The New York Review of Magazines

Drawing the Line

One of the most famous illustrators in magazines will redo a portrait on deadline, but don't ask him to make Richard Nixon look good.
By Karla Lightfoot

SAMUEL BECKETT, Jesse Jackson, George Gershwin, Laurel and Hardy, the “Mona Lisa,” Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Marilyn Monroe are just a few of the photographed subjects that Bob Grossman, illustrator and caricaturist, has taped on his wall.

“Do these people inspire you?”

“No,” Grossman recently told me, in a you’vegot- to-be-kidding-me sort of way. “They went up for some reason and just never came down. I guess it’s just my poor housekeeping. It seems there’s always something more important to do around here.” At some point, he has used each of the photographs as a tool to “bring out the likeness” of a person in his work.

Some might call the New York City studio of the 6-foot-4, salt-andpepper- haired artist a great big mess; but to him, his place is like a fine wine that has taken years to perfect. From the aging color on the walls, which he attributes to years of having sprayed paint through his airbrushing tool, to the knickknacks, including cartoon-like sculptures of every political figure you can think of, to his children’s and grandchildren’s artwork, this 1,500-square-foot space doubles as his home.

Bob Grossman loves what he does. And I would hope so, since he’s been at it for so long. Like most children, Grossman started drawing at a very young age, but he never stopped. “By age 9 or 10, most kids go through the ‘I can’t draw stage,’” he said. Well, Grossman never did.

“What kept you from stopping?”

“Well—” He paused for a long while. “I just loved it, and I still do,” he said with sincerity. “I wasn’t good at anything else.” So Grossman sketched, sketched and sketched some more, and at age 62, he continues to sketch.

Grossman is known for being the best of the best in a field where Adobe Photoshop is king and illustrators who do all their work by hand are scarce. He survives in an industry where he shouldn’t because he has a reputation for ingenuity. He’s also known for being flexible. He has to be. Although Grossman doesn’t know the exact size of his résumé, his art has graced the covers of more than 500 national magazines, including Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and The New Republic. “Bob has a distinct and original style,” said Steve Heller, art director for The New York Times Book Review. “He’s a good cartoonist, a great draftsman and he reads. He’s as articulate and fluent in his language as any good writer is.”

Grossman creates this language with a black pen and an airbrush. Most artists and photographers use the airbrush for touch-ups, but for Grossman, it transforms his final black-and-white line drawings into vibrant and colorful caricatures. He is often credited for bringing the airbrush color technique, which prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s, back into vogue. But he has made it his own. And in so doing, he has carved for himself an entire niche in illustration. But times have changed, and so have the editors and art directors who once preferred cover illustrations over photographs.

Walter Bernard, former art director at Time, Esquire and New York and now co-owner of WBMG, Inc., a design firm, said that between 1977 and 1980, at least forty of the fifty-two covers he did at Time each year were illustrated. Today, he said, you see as few as four illustrated covers each year. “Editors are afraid of illustrations, and they’ve convinced themselves that photography is what sells on the newsstand,” Bernard said. And, he said, now an editor can choose from fifty different photographs of George W. Bush, but if he wants to use an illustration, he often has only one choice. He added that editors are much less likely to relinquish control by introducing another person— the illustrator— to the process.

Heller, of the Book Review, said, “Grossman is someone who can think and transfer that thought into images that aren’t clichéd. He always has that little twist.” But as respected as Grossman is, he has nevertheless lost a significant amount of work to photographers over the past twenty years. Grossman says we’ve come into a time when not only can the editor dictate the specific item he wants to see on the cover, he can often pull that image right off of Photoshop and create the whole cover himself. The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly are two of only a handful of magazines that consistently buck this trend.

As a result, much of Grossman’s current work can be seen nestled inside The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and New York, although every so often it crops up on a cover or front page. How? He is savvy when it comes to creating illustrations for some of the most persnickety art directors in the country. At various times, due to changes in the political climate or because a publication wants to make a different statement, he has been asked to alter his own work. Grossman said that he tries not to take the suggestions as insults, preferring to make changes before, rather than after, the piece is completed. On two occasions, certain publications have taken the liberty of altering his work, something that was near-to-impossible before the birth of Photoshop. Grossman made his feelings known and discontinued working with both publications. He has also turned down work because the political statement the organization wanted to make did not match his own ideology.

But turning down work can be a costly decision. Heller said that newspaper front pages and magazine covers in color, range anywhere from $700 to $3,000, whereas inside pages might range from $200 to $1,000. He said, “It really just depends on what a particular budget can bear and what certain artists will accept for their work.”

Although Grossman said he doesn’t get as much work as he used to, he realizes that he’s fortunate. He used to pursue work in the advertising industry, but advertisers have ceased using illustrations, too. He stays away from illustrating products because he said that manufacturers spend too much time mandating “what color to paint which flower.” In a given week, he may complete as many as four illustrations and in another he might complete one, if that. Grossman admits that his fame hasn’t insulated him from the dry spells common to freelancing.

He usually receives his assignments from an art director, who may or may not give him a copy of the accompanying story. It’s only on rare occasions that he has an opportunity to actually read the story or speak to the writer. “More often than not, there’s nothing to read, because the person who’s writing the piece is in the same deadline race you are,” he said. In some cases, Grossman’s illustrations may agree with the story. In others, the fit may be imperfect.

He has definitely had his share of imperfect fits. Top cartoon artists face challenges with editors and art directors, who often ask them to make changes to an initial sketch or even to the final product. Last fall, around the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor, Grossman did an illustration for a piece in The New York Times Week in Review section about how Schwarzenegger was carrying the Republican Party of California. Grossman portrayed Schwarzenegger as a brawny weightlifter, holding up a huge, gray elephant, which was noticeably female (she was wearing a polka dot bikini). Everyone loved it, and he was given the go-ahead. But the day he began working was the same day that six women told the media that they had once been groped by Schwarzenegger. The art director called Grossman immediately and asked him to make the elephant unisex, because they didn’t want to show Schwarzenegger “groping” a female elephant. Fortunately for The New York Times, the request to alter the illustration was made before he had finished the final drawing and coloration, so, rather than being charged for two illustrations, they only had to pay for one.

On another occasion, the paper’s Book Review wanted a caricature of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Grossman provided a sketch of her happily studying a globe. The sketch was approved, but once Grossman sent the work over, Heller called back to say that Albright looked like a Kewpie doll. Grossman admits that she had plump rosy cheeks, big eyes and a pleasant look on her face, but it was the exact same way she looked in the black-and-white sketch. On the second and final round, Grossman created a much more staid drawing— a profile of a more serious Albright, in which he added some irreverence by making her earring a globe stud.

“Grossman’s work is just inherently funny,” Heller said. “It takes real talent and intelligence to understand a subject matter and translate it.”

A New Republic cover in 1999 probed the question of whether Hillary Clinton would run for the Senate. Grossman’s final illustration showed her in the “get ready, get set” racer’s stance, wearing a blue suit with a scarf wrapped around her neck. In the approved original, he had portrayed her in the same stance, but with a ball and chain around her neck—a not-so-subtle reference to how tough her race would be because of her husband’s debauchery. The ball and chain proved to be too flagrant for the cover, and The New Republic asked him to create another. Grossman pasted a flap over the lower part of the illustration, kept the racing theme, but replaced the yoke from the ball and chain with a striped scarf. He had to alter everything except for her head.

But sometimes such changes aren’t so drastic. Last fall, Fortune asked Grossman to create a beauty pageant depiction of the Democratic candidates for president. (You can’t have a beauty pageant without a swimsuit competition, right?) Grossman sketched bikini-clad muscle men candidates “working it” down a catwalk. The art director thought the bikinis were hilarious—but they decided to go with Speedo-type swimsuits instead.

At 3 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in March, Grossman was working diligently to complete an assignment for the front page of The New York Observer. His deadline was 5 p.m., and he worked quickly using strokes of airbrushed color. The illustration was for an article about the Palm Beach renaissance—it seems that a number of celebrities and other noteworthy people have purchased property there. Some of these folks include actresses Glenn Close and Lorraine Bracco, businessmen Henry Kravis and Donald Trump, designer Lilly Pulitzer, and rock star Bruce Springsteen. The art director told Grossman the exact characters she wanted in the piece, but she left the rest up to him.

His illustration: the sun, the sky, the ocean and a sandy, curvy part of the beach, upon which bathing beauties Glenn Close and Lorraine Bracco held prominent spots. In the blue sky, several of the others flew in on a convertible plane. The mix of colors—bright blue, bright yellow, lavender, pink and sand—were so vibrant that the images jumped off the page.

Grossman had submitted the proposed sketch the day before, but the real work started that Tuesday, after he finished drawing the original. While his sketches are drawn quickly with a very soft pencil, the originals are drawn very slowly, and with a very sharp pen.

“Once that’s done, it’s more like knitting,” Grossman said. “It’s time to finish the details, step by step.”

At this point, he applies color by covering the original with a sheet of translucent film, carving out the appropriate sections and spraying on the paint with his airbrush. Depending on the intricacy of the illustration, this can be an extremely tedious process. He layers multiple colors to achieve various nuances, as with the stripes on Clinton’s scarf and Schwarzenegger’s leopard-print unitard. And he does every tiny detail by hand.

The process itself is very Zen-like, he said.

“In the ritual of knitting, the yoga of it is one of the reasons people put up with it. It has a relaxing feel while you’re doing it, and after a while, it’s done.”

“In my work, you’re drawing something as it might have looked,” Grossman said. “But then again, it no longer exists. Who’s to say what something that no longer exists looks like? You make it into an interesting pseudo-experience like writing—you take something that’s not so interesting and make it interesting.”

Grossman said that illustrators love to do Richard Nixon because he’s a funny-looking guy and you can really play around with his nose and his chin. He was once called upon by The American Spectator magazine to do a caricature of Nixon, but they wanted him to be portrayed in a positive light. Grossman said he thought, “Why would I ever want to make that anti-Semitic jackass look good?” Although he has since done several caricatures of Nixon, he had to turn this assignment down.

In college, Grossman started his own satirical magazine, which he named The Yew Norker. The man has a great sense of humor, along with an infectious laugh. (What’s the sense of creating caricatures if you can’t laugh at them?) Ironically, Grossman didn’t laugh much when he worked as an assistant art director at The New Yorker after college. It was through this experience that he realized he belonged on the other side of the table. He wanted to be the person who was supplying the artwork. And after a short stint at his father’s silk-screen printing company, he stepped into the world of freelance illustration and never looked back.

Now, Grossman doesn’t turn much work down. And despite the current business trends, Grossman doesn’t plan on retiring. He is determined to continue putting his hands, his brain and his airbrush to good use.

BEFORE: This New York Times Book Review sketch shows former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill eavesdropping on President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney plotting against the world and chuckling all the while.	AFTER: No laughter here. The edited illustration shows only pensive planning.