Bruce McCall was an artist and humor writer. His art has been featured on over 80 New Yorker covers and featured in hundreds of magazines, including the original national Lampoon, Vanity Fair and more.
BRUCE McCALL
Bruce McCall, hailed by Steve Martin as “a comic hero of several generations,” was a prolific artist and satirist best known for his iconic covers for The New Yorker—more than 80 in total. He was one of the original staffers at National Lampoon magazine and Saturday Night Live and his art and satire has been featured in nearly every major magazine in North America. His first published collection, Zany Afternoons (1982), became a cult classic that influenced generations of artists and satirists.
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McCall's many forays into uncanny design have been described as "Retro-Futurism," a concept the artist expanded upon in the 2008 TED-Talk, "What is Retro-Futurism." His career also encompasses a host of artist-writer collaborations with lifelong friends, including Adam Gopnik (The Steps Across the Water), Ian Fraser (The New Yorker), and David Letterman (This Land Was Made for You and Me). McCall's archive of visual art includes hundreds of paintings, with a variety of subjects and materials that testify to his ranging fascinations with people, technologies, and ideas of the past, the future, and the reliably constant absurdity that comes up in between. An exhibition of his selected work, Bruce McCall's New York, opened at the New-York Historical Society in April 2021. Bruce McCall died on May 5th, 2023.
Bruce McCall, hailed by Steve Martin as “a comic hero of several generations,” was an artist and satirist best known for his iconic covers for The New Yorker—more than 80 in total.