Robert Grossman is an American painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author. In a career spanning fifty years, Grossman’s illustrations have appeared over 500 times on the covers of various national publications. TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, The Times, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Evergreen Review, New York magazine, National Lampoon, and The New York Times have all published illustrations by him. His work has appeared in children’s books, including The 18th Emergency (text by Betsy C. Byers), and What Could a Hippopotamus Be? (text by Mike Thaler). He has created album covers for Columbia, Epic,Warner Bros., and United Artists.
Throughout his career, Grossman has employed an airbrush (he favors compressed air over piston) in order to render the sculptural forms which are his paintings’ most readily identified characteristic. Since with an airbrush a skilled user may lay in areas of shadow and light with either crisp or soft edges, the shapes possess a high degree of visual verisimilitude. Grossman is sometimes credited with spearheading a resurgence of the tool in illustration; for decades it had been used primarily for photo retouching.