Mac Conner: A New York Life

Commercial artist McCauley (“Mac”) Conner began as a sign painter then moved to New York as a young man to work on wartime Navy publications and stayed on to make a career in the city’s publishing industry. He illustrated ads from the late 1940s through the early 1960s for all the major brands and illustrated short stories and other fiction in major magazines.

Let’s Take a Trip Up the Nile, published in This Week magazine, 1950.
Photograph: Museum of the City of New York

An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York will display more than 70 of Conner’s hand-painted illustrations for advertising campaigns and women’s magazines like Redbook and McCall’s, made during the years after World War II when commercial artists helped to redefine American style and culture.

Hold On Tight, published in Redbook, 1958.
Photograph: Museum of the City of New York

His work is getting renewed attention decades later as a result of the popularity of “Mad Men,” the television series about a make-believe Manhattan agency in the ’60s.

Killer in the Club Car in This Week Magazine, 1954
Photograph: Museum of the City of New York

The exhibition is scheduled to run from Sept. 10 through Jan. 11