Alan E. Cober

Cober was frequently cited as one of the most innovative illustrators America has ever produced.

• Name — Alan E. Cober • Born — May 18, 1935 • Birthplace — New York City, United States • Died — January 17, 1998 • Place of death — Sarasota, Florida • Field — Illustration • Training — * University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont • School of Visual Arts, New York City • Awards — * Hamilton King Award, 1969 • Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, 2011

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.

Cober was one of a small group of American illustrators who initially brought aspects of modern art into commercial art. His magazine illustrations rejected the existing top-down approach of art direction and embraced a far more expressive and symbolic approach to the subject matter. He did not mimic a passage of text, as was the convention at the time in illustration, but instead embraced artistic interpretation. 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. In addition to illustration, his mediums included painting, printmaking and clay and ceramic sculpture.

In 1992, the Georgia Museum of Art displayed Cober's work in an exhibition titled Alan E. Cober: suite Georgia. The exhibition title refers to prints Cober completed during 1991 as the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair at the University Of Georgia. The exhibition included etchings made of such folk artists as Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, Reverend John D. Ruth as well as Georgia tourist attractions such as the statue of Br'er Rabbit in downtown Eatonton, Georgia. 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.

Cober taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Georgia, and the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. 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."

Cober is established in Library of Congress under n50032223. Cober is established in FAST under 10803. Cober is recorded as illustrator. The identifiers under which Alan E. Cober may be traced in institutional catalogues.