Robert McGinnis – RIP
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Illustrator Robert McGinnis has passed away.
Robert Edward (Bob) McGinnis
February 3, 1926 – March 10, 2025
Renowned painter/illustrator Robert E. McGinnis (those who knew him firsthand called him Bob) died at the age of 99 in Old Greenwich on March 10, 2025. Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die. In 1993, Bob was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
When interviewed by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury in 2020, Robert McGinnis shared his thoughts on why he was chosen to paint the Bond campaigns, “I had become known for my ability to depict glamorous women. It probably was the large number of paperback book covers I had illustrated – with many of the paintings depicting seductive women, detectives, scenes of mystery and/or danger, and a wide range of other characters and scene elements – that got me the ‘Thunderball’ job.”
By the late 1950s McGinnis had found his artistic niche, painting cover art for pulp fiction paperbacks for $200 a piece. These books “were intended to be read at home or on the train and then thrown away. My illustration work went through the roof. I raised three kids on it. A lot of illustrators wouldn’t do them—they were considered cheap and low-grade. But I enjoyed doing them. I didn’t see anything demeaning about it.” He eventually painted the cover art of more than 1,400 paperbacks.
McGinnis’s first big break came when he was hired to illustrate Dell’s line of Michael Shayne mysteries. They were built around a rangy, redheaded Miami private investigator and were penned originally by Davis Dresser, a Chicago-born, Texas-bred ex-civil engineer who sported an eye patch (the consequence of a barbed-wire mishap during his boyhood) and wrote under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. Scott notes that between 1958 and 1968, McGinnis created for the Shayne books 86 portraits of women—most of them pictured alone—beginning with The Private Practice of Michael Shayne.
In 1961 the artist scored an even bigger commission, this time from Signet, which led to his fashioning 100 covers for a best-selling succession of short novels concocted by a English-born Australian writer named Alan Geoffrey Yates, better recognized by his nom de plume, Carter Brown…
Coming from the numerous paperback covers that helped those pulp thrillers sell millions of copies, Robert McGinnis was brilliantly suited to design the films of that era, full of verve, immensely cool and always sexy.
It started with the stunning rendition of elegant Audrey Hepburn clutching a cigarette holder, in her little black dress, immaculately coiffed, and looking at you from the poster of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
This iconic poster brought Robert McGinnis, the ace cover artist for countless paperbacks, into the world of film. and we are all the more lucky for it. For the career in poster art that started in Breakfast at Tiffany’s moved soon to what was part of a phenomena in the 60s and 70s.
Bond, James Bond.
Above is shown the few links Robert McGinnis had to comics.
Further reading: Killer Cover’s Month of McGinnis
When I was planning this project, I imagined posting occasional McGinnis paperback fronts in this blog, beginning on October 1 and continuing just past what was supposed to have been the October 28 release of the handsome new work, The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, by Robert E. McGinnis and Art Scott (Titan). However, it quickly became obvious that there were far too many exceptional choices, and that only daily installments in the series would suffice.
The Robert McGinnis pages tagged at Pulp International.
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