Brad Holland 1943-2025

 

We have just learned of the passing of illustrator Brad Holland after a fatal operation.  For lack of more information, here are excerpts from his Wikipedia entry.

Brad Holland is a self-taught artist whose work has appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and many other national and international publications. 

Paintings by the artist have been exhibited in museums around the world, including one-man exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Clermont-Ferrand, France; The Museum of American Illustration, New York City.

Born in Fremont, Ohio, Holland began sending drawings to Walt Disney, as well as the Saturday Evening Post at the age of 15. 

At 17, after receiving a box of his drawings back from Disney with a Mickey Mouse masthead rejection letter as well as numerous rejection letters from the Saturday Evening Post, Holland traveled by bus to Chicago where he found odd jobs, including sweeping the floor of a tattoo parlor. 

At age 20 the artist was hired by Hallmark in Kansas City to illustrate books as a staff artist. 

Among the books he would illustrate for Hallmark was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. 

In 1967 at age 23, Holland moved to New York City to pursue a career as a full-time freelance illustrator.

Although Holland's first prominent editorial art work appeared in Avant-Garde magazine in 1968 under the art direction of Herb Lubalin, the two significant milestones in Holland's early career were becoming a regular contributor to Playboy starting in 1967 and op-ed illustrator at The New York Times in 1971.

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At Playboy, his talent was first recognized by art director Art Paul, who after seeing the artists work invited him to become a monthly contributor.

Hollands' monthly contributions to Playboy accompanied the Ribald Classics series.

At The New York Times, Holland was brought in by  Jean-Claude Suares, the first art director of the op-ed page and who is credited with bringing the first works of illustration to the editorial page of the paper.

Holland's contributions to the Times op-ed page were seen as a fundamental shift in how illustration could be used in print, as more often than not Holland treated the art and text as two separate elements.

In 1969 Holland and Steven Heller founded the short-lived Asylum Press, created to represent and promote the work of artists and designers to underground and alternative press resources.

After the failure of the New York Review of Sex, Heller became the art director of Screw: The Sex Review, for which Holland did some covers.

Holland's drawings, in particular those about the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal, became the single largest body of work to be published in the first book of op-ed art: The Art of the Times, edited by Jean-Claude Suares and published in 1973 by Darien House.

In the same year, Holland would accompany Suares when the art director arranged an exhibition of op-ed art from the Times at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

By 1986, the artist was so firmly established as a prominent presence in the graphics community that The Washington Post said Holland was "the undisputed star of American Illustration".[

Writing for Print magazine, author Steven Heller wrote, "As Pollock redefined plastic art, Holland has radically changed the perception of illustration"

You can find a rich selection of his work on my Pinterest gallery.

Read also:

The Daily Heller: Mourning for Brad Holland (Stage One)