Murray Tinkelman\nBorn February 4th 1933, Passed January 20th 2016\nEducation Cooper Union, Brooklyn Museum of Art\n

At the High School of Industrial Art, he was encouraged to experiment with many mediums, from gouache and watercolor to silkscreen, but felt most comfortable working in pen and ink. Tinkelman recalled, “As a kid, I loved looking through the pages of illustrated dictionaries and encyclopedias, which were filled with technical drawings. I also loved the color present in black and white, and I found that I had a facility for it.” The artist’s first job after high school was at a comic book studio run by pioneering comics packager Jerry Iger. At the age of nineteen, he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War and served his time in Germany, which allowed him to remain active as an artist. \n\nHe attended Cooper Union for two years but found his true home at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he was awarded a full scholarship.\n\nThe greeting card industry was booming in the early 1950s, and Tinkelman gained professional experience at three noted New York firms—Norcross Greeting Card Company, American Artists Group, and Wallace Brown, where he scaled card illustrations to size and designed boxed sets. Unsatisfied by the rote nature of these jobs, he felt compelled to explore more creative opportunities, and found what he was looking for in the pages of a 1956 Art Directors Club Annual featuring the art of illustration masters Lorraine Fox, Jon Whitcomb, and Coby Whitmore.\n\nTinkelman got hired on at Cooper Studio, artists worked on a freelance basis and paid the firm fifty percent of all advertising commissions received; fees for editorial jobs, which popularized their work in mass circulation magazines, were retained by the artist.\n\nHe Tinkelman’s work was fresh and contemporary with a decorative, expressionist edge, in contrast with the more mainstream art of the romance and glamour illustrators that the studio represented. Cooper understood that the look and feel of illustration was changing in the marketplace, but the company’s account executives were less convinced about Tinkelman’s approach, and did not initially promote it. His first year at Cooper Studio was lean, but assignments began to come in, and he remembers his time there as positive and fulfilling.\n\nn 1963, Tinkelman was invited to teach an illustration course at Parsons School of Design in New York, and found his days in the classroom to be interesting and fulfilling. \n\nTeaching\nHe is Professor Emeritus from Syracuse University where he taught in the undergraduate program and was the senior advisor in the Independent Study MA Program in Illustration for over 25 years from 1979 - 2006.\n\nMurray is now the Director of the Limited Residency MFA program at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. This program is completely dedicated to the field of Illustration.\n\nTinkelman travels around the country to colleges, universities and museums, giving entertaining slide presentations on his own work, The History of American Illustration, and other art topics.\n\nAwards\nTinkelman has been named the recipient of the 1999 Distinguished Educator in the Arts award from the Society of Illustrators in New York. He has received the 1995 Sports Artist of the Year from The United States Sports Academy, the 1970 Artist of the Year award from The Graphic Arts Guild in New York City, and the 2001 Syracuse University Faculty Service Citation.\n\nIllustration gallery: http://tinkelmanstudio.com/

Murray Tinkelman History of American Illustration