Episode 34: Emanuel Schongut
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As someone deeply enamored with illustration and a collector of old magazines, I always pay attention to the names of illustrators I come across in my archive. One illustration in a 1979 issue of Cosmopolitan particularly caught my eye (first image in the slideshow above)—a watercolor of two women by Emanuel Schongut, it was unlike the work of any other illustrators I know of from that era. The illustrators I’ve previously interviewed for this podcast (Barbara Nessim, David Lance Goines, and Mel Odom), have careers that overlap with Schongut’s yet their styles differ greatly.
The perfectly rendered forms and shadows in watercolour, the elegant pen lines, the saturated colours—his work almost seemed to come from an earlier era. As I came to know Manny Schongut’s work better, I found that there was a wide diversity of styles in his portfolio—something that he admits in this interview possibly hindered his career as editors had trouble pigeonholing him.
Emanuel Schongut
I reached out to Manny and we spoke over Zoom last year. Manny was born in upstate New York in 1936. He studied at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, under Richard Lindner among others, before teaching there in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. He then became a freelance illustrator, primarily known for designing and painting a large number of book covers for Doubleday. Working in watercolor, pencil, and pen and ink, Schongut developed a “distinctive style usually featuring human figures and abstract images in stark configurations, avoiding bright colors and elaborate detail, and preferring more subdued and uncluttered designs.”
In the early 1970s, he was represented by Push Pin Studios, the legendary graphic design and illustration firm founded by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. Taking a more traditional figurative tack, Manny’s work appeared in New York magazine, the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, Redbook, and many other publications. Starting in the 1970s, Schongut began working on children’s books—so far, he has illustrated over twenty, and been the author of five of those.
In the 1980s, due to ailing parents and a changing New York City, he returned to upstate New York—a move that engendered a more fallow period in his career. In the interview, he speaks very openly about the hardships of this period, the insecurities of a faltering career. In the early 1990s, Manny moved to San Francisco, where he is still based. His partner of many years, performance artist Bill Morrison, passed away in 2013. Manny continues to paint—often posting to Flickr, where he is part of a large and vibrant illustration community—and work on the placement of his partner’s archive. Much of Manny’s archive is in the process of being transferred to the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Permanent Collection of Illustration Art. Some of his gay-themed work (done under a pseudonym) is in the collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
From the traditional watercolours that found acclaim in children’s books to the highly conceptual book covers he designed in the 1960s, Schongut has painted it all.
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