James McMullan Meets Manson

August 9th, 2010 by Dan Nadel

A couple weeks ago I went over to The Milton Glaser Design Study Center at the School of Visual Arts and was knocked out by what archivists Beth Kleber and Zachary Sachs showed me. Of course I’d been following their smart and witty blog, Container List, for a while, but seeing the stuff in person is a whole other thing. Basically they’re gathering the archives of the great illustrators and designers who have passed through SVA. This includes some of the giants of post-WWII illustration and graphic design: Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, James McMullan, Henry Wolf, George Tscherny, Steve Heller, and a personal favorite of mine, the late great Heinz Edelmann. It’s an invaluable resource to figures that, while canonical, are not easily visible. Anyhoooo, Beth and Zach are already blogging here at PictureBox and also feeding me little visual morsels to write about all by myself. They are like kindly zookeepers gently feeding a ravenous monkey man his daily snack. I want more! I want to be buried up to my neck in George Tscherny jpegs! Grrr! Give me more Milton Glaser roughs from 1966! Now! Arrrgh. But I must be calm.

So, to kick things off, here’s an undated original by James McMullan (1934-) for a magazine article on Charles Manson. From the looks of it, early 1970s at the latest. McMullan was a member of the famed Push Pin Studios from 1966 to 1969, and an essential part of the identity of the early New York Magazine. His lush watercolor reportage at once harkened back to the 1950s and advanced forward with his dynamic angles and embrace of abstraction in service to expressive realism in illustration. McMullan famously contributed the illustrations (based on his own photographs) for the magazine story that became the film Saturday Night Fever. In the late 1970s he began an unbroken run of theater posters and today stands virtually alone in still providing lush paintings for ads and posters.

Anyhow, this particular piece on Manson has all of McMullan’s trademarks. He gets the likeness, sure, but better yet the full-body shot and upward look convey the irony of Manson’s continued potency as a legend and menace, even while still in jail. McMullan gets that irony and amplifies it with an angelic glow crowning the murderer’s head. It’s also a damn good portrait of an era — anti-heroes from Hopper (aside: is it too soon to start talking about Terry Southern’s view of the now-sainted actor?) to Nicholson were clad in denim and a white shirt, a slightly superior sneer always at the ready. Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues” on his record On The Beach was an indictment of both that sneer and the Manson-hipness that still continues. McMullan’s picture is equally effective: It’s a striking condemnation of a caged (but in his open room and powerful aura) still powerful force.

More to come.