Illustrators and caricaturists Robert Grossman and Steve Brodner are numbered
among the 2024 inductees into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
As is Gustave Doré.
Of Robert Grossman the Society of Illustrators noted:
Employing his signature airbrush style, [Robert Grossman] went on to illustrate over 500 magazine covers alone. National publications that featured Grossman’s distinctive, whimsical, and satirical caricatures, cartoons, illustrations, and sculptures include Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Nation, Esquire, New York Magazine, Mother Jones, National Lampoon, The New York Observer, The Atlantic, The Realist, Forbes, and many others. Grossman also illustrated numerous album covers, book jackets, and movie posters.
In his own words, Grossman said he liked to “illustrate the un-illustratable”, and found the process of drawing “endlessly magical”. The idea that there are “an infinite number of little worlds waiting to be created on a piece of paper” forever excited him, as much in his final years as when he was a child.
A gallery of Robert Grossman artwork is found at his website.
The Society of Illustrators said of Steve Brodner:
Steve Brodner has been a leading satiric artist for the last 40 years. His goal during this time was to find a home for various forms of political and social commentary in the world of independent, freelance art. His work has appeared in most major publications in the US. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The NY Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and GQ, among others. His work currently appears regularly in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Nation.
[In] 2008, Brodner was the subject of a major career retrospective, “Raw Nerve” (the first for a living artist) at the Norman Rockwell Museum. He has won many major awards in the graphic arts, including medals at the Society of Illustrators, Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, SPD, the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College, the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union, and the Masters Series Award from the School of Visual Arts. His work currently appears daily at stevebrodner.substack.com and weekly in thenation.com.
Steve Brodner has an archive of illustrations at his website.
Others inducted into the Class of 2024 SOI Hall of Fame are…
Gustave Doré’s (1832 – 1883) long career began at an early age, when at only 15 years, he became a caricaturist for the French paper Le journal pour rire. This was followed with several text comics including Les Travaux d’Hercule (1847), Trois artistes incompris et mécontents (1851), Les Dés-agréments d’un voyage d’agrément (1851) and L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854). During the 1860s, Doré was commissioned to create over two hundred engraved illustrations for Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Around this time, Doré completed a series of wood engravings for an illustrated Bible. Volumes were published simultaneously in France and the UK. Additionally, Doré’s work would be featured in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, The Works of Thomas Hood, and The Divine Comedy, as well as the book London: A Pilgrimage.
WikiArt has hundreds of Doré works archived.
Grossman’s and Brodner’s works are great. Simply great.
And it’s so nice to see M. Doré getting his due.
Grossman had a social media presence toward the end of his life, and he would happily answer questions about his art and career. Very pleasant and friendly, and would even respond to email.