Louis Glanzman: "The real painting artist"

There are a lot of graphic arts professionals on the Today's Inspiration daily mailing list including several, like Harry Borgman and Charlie Allen, who were there on the front lines during the mid-century period we all adore. But the mid-century illustrator who has been a TI list member the longest is the man his brother Sam once described in an interview as "the real painting artist", Louis S. Glanzman.


Lou and his wife Fran have been following Today's Inspiration every day since long before it was a blog. At the time, I was sending one scan out each day to about a hundred people (now its nearly a thousand!)

On one particular occasion I had collected the images you see here today in preparation for a week of emails to my subscribers. I decided to do a little detective work on the artist and discovered Lou's website!


Lou already has a comprehensive biography available on his site, so I won't spend too much time on that here.


What I've done for this week is collect about a dozen pieces Lou did for Collier's magazine between 1952 and 1957 (when the magazine folded). I'm hoping to ask Lou some specific questions about those assignments over the course of this week and present the images along with his answers.


Unfortunately replies to my emails to Fran and Lou have been sporadic so I can't promise you we'll hear back from them in time... but "the show will go on" either way.


Louis Glanzman did some inspired work for Collier's AD, Bill Chessman, during the mid-1950s. Watching his style evolve and mature during this clearly busy time will be interesting, to say the least.

* Louis Glanzman's website

* My Louis Glanzman Flickr set.