VANITY FAIR

Walter Bernard, Milton Glaser, and McMullan at New York magazine, early 1970s.

​

STUDIO CITY

 

For 45 years McMullan did much of his work out of a studio at his house in Sag Harbor, New York, a 1950s prefab perched on Upper Sag Harbor Cove that he bought in 1970. Two years ago, he relocated back to Manhattan, where his new studio occupies a generic one-bedroom apartment five floors up in a brick tenement on a tree-lined Upper West Side block. The sounds of recess at the public elementary school across the street filter through the windows. Like the man himself, the studio is neat and uncluttered. The walls are covered with various McMullans—originals, posters, prints, a piece about him from The New York Times, mounted and framed by his daughter, Leigh McMullan Abramson, a lawyer turned writer who has contributed to The Atlantic and other publications. McMullan has been married to his wife (and Leigh’s mother), the writer Kate McMullan, since 1979. Together, they have authored an ongoing series of children’s books with titles such as I Stink (about a garbage truck) and I’m Mighty(about a tugboat). The books are modern classics and have become the basis of a new Amazon video series, The Stinky & Dirty Show.

 

His workstation, with its tilted drafting table, displays an envy-inducing degree of orderliness: Kolinsky sable brushes stand in tall containers, and the white-enamel butcher’s trays he uses as palettes are lined up according to color groups, arrayed with discrete blobs of watercolor paint. (McMullan has a special affection for the cobalt blue made by the Schmincke company.) For a guy who spends his waking hours channeling the Sturm und Drang of Lincoln Center’s dramatic productions, the place is—true to form—conspicuously drama-free.

 

This is where McMullan works from 9:30 until 5:30 every weekday, with a martini at the finish line. When he gets the call from Lincoln Center, he first reads the play or watches an earlier adaptation on video. He can start the visual brainstorming with a ballpoint pen on a legal pad or on old Filofax sheets. The ensuing process can be byzantine and arduous, best characterized by a line he used in 1998’s The Theater Posters of James McMullan, one of two illuminating books he wrote documenting the creation of his Lincoln Center posters: “Take two Prozac and call me in the morning.” (McMullan’s writings on illustration add up to arguably the most probing and entertaining investigation into the genre ever attempted.)

 

In McMullan’s case, the proverbial drawing board is frequently returned to as he sifts through sketches and ideas and layers of feedback from Lincoln Center. There’s a give-and-take, often lively. “He can get hot under the collar,” Bishop said. “He’ll defend the things he strongly believes in.” But just as easily McMullan will shift gears, like an actor toggling through different approaches to a character, until he strikes gold, ending up, as Sher put it, “somewhere mind-blowingly great you never could have imagined.” (A Stanford University business professor, McMullan said, uses the artist’s process as a way of teaching the concept of flexibility.)

 

When the approach has been decided on, McMullan typically employs a method he perfected during his years in journalism: taking photographs to get what he calls “information.” Models or, if available, actors pose. McMullan is an artist obsessed with the body, and all of his theater posters contain figures, often full-length ones. “In terms of the posters of the 20th century,” he said, “there are more feet in my posters than anyone else’s.” A typical McMullan image is all about movement and intense physicality: the heavily seated figure in his two classic posters for Six Degrees of Separation, the backside of the comely, broad-hatted passenger on the deck of a ship in the Anything Goes poster, all Art Deco curves. He is a master of the telling gesture, the writhing contortion, the fleeting expression: the illustrator’s classic tools.

 

When he’s ready to get down to business, he breaks into a special stash of watercolor paper, none of it made after the year 1955. The vintage stuff, McMullan says, has the right balance of absorption and resistance. His precious stockpile is now down to 80 sheets. (“It’s a race to the finish—whoever goes first, me or the paper.”) He tends to work small, sometimes four by eight inches. The fine lines you see on a McMullan poster are done with brushes—no pencils or pens. Much of what he does is “wet on wet,” that is, fields of watercolor meeting, or “fusing,” before they dry. This leads to a sustained series of accidents that bring energy to the image and excitement to the artist. “My work involves so much risk,” McMullan says. Sometimes the accidents aren’t so happy and the work ends up in the trash bin. Occasionally McMullan will execute an elaborate watercolor background, as with the poster for Albee’s A Delicate Balance. He’ll let it dry, admire it, and then attack it with an overlay in gouache (usually the figures), another technique that gamely courts disaster. If all goes well, the finished art is on its way to Lincoln Center, ready to be blown up into a three-sheet, with McMullan’s hand-painted, always striking lettering—remember South Pacific?—done on an affixed sheet of clear plastic.

 

You think of theater posters as having to pummel weary subway riders with screaming graphics, hard edges, riotous color. Yet McMullan’s watercolors and gouaches, for all their relative softness, cut through the urban noise. They’re the stage whispers that turn all heads. (Like anything posted in subway stations, McMullan’s posters are vulnerable to graffiti, a lopsided kind of collaboration that gallery and museum artists rarely endure.) Even so, there have been strikeouts along the way, such as the poster McMullan attempted in 1988 for a Mike Nichols production of Waiting for Godot. Nichols dinged the poster, apparently having made up his mind that he didn’t want a McMullan for the show, no matter how great and no matter how much Lincoln Center wanted one. It’s an experience that still sticks in the artist’s craw. “He accused me of not reading the play,” McMullan said. “Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a reader, and I do that part of the job.” The illustration showed an empty suit of clothes in the act of walking, the trousers going one way, the coat the other, a concept plucked from the first act of the play. (Small vindication: the poster was later printed and, according to McMullan, various people involved in the production bought and framed it.)

 

But those disappointments are rare, not unlike McMullan originals. The artist tends to hang on to them or give them to archives (such as the expansive James McMullan Collection at New York’s School of Visual Arts) or gift them to a lucky actor, director, or playwright. Prints and posters can be had at the Triton Gallery, in New York City; they’re a steal, often under $1,000 a pop. (The odd piece shows up on eBay from time to time.) Perhaps the modest prices reflect the fate of the lowly illustrator, even one as off-the-charts as McMullan, in an art market gone mad. As the caricaturist and satirist Edward Sorel, an admirer of McMullan’s, put it, “We live in a world with Jeff Koons—and the Motherwells and Franz Klines and Andy Warhols—and other extremely no-talent idiots that the world takes seriously as artists, while we, who take ourselves seriously as artists, are ignored as simply being ‘commercial.’ ” With trademark sarcasm, Sorel characterizes himself and McMullan—and, by extension, their illustrator ilk—as “the only sane people in an insane world.”

​