Lou Glanzman — Clem Robins

As I’ve written earlier (see December 8 essay, “Eulogy”), my father was yanked out of gunnery school during World War II when the brass realized that their radio-gunner-in-training was one of the hottest graphic designers in the country. As it happened, they badly needed someone who could help them communicate the relationship of the Army Air Corps to the rest of the armed services. In a situation of total war, one might think that such concerns would be considered unimportant, but apparently this wasn’t the case. Pop, a lowly Tech Sergeant, was whisked off to the Pentagon and given carte blanche to assemble a team of designers and illustrators, and train them as he saw fit. Occasionally he had to tangle with officers who thought they understood typography better than he did. War is hell.

One of his recruits was the late Gene Federico, whose daughter Lisa later thanked Pop for enabling her to be born. The combat specialties both men were trained for were basically meat grinding operations, and odds were that neither would have lived to see it end. Federico went on to achieve legendary status in American graphic design, as did my father. The world is a better place for both guy’s contributions.

I don’t recall all the people he brought into his Pentagon design offices, but one was a third-rate comic book artist named Lou Glanzman. (In the early 1940s, a third rate comic artist would have been horrifically bad indeed; standards were quite low in those years. Comics illustration hit its zenith in the fifties and sixties.) I don’t know why Pop chose Lou. He’s told me that he often had to remind Lou that there are five fingers on the human hand. But for whatever reason, Pop wanted Lou, and whoever Pop wanted, he got. He trained Lou, showed him how to draw, and as best he understood it, how to paint.

With the war’s end, Glanzman merchandised the skills he’d picked up, and soon became one of the most sought-after illustrators in the country. In the 1960s, Glanzman was to Time covers what Norman Rockwell had been to the Saturday Evening Post. If you’re old enough to remember when each new cover of Time was likely to feature some prominent figure on the world stage, lovingly painted, the covers you may remember are likely Glanzman’s.

I recall seeing this cover when I was a kid, having no idea that Pop’s disciple had painted it. Something else I didn’t realize was that Glanzman had actually had a mason construct a small brick wall, onto which Lou pasted the painting of Agnew. It took a crew of moving men to bring the wall and painting from Grlanzman’s Long Island studio to the Time-Life building in Manhattan.

This 1968 opus was a big hit in our house. I actually removed the cover from our copy of Time and mounted it on crescent board. Glanzman’s use of Cubism to suggest De Gaulle’s personality amid the chaos one late 60s European politics was quite brilliant.

Like most high-end mid-century illustrators Glanzman favored oil on canvas, walking in the footsteps of N.C. Wyeth, Howie Pyle and Norman Rockwell. But when acrylic paint was first introduced in the 1960s, Glanzman was quick to recognize the speed and flexibility the new material could enable. Pretty much all his famous cover work was done in acrylics. This De Gaulle picture was an acrylic painting on illustration board. Acrylics dry in minutes. This sort of free-wheeling brushwork was a good example of what acrylics can do. I should try them someday.

RFK, painted the night of his assassination.

Glanzman’s most familiar work is arguably this portrait of Bobby Kennedy, painted the night of his assassination. Time was to go to press the next day, and they needed a cover overnight. Lou loved the Kennedys, and was devastated at the Senator’s murder. He pulled an all-nighter on this one, and was grateful to get it done. Later, this image — like Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington — became very popular with collectors, and he must have repainted the cover a dozen times. Like Stuart, Glanzman made a lot of money repainting a famous picture.

Time’s art direction changed in the 1970s and 80s, and they commissioned fewer covers from Glanzman. He found himself painting a lot of book covers. Most notably, when Bantam released the whole Louis L’Amour oeuvre in paperback, Lou painted dozens of covers for them. It looks a lot like Frederick Remington until you look more closely. It’s acrylic paint on illustration board, a painting done in the course of hours instead of weeks. Angela Lansbury has talked of the difference between acting for episodic television and for movies. It’s a kind of shorthand, and if the actor’s any good, he’ll fool you. But compare her work in The Manchurian Candidate with an episode of Murder She Wrote and the difference is obvious. Similarly, Glanzman’s rendering of this scene is totally convincing and totally superficial. Compare it to a Remington or a Homer or a Farney and the difference is shocking. Lou, who had one of the most complete files of images anywhere, enough spots that he could produce a convincing image of damn near anything, beautifully, convincingly, and fast.

Book covers also gave Glanzman a chance to strut his stuff as a composer. The above painting, with the hero and the line of Indians forming a cross shape, and with the foreground dog providing a counterpoint, is a lovely piece of design. At his best, he was one hell of a painter.

I had no clue that Glanzman’s work was appearing on the cover of The National Lampoon. The magazine’s design director Michael Gross understood how to make the best use of Glanzman’s style for this faux-Rockwell cover.

My father took me out to Long Island in 1967 to see Lou in his studio, and his brother Sam, a comic book artist. It would be the last time Glanzman saw my father until 1973, when my pop turned sixty. Lou had heard that Pop had grown a beard. From memory, he painted my father’s portrait, adding those six years and a beard. His improv, executed entirely from memory and his imagination, was pretty close to the mark.

It’s a hell of a likeness, all things considered. I wish the image were better.

Some 25 years later I drove east to visit with Lou and his wife Fran. I had it in the back of my mind that maybe Lou could use an assistant. He made it clear that he didn’t use assistants, but he did give me some advice about the illustration business, and Time in particular.

His brother Sam worked in comics till his death three years ago. Although I tried to get to letter his work one Jonah Hex and other DC books, I never got to assist him either, although this may have been a blessing. During our 1967 visit to his studio, Sam complained a lot about his letterer. I’d hate to have had him complaining about me, as well.