The New York Times - 08.10.2019

Mac Conner, a prodigious illus-
trator whose realistic, colorful and
often dramatic paintings for ma-
jor magazines and advertisers
helped lend a distinctive look to
postwar popular culture, died on
Sept. 26 at his home in Manhattan.
He was 105.
His death was confirmed by a
family spokeswoman.
Mr. Conner thrived as an artist
from the late 1940s to the early
’60s, when magazines still prized
illustrations for short stories, and
advertising agencies on Madison
Avenue valued artwork over pho-
tography to pitch clients’ prod-
ucts.
Mr. Conner’s illustrations,
largely in gouache, appeared in
magazines like The Saturday
Evening Post, Redbook and Wom-
an’s Day, and in ads for United Air
Lines, Armco Steel, Blue Bell den-
im and many other companies.
Mr. Conner said he wanted to
tell a story in all of his work, but he
had a pragmatic assessment of its
ultimate value. “You don’t give a
damn whether it’s hanging on the
wall or is put into the trash after-
ward,” he told the British newspa-
per The Telegraph in 2015.
The stories he told for advertis-
ers were largely upbeat ones
about prosperous, mostly subur-
ban life in the 1950s.
A smiling boy hangs upside
down from a tree limb wearing
Blue Bell overalls while his sister,
also in overalls, rakes leaves be-
low. Another happy boy, in a hospi-
tal, is helped in his recovery by
air-conditioning equipment man-
ufactured by Carrier. And a family
of four enjoys a day on the verdant
grass surrounding an atomic
plant made by American Machine
& Foundry.
Mr. Conner found greater artis-
tic freedom in illustrating fiction
for magazines.
For “Let’s Take a Trip Up the
Nile,” a short story in a 1950 issue
of This Week, he depicted a man
kneeling before a woman on the
landing of a fire escape. Com-
posed like a movie scene, it
showed the couple (was he
proposing? apologizing?) from a
high angle, probably from the
floor above them.
For “Veni, Vidi, Video,” a 1949
story in Collier’s about a man try-
ing to woo a woman by purchasing
a television set, Mr. Conner cap-
tured the novelty of the infant me-
dium’s arrival in a home. Again, he
used a high angle to set his scene:
About two dozen people (and a
dog) crowd into a living room,
nearly all of them standing trans-
fixed by a boxing match on the
screen.
“He’s the only guy with a televi-
sion, so all the neighbors came to
see the game,” Mr. Conner said in
an interview with Channel 4 in
Britain in 2015, when an exhibition
of his work that had opened at the
Museum of the City of New York
had moved to the House of Illus-
tration in London.
Many of his paintings were for
women’s magazines, where he al-
most invariably portrayed women

as beautiful, sophisticated and fash- ionable. “He was alert to changing neck- lines, styles and glove lengths,” Sar- ah Henry, deputy director and chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York, said in a phone inter-

view. “His women were powerful figures; he was sympathetic to them, and he made them the center of the stories. They definitely weren’t props.” Mr. Conner had a noirish side, which suited the crime stories he illustrated. For a 1954 yarn in This Week, he captured the shooting of a police officer in a jewelry store. In shades of black, blue and white, he showed the officer clutching his chest after being struck by a bullet, a wisp of smoke snaking

out of the killer’s gun, and a fright- ened little boy watching outside the shop. McCauley Conner was born on Nov. 12, 1913, in Newport, N.J. His parents, Ross and Maud, owned a general store. A shy youngster, Mac admired the work of Norman Rockwell and found it easy to ex- press himself by drawing people; it led him to take a correspon- dence course in illustration. Mr. Conner sold his first cover illustration to The Saturday

Evening Post while still in his teens. He later graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the Univer- sity of the Arts). He also studied under the renowned illustrator Harvey Dunn at the Grand Cen- tral School of Art, in the Manhat- tan train terminal of the same name. “He didn’t like pretty pictures,” Mr. Conner said of Mr. Dunn in the Telegraph interview. “He wanted them to tell a story. He was direct — ‘Is that a red dress? Well make it red, dammit!’ ” While in the Navy, Mr. Conner painted signs and illustrated training materials. He found enough regular work after the war that he and two part- ners were able to start a studio in

Their company, Neeley As-
sociates, provided illustrations to
magazine publishers and adver-
tising agencies from a team of art-
ists.
Mr. Conner’s advertising and
magazine work continued for
about another decade, until pho-
tography became a more favored
alternative to illustrations. He
shifted to painting cover images
for romance novels and eventu-
ally shifted again, to illustrating
children’s books, including “Doro-
thy and the Misfit Chimp” (2014),
written by Paul Dalio, a step-
grandson.
In addition to Mr. Dalio, Mr.
Conner is survived by a step-
daughter, Barbara Dalio; a step-
son, Louis Gabaldoni; three other
step-grandsons; and three step-
greatgrandchildren. His wife,
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
Conner, an artist who was known

as Gerta and whose grandmother founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, died in 2009. A cousin, Gloria Vanderbilt, died earlier this year. Mr. Conner was nearing his 101st birthday in 2014 when the exhibition of his work at the Mu- seum of the City of New York opened. Ms. Henry said the exhibition explored “an important moment in American media history,” add- ing, “It was the heyday of pictorial magazines and Madison Avenue — and how they shaped the way Americans looked at themselves.” The exhibition opened during the run of “Mad Men,” the hit television series about advertising ex- ecutives set mainly in the 1960s. The exhibition linked Mr. Conner to the show by calling him an “original Mad Man,” although he had never held a job at an ad agency. (He did say, however, that he enjoyed Manhattan during that time, working late and often drinking at the Stork Club.) When his show moved on to the Delaware Art Museum, in Wil- mington in 2017, he reflected on what his younger self had done. “It’s good for the old ego, of course,” he told the museum in a video, referring to the exhibition. “You look around and see what you’ve accomplished over the years.” He added: “I can’t even draw a line now. I can’t even draw a line. I look at this stuff and I say, ‘How the hell did that guy do it?’ ”

Mac Conner, 105, Illustrator Who Captured Postwar Era in Ads and Magazines

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

MAC CONNER Mr. Conner used high angles in his work, including an ad for Blue Bell denim, left, and an illustration for a 1950 short story, “Let’s Take a Trip Up the Nile,” right.

MAC CONNER

Mr. Conner at 100 in 2014, when the Museum of the City of New York opened an exhibition on his work. The show called him an “Original Mad Man,” although he never held a job at an agency.

NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Painting happy scenes

of American life for

Madison Avenue.

A24 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019

Su Beng, a revolutionary widely
known as the father of Taiwan in-
dependence for his efforts to liber-
ate the island from colonial rule,
died on Sept. 20 in Taipei, the capi-
tal. He was 100.
His death, at Taipei Medical
University Hospital, was con-
firmed by Ray Jade Chen, the hos-
pital’s superintendent, who said
the cause was pneumonia.
Mr. Su’s stature as a key figure
in the independence movement
was cemented when he wrote
“Taiwan’s 400-Year History,” a
three-volume foundational book
published in 1962 that embraced
the notion that centuries of coloni-
zation had given Taiwan’s people
a distinct identity in East Asia.
Mr. Sun began his political life
seeking to free Taiwan from the

yoke of Japanese colonial rule,
only to find himself, decades later,
simultaneously fighting two op-
pressive Chinese governments —
the Communists in Beijing and a
nationalist regime in Taipei —
each standing in the way of Tai-
wanese self-determination.
As a university student, Mr. Su
had taken to Marxism and lived in
China, where he assisted Mao Ze-
dong’s revolution for more than
seven years. But after Mao tri-
umphed in 1949 over nationalist
forces led by Chiang Kai-shek in
the Chinese civil war, Mr. Su aban-
doned the Communist Party that
sought to recruit him.
The reason, he said in an inter-
view in March, was that after wit-
nessing countless executions of
Chinese by Communist forces, he

realized that their true ideology was not Marxism but rule by fear. “Why should you need to kill so many people to move things for- ward?” he asked. He returned to Taiwan. No long- er a Japanese colony, it had become the new base for Chiang’s vanquished Republic of China government, now ensconced about 100 miles from the mainland across the Strait of Formosa. Tai- wan had also entered what would become a nearly four-decade peri- od of martial law known as the White Terror, under which Chi- ang’s party, the Kuomintang, ar- rested and tortured more than 100,000 people and executed more than 1,000. Determined to overthrow the Republic of China and establish a Taiwanese state, Mr. Su and oth- ers drew up plans to assassinate Chiang, who had become a Cold War ally of the United States. But in 1952 their plot was discovered, and Mr. Su stole away to the north- ern port of Keelung, where he made his escape to Japan on a boat exporting bananas. In Japan he reunited with his girlfriend, Hiraga Kyoko, whom he had met years earlier in China. Months later, the couple opened a restaurant, New Gourmet, in To- kyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood. (The restaurant still operates, under different management.) He continued his underground opera- tions from Tokyo, training Tai- wanese revolutionaries in the guerrilla tactics he had learned in China. New Gourmet (which special- ized in noodles and boiled dump- lings) also generated enough rev- enue to support Mr. Su’s long-term endeavors, including researching and writing his monumental “Tai- wan’s 400-Year History.” The work, published at first in Japanese, became one of countless forbidden books on Taiwan under the government’s martial law.

“Su Beng’s book is the foundational text of a specifically Tai- wanese history,” said Jonathan Sullivan, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in England. “Su himself was a piv- otal figure, not just for the Taiwan independence movement, but for what he did to center Taiwan-

eseness and the Taiwanese expe- rience outside the narrative of Tai- wan’s colonizers.” With regulars still slurping down bowls of noodles in his restaurant, Mr. Su founded the Taiwanese Independence Associ- ation in 1967. Members he trained in guerrilla warfare would go on to

launch arson and bombing attacks against police stations and army trains as well as a failed assassi- nation attempt against Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching- kuo, at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1970. Around the time of the elder Chiang’s death in 1975, Mr. Su switched from advocating violent revolution to promoting revolution by peaceful means. It was at that time, he said, that he determined that realism should trump idealism. In 1980, the first Chinese-lan- guage copies of his book were published, in San Jose, Calif., reaching a younger Taiwanese readership that did not speak Jap- anese. With nearly 2,400 pages over three volumes, the new edi- tion fed a growing Taiwanese democracy movement, which was largely being driven by United States-trained Taiwanese lawyers. These lawyers would go on to start the first major opposition party in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party, in 1986, one year before the younger Chiang, as president, declared the end of 38 years of martial law. In the 1990s, Taiwan began to move away from the Chinese identity that had been forced on the island’s people by the Kuomintang and to embrace its own identity, a blend of Austronesian and Chi- nese cultures shaped by the colonial rulers from the Nether- lands, Spain, Japan and China. Mr. Su returned to Taiwan from Japan in 1993, the year after Tai- wan’s first democratic legislative elections and three years before its first presidential contest. It wasn’t until after the land- mark election of 2016, however, that both the executive and legislative branches of the Republic of China government in Taiwan were controlled by people who consid- ered their nationality to be Tai- wanese.

Since then, President Tsai Ing- wen, a Cornell-trained lawyer, and her Democratic Progressive Party cohort in the legislature have governed Taiwan. All the while it has become increasingly under threat by Beijing, which continues to claim Taiwan as its territory despite having never ruled it. Mr. Su remained optimistic in the face of China’s rising threat, while acknowledging the difficul- ties posed by Taiwan’s highly po- larized society. Although there is a consensus among the Taiwanese against unification with China, there are major differences of opinion regarding how close the relationship should be. “Taiwanese society has its is- sues — it’s not united,” Mr. Su said. “But when threatened it will come together.” He was born Lim Tiau-hui on Nov. 9, 1918, in Taipei into a mid- dle-class family. His mother, Si A- siu, steeped him in Confucian culture. His father, Lim Tse-tshuan, was an agronomist with anticolo- nial activist friends. As Lim Tiau-hui, he studied eco- nomics and politics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He took the pseudonym Su Beng when he wrote “Taiwan’s 400-Year His- tory.” He would be known by that name — meaning “clearly seeing history” in Taiwanese — for the rest of his life. He did not leave any immediate survivors. President Tsai visited Mr. Su in the hospital during his last days. He had been a senior adviser to her since her inauguration in 2016 and had been supporting her re- election; she faces a pro-China candidate, Han Kuo-yu, in Janu- ary. Huang Min-hung, the director of the Su Beng Education Founda- tion, said that one of the last things Mr. Su said was, “Tsai Ing-wen must win.”

Su Beng, 100, Father of Taiwan Independence Who Led With Pen, Dies

By CHRIS HORTON

His history book about

colonial rule fueled a

democracy movement.

Su Beng in 2007. His book, “Taiwan’s 400-Year History,” published in 1962, shaped a new narrative about the island’s identity.

NIR ELIAS/REUTERS

More obituaries appear on Page A21.

The New York Times - 08.10.2019

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources