ALAN MAGEE

Born in 1947 in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Alan Magee attended art school in Philadelphia and, in 1969, began working as an editorial and book illustrator in New York. 

Among his regular clients were Time,  Atlantic, Playboy, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and Simon & Schuster, Ballantine, Avon, and Bantam Books. 

During the 1970s Magee produced paintings for the covers of books by Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Irving, Henry Miller, Edward Abbey, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Stanley Elkin, John Neihardt, Ken Kesey, Russell Hoban, Agatha Christie, Patrick White, Arkady and Boris Strugatski, and others.

His illustrations received numerous awards including an American Book Award in 1982, Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts magazine and from the Society of Illustrators, Playboy magazine’s Annual Editorial Award, and awards from the Art Directors Clubs of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

In the late 1970s Magee began to concentrate on his personal paintings and in 1980 presented his first solo exhibition at Staempfli Gallery in New York.

Since that time, he has had annual one-person shows throughout the United States and Europe. In 1991 a ten-year retrospective, Alan Magee 1981-1991, traveled to four US museums. Archive, an exhibition of Magee’s black and white monotypes opened at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in November, 2000 and later traveled to the Portland Museum of Art, the University of New Hampshire at Durham, and the New England College Art Gallery.