Robert E. McGinnis, Whose Lusty Illustrations Defined an Era, Dies at 99

New York Times

17-04-2025

Robert E. McGinnis, an illustrator whose lusty, photorealistic artwork of curvaceous women adorned more than 1,200 pulp paperbacks, as well as classic movie posters for 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' featuring Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder, and James Bond adventures including 'Thunderball,' died on March 10 at his home in Old Greenwich, Conn. He was 99.
His family confirmed the death.
Mr. McGinnis's female figures from the 1960s and '70s flaunted a bold sexuality, often in a state of semi undress, whether on the covers of detective novels by John D. MacDonald or on posters for movies like 'Barbarella' (1968), with a bikini-clad Jane Fonda, or Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore.
'Barbarella'
Beginning in 1958, he painted book covers for espionage, crime, Western, fantasy and other genre series — generally cheap paperbacks meant to grab a male reader's eye in a drugstore, only to be quickly read and discarded.
He was best known for illustrating detective series featuring the gumshoes Mike Shayne, Perry Mason and various shamuses in works by the prolific author Carter Brown. The femme fatales who adorned those covers became known collectively as 'the McGinnis Woman.'
The McGinnis Woman was long legged, impossibly beautiful and sophisticated looking. Her curves were the pneumatic ideal of Playboy and Barbie, but her allure was never that of Hugh Hefner's prized girl next door. She was a man-eater, sometimes topless, and was usually placed in the foreground while bumping the male character, the book's protagonist, into a secondary role.
To pose for his paintings, Mr. McGinnis hired svelte models, including the young Shere Hite, who went on to write the wide-selling 'The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality,' in 1976.
Playboy once approached Mr. McGinnis to fill the shoes of its illustrator Alberto Vargas, who drew the magazine's signature 'Vargas Girl' nudes, but Mr. McGinnis wasn't interested. 'I didn't like what was going on there, with the bunny tails and the ridiculous way they treated women,' he told Vanity Fair in 2017.
In 1961, he began getting offers from the publicity departments of movie studios, in an era when a film's poster was a narrative artwork used to entice viewers into a theater, not a Photoshopped afterthought.
'Breakfast at Tiffany's'
Mr. McGinnis is probably best known for the poster for 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961), for which he painted Hepburn in a snug black dress, a cat draped around her shoulders.
For numerous Bond movies, he painted scenes that burst with action and cemented in the public imagination the idea that the 007 movies featured not just a swank secret agent but also a series of 'Bond girls' with dangerous curves who were his foils.
'If you wanted beautiful women in Bond posters, there was only one man: Bob McGinnis,' Don Smolen, who commissioned the posters for United Artists, told the director Paul Jilbert for a 2008 documentary about Mr. McGinnis.
'Thunderball' and 'The Man With the Golden Gun'
Besides 'Thunderball' (1965), Mr. McGinnis also did the posters (sometimes in collaboration with another artist) for the Bond films 'You Only Live Twice' (1967), 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1969), 'Diamonds Are Forever' (1971), 'Live and Let Die' (1973) and 'The Man With the Golden Gun' (1974).
His other movie poster work included 'The Odd Couple' (1968) and 'Cotton Comes to Harlem' (1970), a psychedelic swirl that incorporated scantily clad women, a gold Rolls-Royce and men pointing guns, a familiar trope from the Blaxploitation genre.
'Cotton Comes to Harlem'
Robert Edwards McGinnis was born on Feb. 3, 1926, in Cincinnati, and raised in Wyoming, Ohio. He was the second of six children. His father, Nolan, was a construction worker who encouraged his son's talent for drawing. His mother, Mildred (Finch) McGinnis, enrolled him in drawing classes at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
A high school art teacher landed him an apprenticeship at the Walt Disney Studios in California, where he worked as a teenager until World War II paused the studios' cartoon output.
Mr. McGinnis enrolled at Ohio State University, where he played left tackle for the football team, which went undefeated in 1944.
Although he left before graduating, he met Ferne Mitchell there, and they married in 1948. The couple moved East, and Mr. McGinnis found work in advertising illustration.
In 1958, when an agent showed Mr. McGinnis's work to an art director at Dell, the book publisher, he was hired to paint covers for four paperbacks, at $200 each.
'Built For Trouble' and 'So Young, So Cold, So Fair'
He was soon in constant demand from publishers, earning much better rates.
'My illustration work went through the roof,' Mr. McGinnis told Vanity Fair. 'I raised three kids on it. A lot of illustrators wouldn't do them — they were considered cheap and low-grade. But I enjoyed doing them. I didn't see anything demeaning about it.'
'Modesty Blaise' and 'The Hellcat'
His wife of 75 years died in 2023. Mr. McGinnis is survived by their three children, Melinda Reynolds, Laurie McGinnis and Kyle McGinnis; three grandchildren; and a brother, David McGinnis.
Mr. McGinnis lived long enough to see his work acquire a retro-cool aura, thanks to such cultural hits as AMC's 'Mad Men,' the series about the 1960s advertising industry that ran for seven seasons beginning in 2007.
'The Art of Robert E. McGinnis,' a collection of his work, was published by Titan Books in 2014.
Two years later, the English fantasy author Neil Gaiman hired Mr. McGinnis to illustrate the covers of a series of his books that were being reissued in paperback, beginning with 'American Gods.' Mr. McGinnis, who didn't stop painting until shortly before his death, was then 90.
Describing their collaboration on his blog, Mr. Gaiman wrote: 'Each painting from McGinnis was better than the one before.'