Artist Robert McCall died 26 February 2010 of a heart attack. Born in Ohio in 1919, he helped illustrate the space age.
Raised on a diet of science fiction, McCall knew he wanted to be an artist when he was 8 years old, but he was also passionately interested in science and technology, especially aviation. After high school, he won a scholarship to the Columbus Fine Art School. While attending school, he worked for a local sign shop, making posters and advertising billboards. He joined the Army Air Corps during World War II, but the war ended before he was sent overseas.
McCall and his new wife, Louise Harrup, moved to Chicago, where he worked as an advertising artist, while aiming “to become a first-rank illustrator, like Norman Rockwell or N.C. Wyeth.” They moved to New York in 1949, and he continued to work in advertising art, but also began painting magazine illustrations for the likes of Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Popular Science.
With the coming of the space program in the 1950s, McCall writes, as aviation moved from planes to rockets, so did he. “It was visually dramatic. All of the buildup to a manned launch, so theatrical and dramatic. It really inspired me.” In the middle of the decade, the Air Force started inviting artists to visit their facilities and paint about the experience; McCall jumped at the chance. “I got to fly in all the aircraft. I’d go to great lengths to get permission to fly in the backseat of a jet fighter.” When NASA instituted a similar program, again, McCall was at the front of the line. He also created several mission patches for NASA, including those of Apollo 17 (the last manned mission to the Moon) and the first and third Space Shuttle missions. Many of his paintings have been donated to the Pentagon, the Air Force Academy, air bases, and NASA.
In 1971, McCall did his first work for the US Post Office: the Decade of Achievement twin stamp that flew to the Moon on Apollo 15, and was canceled on the lunar surface by astronaut David Scott. His later stamp paintings include illustrations of the Pioneer flyby of Jupiter, Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, and the Viking Mars landing.
In the early 1960s, Life asked McCall to paint future spacecraft, and that work led to a meeting with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, from which McCall painted the iconic posters for 2001: A Space Odyssey. That work firmly ensconced him the science fiction realm. His other sf movie posters include a trio of 1979 releases: The Black Hole, Meteor, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
McCall’s “The Space Mural—A Cosmic View (reproduced from the NASM’s web site above right) is six stories tall, and greets visitors to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Other McCall murals are at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, and Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center’s “Spaceship Earth”.
A few years ago, after abandoning an attempt to establish a McCall Museum of Art, he donated 200 of his paintings, drawings, and prints to the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson (he has been living in Scottsdale). Receiving the donation, UA College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz said “Sometimes people like Bob McCall help point us in the direction of where science should be going. The futuristic views of his work will be inspiring to new explorations.”
Books of McCall’s art include Vision of the Future (1982, written by Ben Bova) and The Art of Robert McCall (1992). McCall’s own web site is resplendent with numerous examples of his work, a fitting tribute to a man who painted the future and inspired us to make it real. NASA has a gallery and remembrance of him here.
McCall is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, two daughters, and four grandchildren.