Franklin McMahon, RIP
March 8, 2012, 8:46 am
Posted by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
The images that many of us carry around in our imaginations come, not from witnessing an event, but the images created of those events. My images of Vatican II are very much the line drawings that Franklin McMahon drew of the great events in Rome in the 1960s. His fine drawing of John XXIII once graced a Commonweal cover. The obituary in Thursday’s Times also points to other iconic drawings, in this case, of the Emmet Till trial in 1955. McMahon’s drawings appeared in many venues, including the Till drawings in Life magazine. He was from Chicago! a modest man, always considering himself a “reporter,” rather than an artist. Here.
Thanks, Peggy, for this. What a remarkable drawing that is, dynamic, powerful, better than a photograph.
When a photograph captures a moment beautifully, it’s always an accident, and it’s very rare. An artist can do it every time.
One of my father’s artist friends, E. W. Ball, taught Franklin McMahon at one of the Chicago art schools. He told my father that McMahon, after his success, had declared that he owed it all to one teaching suggestion that Mr. Ball (as my siblings and I always called him) had made in an art class, something about switching from one kind pencil or drawing implement to another. Undoubtedly not the whole truth but a touching tribute to a teacher.
McMahon visited the old Commonweal offices on 37th and Madison, perhaps at the time of that John XXIII cover, and seemed to remember me, according to correspondence, mostly carried on, through his son Mark and at one point with my brother Martin. When our Fordham Center organized a conference on the Declaration on Religious Liberty in 2005, we showed outside the auditorium a wonderful video of his drawings about the Council. Somewhere I have some correspondence that I recall he always signed off with a line “Onward and upward!”
Courtesy of google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=franklin+mcmahon&num=100&hl=en&client=safari&tbo=d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=P79aT_mxGerc0QHb5eW6Dw&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=768&bih=900