Fred Marcellino
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Fred Marcellino (October 25, 1939-July 12, 2001) was an illustrator and later an author of children's books who was very influential in the book industry. Publisher Nan Talese said that Marcellino could "in one image, translate the whole feeling and style of a book." Such was the case with his evocative painting for Judith Rossner's August, published and edited by Talese. Among many other commissions, he was responsible for the covers of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, Thomas Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and the 1987 Dell Laurel Leaf edition of Allen Appel's Time After Time.
Born in Brooklyn, Marcellino began as an abstract expressionist painter and spent 1963 studying in Venice on a Fulbright Scholarship. Returning to the United States, he went in a new direction as a designer and illustrator with the main focus on LP cover art illustrating the albums of rock musicians. By 1969, he was creating record album covers for Capitol, Decca and Polygram.
He entered the book publishing field by 1975, producing 40 jackets a year for 15 years. He is sometimes credited with having revolutionized the style of book cover design in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s with notable work on such books as Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and William Wharton's Birdy.
Illustrators were sometimes presented with tip sheets suggesting pages in the manuscript the illustrator might find a suitable character or location to illustrate. Marcellino, however, insisted on reading the entire manuscript and producing a carefully designed, tasteful illustration that captured the overall mood of the book, often symbolically. Art director Steven Heller described Marcellino's approach:
- His surreal landscapes, exotic backdrops, impressionist palette, and precisionist typography defined a particular kind of literary genre. By "defined" I mean Marcellino gave authors including Anne Tyler, Tom Wolfe, Milan Kundera, Judith Rossner, Margaret Atwood and Primo Levi, to name but a few, a visual persona that underscored their words and ideas. Marcellino's distinctive personal style never conflicted with the writers' character, but like the best graphic interpreters he added dimension that was not always there. He also, and perhaps most importantly, challenged the strict marketing conventions imposed on packaging fiction and non-fiction blockbusters that required gigantic type for the author's name and a small, literal illustration of the plot or theme. Although these kinds of covers grabbed attention there was little aesthetic resonance. Marcellino introduced subtly painted and smartly lettered mini-posters that established allure. He was a master of sky and many of his book jacket illustrations use rich, cloud-studded skyscapes as backdrops and dramatic light sources for effect. He typically rendered the light of early dawn and late afternoon in pastel hues and airbrush smoothness to create surreal auras. The way in which he manipulated light on such subjects as walls, chairs, and doors enabled him to transform the commonplace into charged graphic symbols.
In the mid-1980s, he began doing children's books, starting with Tor Seidler's A Rat's Tale. He found it to be a different experience, commenting:
- Each picture is a link in a chain, and they all exist in counterpoint with the text. And although you want each picture to have impact, just like a jacket, the book illustration can also be much more subtle. It can be pondered and savored over a period of time. It's a very different discipline from what I was used to, but I must say it was love at first sight.
Charles Perrault's Puss in Boots, his first full-color picture book, won a 1991 Caldecott honor, and he won more awards with The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Wainscott Weasel, The Pelican Chorus and Other Nonsense, The Story of Little Babaji (a politically correct version of Little Black Sambo) and Ouch! (adapted from the Grimm tale, The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs).
He moved into writing with I, Crocodile (1999), honored by The New York Times (Best Books of the Year), Publishers Weekly (Best Book of the Year), Child magazine (Best Book of the Year), the New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Illustrated Picture Books) and the ALA (Notable Book).
In 1998, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, and he died on July 12, 2001. At the time of his death, he was working on the I, Crocodile sequel, Arrivederci, Crocodile, or See You Later, Alligator.
Dancing by the Light of the Moon: The Art of Fred Marcellino was an exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, from November 9, 2002 until January 26, 2003. The exhibition will next be on display at the Los Angeles Public Library in Los Angeles, California from April 7 through July 29, 2007.
