The career of illustrator McCauley (“Mac”) Conner helped to define the look of midcentury America. One of the original Mad Men, Conner's style was crisp and refined and very urban; life in the big city was a frequent theme. His work, which was published in such magazines as Redbook and McCall’s, owed a lot to the influence of Norman Rockwell (a boyhood idol), but also to film noir.
From the very first episode of Mad Men, viewers were hooked not only on the story but also on the show’s lavish attention to late-1950s/early-1960s clothing and furnishings. Mad Men sparked a revival of interest in midcentury aesthetics, and in some of the people who helped to create it more than 50 odd years ago. Now, one such person, illustrator McCauley (“Mac”) Conner, will be the subject of a retrospective opening September 10 at the Museum of the City of New York. The show will present highlights of a career that helped to define the look of the era.
Conner was born in 1913, and as a kid in New Jersey, grew up admiring Norman Rockwell. After mustering out of the Navy at the end of World War II, he became a commercial artist. (In fact, he worked on various military publications even while still in the service.) The style he developed was crisp and refined and very urban; life in the big city was a frequent theme. His work, which was published in such magazines as Redbook and McCall’s, owed a lot to Rockwell’s influence, but also to film noir. Connor often focused on the fraught relationship between men and women—tensions he’d capture with a look in the eye or small gesture as a man and woman passed on the street, say, or sat together in a restaurant. He revealed the turmoil roiling under the conformity of the Eisenhower years, using images to tell stories about sex and power dynamics that rivaled anything concocted by Matt Weiner. Like Weiner, Connor depicted a man’s world that frequently seemed quite mad.