a mass audience. Grossman sculpts these in red modeling clay, then brings a painterly understanding of color to their multi-hued veneers. Unlike his paintings, which may take on any subject, the sculptures have been primarily a medium for Grossman's caricatures
.
for Jimmy The C (James Picker, Robert Grossman and Craig Whitaker, producers; Motionpicker Productions). The three-minute film features a clay-animated Jimmy Carter
singing "Georgia on My Mind". Ray Charles
' rendition of the song is used on the soundtrack.
During the 1980s, Grossman and his brother David produced a number of animated television commercials under the "Grossman Brothers" banner.
One air-conditioner ad featured a miserable, suddenly melting pet dog. A pair of singing cupids were the centerpiece of ads for a New York radio station specializing in love songs. A dancing piggy bank performed juggling feats for a local bank. Grossman's preferred technique has been replacement animation
, in which separate puppets (or parts of puppets) are sculpted to represent each increment of action. A single character might have dozens of different heads, enabling the expression of any desired word or emotion. The technique was used on The Nightmare Before Christmas
.
have appeared in New York magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Observer and elsewhere. Many of them are written entirely in verse: "The Man Who Bagged Baghdad for Dad" deals with the current war in Iraq. Rolling Stone hosted the regular feature ZooNooz, in which animals enacted a satirical version of current political events.
In June 2008, The New York Times published a discussion with Grossman of his political comic strips, which date back to the Kennedy administration. The profile appeared concurrently with the launch of "O-MANLAND," an online compilation of strips focusing on the 2008 presidential race. The site is named after "O-Man," Barack Obama's Grossman-invented alter ego, whose superpowers and charisma know no bounds. The artist collaborated with veteran record producer and musician John Simon
on a theme song for the site.
now-classic graphic novel MAUS
: "[S]oon one is marveling at the amount of fear, hope, love and pathos that can emerge from a sketch of a mouse's head scarcely a half-inch high. ... [Spiegelman] promises us a sequel and I, for one, can't wait. I hope he is scurrying. The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust."
In a career spanning nearly fifty years, Grossman's illustrations have appeared over 500 times on the covers of various national publications. TIME
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, TV Guide
TV Guide
TV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...
, Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, The New York Observer, The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998...
, New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine, National Lampoon, and The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
have all published illustrations by him. His work has appeared in children's books, including The 18th Emergency (text by Betsy C. Byers), and What Could a Hippopotamus Be? (text by Mike Thaler). He has created album covers for Columbia
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
, Epic
Epic Records
Epic Records is an American record label, owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Though it was originally conceived as a jazz imprint, it has since expanded to represent various genres. L.A...
, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label. It was the foundation label of the present-day Warner Music Group, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of that corporation. It maintains a close relationship with its former parent, Warner Bros. Pictures, although the two companies...
, and United Artists
United Artists Records
United Artists Records was a record label founded by Max E. Youngstein of United Artists in 1957 initially to distribute records of its movie soundtracks, though it soon branched out into recording music of a number of different genres.-History:...
.
Education and early career
Grossman's father, Joseph Grossman, was a display artist who gave his son his earliest training. The elder Grossman also sent Robert to Saturday morning art classes at the Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, in Manhattan, NYC.
Grossman attended Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he served as editor of The Yale Record
The Yale Record
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest college humor magazine in America.-History:The Record began as a weekly newspaper, with its first issue appearing on September 11, 1872...
, "America's Oldest College Humor Magazine" (it predates the Harvard Lampoon
Harvard Lampoon
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor publication founded in 1876 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.-Overview:Published since 1876, The Harvard Lampoon is the world's longest continually published humor magazine. It is also the second longest-running English-language humor...
by four years), and in 1961 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts.
A Yale Record parody of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
(called The Yew Norker) led to an introduction to art director Jim Geraghty, and an art editor position at the weekly. During this period, Grossman created "Captain Melanin," "the world's first African-American superhero," for the satirical journal Monocle
Monocle (magazine)
Monocle was an American satirical magazine, published irregularly from the late 1950s until the mid-sixties. For at least the majority of its run, it was edited by Victor Navasky. Calvin Trillin, C. D. B...
.
In 1963, Grossman began a freelance illustration career. In 1979, Galerie Vontobel of Zurich, Switzerland showcased Grossman's art in a solo exhibition
One man show
The term one-man show often referred to comedian, who would stand on stage and entertain an audience. With the advent of feminism, words and phrases such as one-woman show and comedienne have entered the modern-day lexicon....
.
Best-known work
Airplane!
Airplane! is a 1980 American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures...
.
For the 1970 comedy recording Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is The Firesign Theatre's third comedy recording for Columbia Records, released in 1970. In 1983, The New Rolling Stone Record Guide called it "the greatest comedy album ever made"....
, Grossman painted a quartet of caricatures of The Firesign Theatre
The Firesign Theatre
The Firesign Theatre is an American comedy troupe consisting of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor. Their brand of surrealistic humor is best known through their record albums, which acquired a cult following in the late 1960s and early '70s.The troupe began as live radio...
. The painting depicts the players as animal / human hybrids, with the animal portions signifying each member's Zodiacal sign (each was born under a Fire Sign).
Rolling Stone magazine issued a series of posters featuring Grossman's cover paintings of George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Bob Dylan, The Who, Jerry Garcia, and Crosby Stills and Nash.
Painter
Throughout his career, Grossman has employed an airbrushAirbrush
An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that sprays various media including ink and dye, but most often paint by a process of nebulization. Spray guns developed from the airbrush and are still considered a type of airbrush.-History:...
(he favors compressed air over piston) in order to render the sculptural forms which are his paintings' most readily identified characteristic. Since with an airbrush a skilled user may lay in areas of shadow and light with either crisp or soft edges, the shapes possess a high degree of visual verisimilitude. Grossman is sometimes credited with spearheading a resurgence of the tool in illustration; for decades it had been used primarily for photo retouching. Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York...
writing in the international journal of visual communication Graphis and Steven Heller
Steven Heller (graphic design)
Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes on topics related to graphic design....
in Innovators of American Illustration note that Grossman's approach to the airbrush has been widely imitated. His "mordant wit" is never duplicated, adds Heller.
On the evolution of technique in his illustration, Grossman has said, "I was impressed by the way David Levine
David Levine
David Levine was an American artist and illustrator best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books. Jules Feiffer has called him "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century".-Early life and education:Levine was born in Brooklyn, where his father Harry ran a...
and the Push Pin
Push Pin Studios
Push Pin Studios is a graphic design and illustration studio formed in New York City in 1954. Cooper Union graduates Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins, and Edward Sorel founded the studio....
artists were using line to develop a bulgy three-dimensional feeling in their work. I found an old airbrush in my dad's shop and discovered a jiffy way to outbulge them all. For a while I diligently pursued outline-less-ness as the secret to a real stereoscopic three-dimensional look. I felt my line work belonged to a different world that had nothing to do with the airbrush and went its separate way. Lately I find a strong line reasserting itself in my pictures."
Sculptor
The understanding of form and volume which informs his two-dimensional work finds further expression in an ongoing series of sculptural bustsBust (sculpture)
A bust is a sculpted or cast representation of the upper part of the human figure, depicting a person's head and neck, as well as a variable portion of the chest and shoulders. The piece is normally supported by a plinth. These forms recreate the likeness of an individual...
(many of which can be viewed at Grossman's portfolio website). Unlike most sculpture, they are not intended to be walked around, but are constructed to be photographed from a single point, under particular lighting, printed, and shown to a mass audience. Grossman sculpts these in red modeling clay, then brings a painterly understanding of color to their multi-hued veneers. Unlike his paintings, which may take on any subject, the sculptures have been primarily a medium for Grossman's caricatures
Caricature Carvers of America
In 1989, a group of ten wood carvers, with the common goal of promoting the art of caricature carving, met in the back room of Paxton Lumber Co. in Fort Worth, Texas to discuss the formation of a national organization to further that goal. From that meeting came the Caricature Carvers of America ...
.
Filmmaker
Grossman received a 1977 Academy Award nomination for "Best Animated Short Film"Academy Award for Animated Short Film
The Academy Award for Animated Short Film is an award which has been given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as part of the Academy Awards every year since the 5th Academy Awards, covering the year 1931-32, to the present....
for Jimmy The C (James Picker, Robert Grossman and Craig Whitaker, producers; Motionpicker Productions). The three-minute film features a clay-animated Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
singing "Georgia on My Mind". Ray Charles
Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson , known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records...
' rendition of the song is used on the soundtrack.
During the 1980s, Grossman and his brother David produced a number of animated television commercials under the "Grossman Brothers" banner.
One air-conditioner ad featured a miserable, suddenly melting pet dog. A pair of singing cupids were the centerpiece of ads for a New York radio station specializing in love songs. A dancing piggy bank performed juggling feats for a local bank. Grossman's preferred technique has been replacement animation
Puppetoons
George Pal's Puppetoons were a series of animated puppet films made in Europe in the 1930s and in the U.S. in the 1940s. They are memorable for their use of "replacement" animation: using a series of different hand-carved wooden puppets for each frame in which the puppet moves or changes...
, in which separate puppets (or parts of puppets) are sculpted to represent each increment of action. A single character might have dozens of different heads, enabling the expression of any desired word or emotion. The technique was used on The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Nightmare Before Christmas, often promoted as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a 1993 stop motion musical fantasy film directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, a being from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to...
.
Cartoonist
Grossman has written and drawn multipanel comics throughout his career. The pen and ink stripsComic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
have appeared in New York magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Observer and elsewhere. Many of them are written entirely in verse: "The Man Who Bagged Baghdad for Dad" deals with the current war in Iraq. Rolling Stone hosted the regular feature ZooNooz, in which animals enacted a satirical version of current political events.
In June 2008, The New York Times published a discussion with Grossman of his political comic strips, which date back to the Kennedy administration. The profile appeared concurrently with the launch of "O-MANLAND," an online compilation of strips focusing on the 2008 presidential race. The site is named after "O-Man," Barack Obama's Grossman-invented alter ego, whose superpowers and charisma know no bounds. The artist collaborated with veteran record producer and musician John Simon
John Simon (record producer)
John Simon is an American musician, record producer, and composer. He is best known for his work with The Band as producer and musician on Music from Big Pink and The Band.-Biography:...
on a theme song for the site.
Author
An occasional essayist, Grossman shared with readers of The Nation his reflections on Art Spiegelman'sArt Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
now-classic graphic novel MAUS
Maus
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...
: "[S]oon one is marveling at the amount of fear, hope, love and pathos that can emerge from a sketch of a mouse's head scarcely a half-inch high. ... [Spiegelman] promises us a sequel and I, for one, can't wait. I hope he is scurrying. The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust."