Fred Marcellino

• Name — Fred Marcellino • Born — 25 October 1939 • Birthplace — Brooklyn, New York, United States • Died — 12 July 2001 • Place of death — New York City, New York, United States • Known for — Book jacket design, children's book illustration • Website — fredmarcellino.com

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 such singers and groups as Loretta Lynn, Manhattan Transfer and Fleetwood Mac. By 1969, he was creating record album covers for Capitol, Decca and PolyGram.

He entered the book publishing field in the 1970s, producing more than 40 jackets a year until he turned to children's books in the late 1980s. His designs, which traded marketing-driven covers for elegant images and typography, are credited with revolutionizing book jacket design in the United States, and he produced jackets for bestselling authors including Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera, and Anne Tyler. 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.

• November 9, 2002 - January 26, 2003: Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts • April 7 - July 29, 2007: Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, California • June 9 - October 29, 2011: National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, Abilene, TX • April 6 - May 20, 2012: Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Stamford, CT • July 14 - September 29, 2012: Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska • October 15 - December 24, 2012: Abraham Art Gallery at Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, TX • March 28 - June 2, 2013: Children's Museum of Houston, Houston, TX • November 17, 2013 - January 17, 2014: Greater Denton Arts Council, Denton, TX • June 30, 2015 - October 25, 2015: Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA