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Drew Struzan, the American artist whose hand-painted posters helped define the look of modern blockbuster cinema, has died at the age of 78.
His passing was confirmed on Tuesday with a post on his Instagram account, which read: “It is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you that Drew Struzan left this world yesterday, October 13. I think it is important that you all know how many times he expressed to me the joy he felt in knowing how much you appreciated his art.”
Struzan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, his wife Dylan Struzan announced on his facebook In March, writing: “Drew can no longer paint or sign for you. He is not enjoying a well-deserved retirement, but fighting for his life.”
Struzan’s work, consisting of highly detailed portraits of actors set against richly colored cinematic backgrounds, became one of the most recognizable visual languages of late 20th-century film marketing.
In his career spanning five decades, he created over 150 posters, including star wars, Indiana Jones, back to the future, at, blade RunnerAnd The Shawshank Redemption,
Born on March 18, 1947, in Oregon City, Struzan moved to Pasadena, California as a young man to study at the Art Center College of Design.
He began his professional career as a commercial illustrator, creating album covers such as his painted sleeve for the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees and Earth, Wind & Fire and Alice Cooper. Welcome to my Nightmare (1975) will be cited later rolling stone Among the classic album covers of the modern era.
He has described earning fairly modest fees for album work in the 1970s. decibel He was paid $250 for a week’s work on Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. “People get the impression that I hang around and I’m part of the scene, but the reward was just doing the work,” he told the magazine. “I get feedback and it makes me feel good 40 years later.”
After joining the design studio Pacific Eye & Ear, Struzan began taking poster commissions in the mid-1970s for low-budget titles such as convulsion And kingdom of antsThis was when fellow illustrator Charles White III, who was hired at 20th Century Fox to design a poster for the 1978 re-release. star warsinvited Struzan to paint human characters which ultimately brought success to the artist.
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Speaking about his approach to poster art, Struzan said in a 2021 interview slashfilm: “I wanted to do something different, and I think the problem with a lot of early movie posters is that they looked like classic illustrations, making it seem like it was telling the whole story. I didn’t want to do that.
“I felt that art was more than just telling a story. In fact, it’s wrong to tell a story in a poster for a movie. I wasn’t trying to tell a story. I wanted to give a person a feeling of what they could expect.”
Struzan largely retired from full-time poster work after completing the campaign in 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal SkullBut he returned for select projects and limited commissions, such as for the D23 one-sheet Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), a poster of the documentary batkid begins (2015), and collectible prints for projects The Dark Tower and this how to Train Your Dragon series.
However, Struzan was not immune to changes in the industry, and once talked about how the market for hand-painted one-sheets had largely dried up as studios moved toward photographic, digitally manipulated poster art. “Art always needs patrons to survive. You can’t just sit at home and paint; you have to have someone who wants to buy what you do or hire you to do something to survive,” he explained. isn’t this good news in 2010.
His life and craft were the subject of Eric Sharkey’s 2013 documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Posterin which memories were collected from colleagues george lucas, Steven SpielbergAnd Harrison Ford.
As soon as news of Struzan’s death broke, tributes began pouring in from the film industry and fans. Spielberg told Diversity: “Drew created event art. His posters made many of our films destinations…and memories of those films and the age when we saw them are always evoked by looking at his iconic photorealistic imagery. In his own invented style, no one painted like Drew did.”
Posted by Guillermo del Toro blue sky: “The world lost a brilliant man, a gifted communicator and a supreme artist. I lost a friend – dear Drew.”
DC president Jim Lee paid tribute to Struzan on Instagram, calling him “a giant among giants.”