Frederic Goss
Cooper (Fred G. Cooper)
Born 29
Dec. 1883, McMinnville Ore.
Died, age
77 on 15 Nov. 1961, Pasadena, Calif.
Buried at Masonic
Cemetery, McMinnville
--Obit from Fri, 17 Nov. 1961 edition of The
Courier-News of Bridgewater, New Jersey
--Mr. Cooper died 15 Nov. 1961. Apparently the last LIFE
magazine cover he designed was its 2 Feb. 1962, edition featuring Astronaut
John Glenn.
An illustrated history: McMinnville native made an
indelible imprint on the graphic arts
Source: Article by Tom Henderson, McMinnville,
Oregon, News-Register staff writer in the News-Register Aug. 9, 2018 edition
McMinnville’s most influential
artist never saw his work displayed in a local gallery, but his style is indelibly
etched on the American consciousness.
You know it when you see it.
His characters, drawn in simple
lines with exaggerated features, were ubiquitous in the first quarter of the
20th century and practically defined commercial art in America during the Jazz
Age.
Many famous people can claim a
connection to Yamhill County. There’s animator Will Vinton, author Beverly
Cleary, journalist Nicholas Kristof, physicist Raemer Schreiber and even President
Herbert Hoover.
Fred G. Cooper doesn’t even have a
Wikipedia page. Few people outside graphic art circles remember his name.
Our forebears in the 1920s would
find that strange. It would be as if society forgot all about Dr. Seuss.
Cooper was in the same league back
then. People saw his work whenever they picked up the current issue of Life
magazine. He frequently drew the entire cover — right down to the lettering of
the logo.
His work was inescapable.
Even the advertisements that weren’t
drawn by Cooper were heavily influenced by him. Characters from the era with
little cartoon bodies and gigantic heads? Those were the work of one of
McMinnville’s most prominent, yet least remembered, native sons.
He was born in McMinnville in 1883,
the son of Paralee and Jacob Calvin Cooper. His father had run away from home
at age 14 to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War. By the time his
superiors realized he was underage, it was too late to send him home.
So they trained him as a spy, hoping
his youth would allay suspicion. After the war, he became a wheelwright in San
Francisco and met Paralee Spillman, whose ancestors had come to America to
fight in the Revolution alongside the Marquis de Lafayette.
The couple married in 1867. They
lived in San Francisco for a time, where the new bridegroom made as much as $1
a day — enough to eventually relocate to McMinnville.
They had eight children, including
the artistically inclined Fred on Dec. 29, 1883. His interest in illustration
surfaced early.
Leslie Cabarga, the author of the
1996 book “The Lettering and Graphic Design of F.G. Cooper,” reports that
Cooper spent his school days doodling in his textbooks and drawing mustaches on
image of various historic characters.
According to Cabarga, one of the
earliest samples of his work was a wood-framed slate board filled with chalk
drawings.
His mother, adept at bookbinding,
encouraged his artistic impulses. So did his father, a part-time surveyor.
Cooper adored his parents and never forgot their support, Cabarga wrote.
Cooper left McMinnville in 1890 to
move to San Francisco, where his older sister Ina was living. He spent one day
at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute before deciding he got a better education
working and sketching on San Francisco’s fishing boats and docks.
His first major paid art gig was a
1,400-page catalog of hardware and farming machinery.
After nine years in San Francisco,
he became engaged to Josephine Kendall Normand and saved enough money to move
to the East Coast. He was 21 when he hit New York City. He immediately made
important friends such as Charles Dana Gibson.
Gibson (1867-1944) was another great
graphic artist of the early 20th century. He was best known for creating the
iconic Gibson Girl, the embodiment of beautiful and independent American
womanhood of the era.
Cooper grew to similar prominence
after creating ads for the New York Edison Company as well as propaganda
posters during World War I.
He began his association with Life
magazine in 1904, and it lasted through the early ‘30s. By then, he was the
publication’s art director, with Gibson as publisher.
Life featured Cooper’s small cartoon
characters — or “cartoonettes,” as he called them — scampering about the pages.
Magazine professionals at the time called such characters “type warmers.”
However, Cooper’s typography hardly
needed warming. He was obsessed with typography, although he would have hated
it being called type. He preferred “lettering.”
His wartime propaganda posters, in
particular, were noted for their all-lowercase letters that conveyed a sense of
warmth and character. Cooper’s lettering, like his other graphic work, is often
instantly recognizable to people who have never given a second thought to where
it originates.
Fellow artists respected his work,
with some even asking him to create unique monogram signatures for them.
A couple of such requests came from
Rube Goldberg, known for his improbable cartoon inventions, and Milton Caniff,
creator of the comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon.”
Another came from President Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
In addition to his work for Life
magazine, Cooper designed the logos for Liberty and Collier’s magazines. The
lettering he designed for the Society of Illustrators can still reportedly be
seen, etched in stone, at 128 E. 63rd St. in New York.
Newspaper tycoon William Randolph
Hearst once offered Cooper $50,000 (roughly $250,000 in today’s money) if
Cooper agreed to never work for anyone else.
He declined, not caring for Hearst’s
politics and preferring to be a freelancer.
Hearst was having a bad string of
luck with Oregon cartoonists. Political cartoonist and Silverton native Homer
Davenport was lured away from Hearst in 1904 by the New York Daily Mail.
Cooper was a Renaissance man of his
time. He belonged to the Amateur Astronomers Club and the Poets Society of
America. He was also reputedly a mathematician and expert in English usage as
well as a landscape architect.
He was also one of the founding
members of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
One of Cooper’s more famous Life
magazine covers, from April 22, 1926, featured a hand-drawn logo and a calico
cat with a woman’s face.
Cooper died in 1962, shortly after
the cover of Life — by that time featuring its iconic red-and-white logo —
spotlighted astronaut John Glenn 18 days before he made his historic three
orbits of Earth.
Times had changed. Cooper, who was
20 years old when the Wright brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina, witnessed a lot of history and drew a few lines of it himself.
The lines have faded over the past
century, but they are still there — still part of the backdrop of daily life
for those who look hard enough.
