Mario Cooper (Illustrator)

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Mario Ruben Cooper (born November 26, 1905 in Mexico City , † July 1995 in New York City ) was an American illustrator , watercolor painter , sculptor and author.

Life

Cooper's father was an American citizen from California and his mother was Mexican. When he was nine years old, his father took him to California - as his future wife Dale Meyers wrote - to escape the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution . Cooper received his artistic training first at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and then continued at the Grand Central School of Art and Columbia University in New York. He studied illustration with Pruett Carter and Harvey Dunn , and sculpture with Oronzio Maldarelli .

Mario Cooper initially worked primarily in advertising, in an engraving house (a re-engineering company, in the USA mostly in conjunction with an advertising agency ), at BBDO and as an art director at Lord & Taylor ; also as a specialist in lettering and layout . He had his breakthrough as an illustrator in 1930 when he first received an order from Collier’s . In the next twenty years published many of his works in Collier's , such as the illustrations for a series of detective novels by Agatha Christie that there as serialized novels were published. Most of the time he worked with colored inks on the drawing board , also with watercolors.

In addition to his work as an illustrator, he has also emerged as a watercolor painter . Cooper was president of the American Water Color Society from 1959 to 1986 and has also published several books on watercolor painting. He also occasionally took on orders as a sculptor for churches and other institutions.

Cooper has taught illustration at the Grand Central School of Art, Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, and the National Academy of Design, among others . He was a member of the Society of Illustrators, which posthumously inducted him into their Hall of Fame in 2009 , and the National Sculpture Society.

In 1954, Mario Cooper was accepted into the American Air Force 's art funding program, and later also into NASA's art funding program , which had been in existence since 1962, and which was primarily intended to document the success of space travel in the form of works of art.

Mario Cooper was married twice. His second wife (since 1964) was Dale Meyers, also a painter. The American Watercolor Society awards the $ 2,000 Mario Cooper and Dale Meyers Medal in recognition of special achievements in watercolor painting on the occasion of their annual exhibition. The Dolphin Medal , which is awarded by the American Watercolor Society to honor special services to art and especially watercolor painting, was designed by Cooper.

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According to Walt Reed, Cooper's illustrations are known for their “dramatic composition” combined with “flawless technique”. In a commendation article in Collier’s in 1944, it was said that hardly anyone was better at capturing the spirit of a story in their illustrations ("capturing the essential spirit of a story"), and therefore had been since that day in 1930 when he was at I came to the editorial office for the first time with a huge portfolio full of drawings, practically became part of Collier’s . Above all, the magazine's “lovely women drawings” were largely made by him.

In Collier’s, Coopers illustrated the Agatha Christie novels Appointment with Death (1937), Murder for Christmas (1938–39), Sad Cypress (1939–40), The Patriotic Murders (1940), Evil under the Sun (1940–41) , Murder in Retrospect (1941) and Moving Finger (1942), an abridged version of The Hollow entitled The Outraged Heart (1946) and her detective story Four and twenty blackbirds (1940); also Wife for Sale (1932) and Bread into Roses (1936) by Kathleen Norris , Arch of Triumph (English translation of Arc de Triomphe ) by Erich Maria Remarque (1945) and a number of short stories by other authors such as Guy Gilpatric and Stephen Morehouse Avery , Richard Connell , Charles Brackett , John Erskine , John Phillips Marquand , Thomas Monroe , Ernest Haycox , Margery Sharp , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Octavus Roy Cohen, and Alec Waugh .

Cooper also worked for a number of other magazines, such as Esquire and American Weekly . He also illustrated books, including The Story of Pocahontas ( Shirley Graham , 1953) or an edited short version by Ben Hur for The Golden Picture Classics (1956).

In the field of watercolor painting, Cooper was not only known for his works, but above all for his extensive teaching activities and his writings, which also had a didactic character.

As a sculptor he worked for St. Luke's Hospital in Denver , among others . He created two figures, the Evangelist Luke and a Madonna with the baby Jesus, which were placed there at the main entrance.

Appearance

Cooper was a relatively short but strong man. In 1944 it was said in Collier’s that he was five feet tall, i.e. about 1 meter 52, but had physically coped very well with taller people , also because of his judo skills . A photo of Cooper at a dress-up game was printed in Collier’s that same year . John Pike, also a watercolor artist from the Luftwaffe's art funding program, drew Cooper in 1969 during his 1969 NASA contract “in battle dress”, that is, with his work equipment (camera, binoculars, writing and painting utensils). The picture can be seen on the National Air and Space Museum page .

Fonts

  • Flower painting in watercolor . Reinhold, New York 1962; 2nd, revised edition 1972
  • Drawing and Painting the City. Reinhold, New York 1967
  • Painting with watercolor. Reinhold, New York 1971
  • Watercolor by Design. Watson-Guptill, New York 1980
  • The Art of Drapery. Styles and Techniques for Artists . Reinhold, New York 1983

literature

  • Walt Reed and Roger Reed: The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980. A century of illustration . Madison Square Press, New York 1984. Via the American Biographical Archive , Part 3, 301-302.
  • Ernest W. Watson: Forty Illustrators and How They Work . Watson Guptill, New York 1946, p. 71.

Web links

Biographical texts

Examples of the work

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See, for example, Joan Murray: Design for a Canadian Hero . Dundurn Press, Toronto and Oxford 1998, p. 26.
  2. ↑ Andrea Degener: Mario Cooper Illustrating Agatha Christie. Online at Washington University Libraries in St. Louis.
  3. ↑ See Tom D. Crouch about the NASA art funding program on the National Air and Space Museum website , including a watercolor of Apollo 11 at the start. Online .
  4. ^ Tara Atterberry: Awards, Honors & Prizes. Vol. 2. Gale Research Company, p. 180.
  5. ^ American Watercolor Society: Dolphin Program. Online .
  6. ^ The Week's Work. In: Collier’s , April 15, 1944, p. 57.
  7. ↑ Impressions of Cooper's teaching activities can often be found in the writings of his students, for example Donald Voorhees: Lessons from a Lifetime of Watercolor Painting , North Light Books, Cincinnati 2007, p. 140; Laurence C. Goldsmith: A Life in Watercolor , Hudson Hills Press, Manchester (Vermont) 2004, p. 7.
  8. ↑ A Welcome To All. In: The Living Church , Volume 137, Nov. 23, 1958, p. 38. Online .
  9. ^ The Week's Work. In: Collier’s , April 15, 1944, p. 57.
  10. ↑ Play's the Thing. In: Collier's, January 8, 1944, p. 26. Online .
  11. ↑ For Pike see his short biography on the page of the Watercolor Society.
  12. ^ John Pike: Mario Cooper in "Battle Dress" Apollo # 10 May 1969. Online .
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, Mario
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cooper, Mario Ruben (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American illustrator, watercolourist, sculptor and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Ciudad de México
DATE OF DEATH July 1995
Place of death New York City