Skip to main content
Read page text
page 8
legend : james mcmullan The promotion of theatrical arts—plays or musicals—dates to the Middle Ages; performances were often announced by town criers, the call of a trumpet, or brief handwritten flyers. More nuanced is today’s convention: a work of visual art, a poster, which through design and clever visual metaphor unlocks the complexities of a dramatic performance. A young Black man, tuxedo clad, perches his elbows on his thighs as he leans forward in his seat. Cadmium red pastel describes his interlocked hands but the overextension of fingers and expression of thumbs, one erect and one bent in supplication, demonstrate an insecurity belied by his casual posture. The title “Six Degrees of Separation”, composed in calligraphic, almost conversational hand lettering, completes the gestural immediacy. This theatre poster for playwright John Guare’s dramatic exploration of the existential premise of human connectivity is exemplary of the psychologically attuned artwork of illustrator James McMullan. Using the body as metaphor demands intuition, and McMullan is arguably one of the most accomplished and consistent illustrators in modern history to harness such visual language in myriad contexts. Lauded for his now 38-year tenure as poster artist for New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre, his oeuvre has extended to book covers and illustrations for literati like Jorge Luis Borges, Lawrence Durrell, and Doris Lessing as well as a dozen children’s book collaborations with his wife, Kate. Coincident to these forays, the illustrator’s watercolors—spontaneous in execution and enduring in emotional evocation— were omnipresent in the pages of Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and New York Magazine. Born in Tsingtao, North China, in 1934, James McMullan and his parents were denizens during a particularly fraught era of Asian history. His grandparents, Anglican missionaries, had immigrated from Ireland to the country’s Shandong province decades prior; their vocation installed them as founders and caregivers of an orphanage for abandoned female babies. James’s primary years, spent in the small town of Cheefoo [now Yantai], were rosetinted, the well-remembered Chinese scrolls that graced the walls of his family home a significant first encounter with the subtleties of line and ephemerality of watercolor wash. Magnifying his artistic bent, McMullan’s father was a musician who wrote for the theatre, his daily perch at their grand piano indelible to the 6
page 9
legend : james mcmullan artist even today. The child’s creative reveries were interrupted, however, when the Japanese overtook Cheefoo in 1937; the ensuing hostilities eventually overlapped with the Pacific Theater of World War II. Though regarded as British and thus neutral, McMullan and his mother, a Canadian national, fled to a small town in British Columbia while his father remained to join the British Army. This first relocation would be the beginning of a peripatetic upbringing for McMullan, the ensuing years transporting him like a pinball to a boarding school in India, back to Canada to finish high school, and finally the United States. The trauma of a forced transnational experience made a biting impact, but feelings of alienation among his ever-changing schoolmates and abandonment—compounded by his father’s death in a military-plane crash when he was just eleven—were tempered by McMullan’s discovery of drawing. Early tracings of his family’s Chinese scrolls gained momentum and context with introduction to the illustrations in The Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell, and comic books, a gateway passed through by many celebrated illustrators. It seems inevitable that McMullan would ultimately move to New York City in 1955 to study at the Pratt Institute, art being the tie that bound his education in ten schools and four countries together. McMullan’s time at Pratt was revelatory, his realization that figurative realism—his preferred style—was no longer de rigueur within fine art frameworks and that illustration was considered a regressive art form proving sightly impeding. Nevertheless, he reveled in the verisimilitude of the European Expressionists he saw in New York’s galleries, Egon Schiele and Max Beckmann particularly influential for their extrapolation of drawing into remarkable modes of expression. It marked the young man forever. Newly graduated, McMullan tailored his portfolio to the specific area of book jackets; a voracious reader, he was determined to articulate the link between the literary and the graphic. Cyril Nelson at E.P. Dutton took a chance on the new, young artist, commissioning artwork for Durrell’s tetralogy, “The Alexandria Quartet” (1961). Its box set illustrations, delicate mirages of emphatic oranges, emerald, and purple, would be the first of many book projects for which Nelson would engage McMullan. Already, the shades of his talent as a colorist were revealing themselves and the illustrator began to develop the ability to compress the competing intricacies of a large narrative into a succinct image, forecasting perhaps the greatest success of his career. Although his dedication to book jackets was gradually replaced by a natural affinity for editorial art, the artist sporadically returned to the form in the decades following. Sig- nificantly, he would draw upon his own juvenile experiences of colonial China—the adult intrigues on his parent’s Tsingtao veranda in his mind theater—to capture the cultivated mannerisms and dalliances of 1930s Buenos Aires for several of Borges’s reverberating tales. Drawing from the same perennial well of memories, McMullan healed his painful past as the indefensible “sissy kid” by imbuing gentle characters like the young protagonist in his children’s book “Hey, Pipsqueak!” (1995) with the bravery to withstand bullying. Esquire Magazine gave McMullan his first assignment as an editorial illustra- tor in 1964, his accompaniment to Vance Bourjaily’s “Fitzgerald Attends My Fitzgerald Seminar” a moody vision of students in tablet armchairs while the American novelist himself looks on from the back row like the class miscreant. Initially dominated by stylistic realism, a dark layer of descending cloud cover dismantles the integrity of the room, forming a perfect visual metaphor for the class’s frame of mind. The artist’s idiosyncratic use of the brush as if manipulating pen and ink emerged quickly and quietly during those initial years, the spindly lines contouring his subjects’ bodies filled with a graduated wet wash that does the job of modeling. Looking outside of the discipline of illustration towards nontraditional painting, McMullan developed a knack for the unnatural color contrasts he so admired in Picasso and Fauves like Matisse—blues often bleeding into ochres before arriving in pools of velveteen green. Further, his Confucian balance of graphic painting and the exactitude of excellent draftsmanship seems a deliberate quotation of visible process in the work of Robert Fawcett, an industry giant whose brushwork renewed McMullan’s interest in the unlabored qualities of Chinese calligraphy. In 1966, McMullan joined Push Pin Studios at the invitation of co-founder Seymour Chwast despite his hesitation to relinquish the independence of free- 7

Page Text

View plaintext

legend : james mcmullan

The promotion of theatrical arts—plays or musicals—dates to the Middle Ages; performances were often announced by town criers, the call of a trumpet, or brief handwritten flyers. More nuanced is today’s convention: a work of visual art, a poster, which through design and clever visual metaphor unlocks the complexities of a dramatic performance.

A young Black man, tuxedo clad, perches his elbows on his thighs as he leans forward in his seat. Cadmium red pastel describes his interlocked hands but the overextension of fingers and expression of thumbs, one erect and one bent in supplication, demonstrate an insecurity belied by his casual posture. The title “Six Degrees of Separation”, composed in calligraphic, almost conversational hand lettering,

completes the gestural immediacy. This theatre poster for playwright John Guare’s dramatic exploration of the existential premise of human connectivity is exemplary of the psychologically attuned artwork of illustrator James McMullan.

Using the body as metaphor demands intuition, and McMullan is arguably one of the most accomplished and consistent illustrators in modern history to harness such visual language in myriad contexts. Lauded for his now 38-year tenure as poster artist for New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre, his oeuvre has extended to book covers and illustrations for literati like Jorge Luis Borges, Lawrence Durrell, and Doris Lessing as well as a dozen children’s book collaborations with his wife, Kate. Coincident to these forays, the illustrator’s watercolors—spontaneous in execution and enduring in emotional evocation— were omnipresent in the pages of Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and New York Magazine.

Born in Tsingtao, North China, in 1934, James McMullan and his parents were denizens during a particularly fraught era of Asian history. His grandparents, Anglican missionaries, had immigrated from

Ireland to the country’s Shandong province decades prior; their vocation installed them as founders and caregivers of an orphanage for abandoned female babies. James’s primary years, spent in the small town of Cheefoo [now Yantai], were rosetinted, the well-remembered Chinese scrolls that graced the walls of his family home a significant first encounter with the subtleties of line and ephemerality of watercolor wash. Magnifying his artistic bent, McMullan’s father was a musician who wrote for the theatre, his daily perch at their grand piano indelible to the

6

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content