Alan E. Cober (May 18, 1935 – January 17, 1998), born in New York City was an American illustrator. His artwork appeared in The New York Times, Life, Time and numerous other publications. Cober was inducted into the Illustration Hall of Fame in 2011, thirteen years after his death in 1998. Cober was frequently cited as one of the most innovative illustrators America has ever produced.
Early life and education
Cober was born in New York City, grew up in the Bronx and attended public schools. In 1952 he attended a preparatory school in Riverdale, the Barnard School for Boys. His father, Sol Walter Cohen was a criminal lawyer for 48 years until his death in 1974. The young artist was close to his father and through him, gained firsthand knowledge of courtrooms, police work and the detention of criminals. This experience would later inform his own views and subsequent art on perceived social inequities. His mother, Molly, was president of the Sarah Starkman League for Retarded Children. During his teenage years, Cober would accompany her as she cared for many children in her care.
Cober would initially attend the University of Vermont, but later graduated in 1966 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City
where the young artist would learn the importance of drawing and seeing. Cober was drafted into the Army in April 1958, going through basic training at Fort Dix, he spent the remaining two years of service teaching officers and heading the graphics department at the Special Warfare School, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Cober would spend those two years drawing and learning and that is where he felt he received his real education. He was one of a few illustrators during the 1960s to make gritty graphic commentary flourish in the rigid world of American illustration. The credit for works such as Cober's being published goes to art directors who were to bring innovative illustrations to print, notably among them Cipe Pineles at Seventeen, Richard Gangel at Sports Illustrated, and Henry Wolf at Esquire.
Cober would be commissioned for work by publications such as LIFE, LOOK, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Newsweek, Science Digest, The Atlantic, The New York Times and covers for Time magazine. His corporate clients included Exxon, CBS, American Airlines, IBM, General Electric, IT and Texaco.
When Cober decided he wanted to do a series of work on circus life, he got in touch with Kenneth Feld, owner of Barnum and Bailey Circus. Agreeable to the idea of Cober drawing the circus, Feld provided him with the credentials necessary to enter backstage. When the circus came to Madison Square Garden, Cober came in to create portraits of the characters and performers he took an interest in. He would become friends with many of the performers as they sat for portraits between their acts. Lou Jacobs was a favorite model of Cober's. Other popular performers who modeled for Cober were Mishu, billed as the "smallest man on earth", Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who would later become famous for his highwire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, as well as lion trainer, Gunther Gebel-Williams. Cober drew their living conditions in their trailers, their families and pets, depicting a culture unknown to the audience who could only appreciate the circus from the bleachers.
Among his many other notable journalistic assignments were his coverage of the shuttle liftoffs from Cape Canaveral for NASA, the 1980 presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter for TIME,
In 1992, the Katonah Museum of Art would display a thirty-year retrospective of Cober's visual reportage of news, culture and the environment. The exhibition would travel to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and then to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama. The exhibition was curated by Steven Heller
Four years after his death, an exhibition of his work, titled Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife, was organized by the Ringling School of Art and appeared at the University at Buffalo in 2002. The exhibit included over 100 drawings and was on display from February 15 through May 18 of 2002.
Bibliography
Cober would illustrate 25 books, two of which made The New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books: Winter's Eve (1969) and Mr. Corbett's Ghost (1968).
- Nothingatall, Nothingatall, Nothingatall by Robert Paul Smith, Harper & Row, 1965
- Tale of a Black Cat, by Carl A. Withers, Henry Holt & Company, 1966
- Viollet, by Julia Cunningham, Pantheon Books, 1966
- Ulysses by James Joyce, The Franklin Library, 1976
- Collected Poems, Essays on Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, The Franklin Library, 1977
- Aaron's Door by Miska Miles, Little Brown and Company, 1977
While teaching in Buffalo, an assignment was given out on Thursday, sketches were due on Friday and the finished piece was due the following Thursday. Classes were only held on Thursday and Friday because he flew to Buffalo on Thursday from downstate New York to teach the class, then flew back home on Friday. He also required at least one sketch a day in a personal journal. The assignments were usually 'live', meaning that the whole class' final pieces were submitted to a publication, and they chose one to print. The class took field trips to Toronto to see Henrik Drescher, to Phillip Burke's studio, to the Buffalo Museum to draw, to the Anthropology Lab on Campus to draw (dead creatures, including a dead person). Everything Cober taught centered around drawing. In his life drawing classes he was never interested in having the figure look exactly the way it should in nature. An interesting drawing was more important to him as a teacher.
He said of his teaching: "My students call it 'traumatic drawing' because of where I take them to draw."
He was the youngest artist ever named Artist of the Year by the Artists Guild in New York City, in 1966
- Illustration Hall of Fame, Society of Illustrators, 2011
- Ten Gold and two Silver medals, Society of Illustrators
- Distinguished Educator in the Arts Award, Society of Illustrators, 1998