Bernie Fuchs (October 29, 1932 – September 17, 2009) was an American illustrator known for advertising art, magazine illustration and portraiture, including for a series of U.S. postage stamps.
Fuchs was born in O'Fallon, Illinois, on October 29, 1932. He grew up in humble circumstances with no father. His ambition was to be a trumpet player, but that ended after he lost three fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident the summer after he graduated from high school. Fuchs turned to art as a career, despite having had no formal art training. He enrolled in Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he graduated in 1954.
His first job was illustrating car advertisements for New Center Studios, located in Detroit. It was the largest and most successful studio in Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s. Bernie was recognized immediately for his incredible talent and pulled in major accounts for Greenwald. Within a few years of moving to Detroit, Fuchs' opened a studio named The Art Group.
Fuchs was commissioned for the illustration of four U.S. postage stamps released in 1998. The stamps featured folk musicians Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, and Josh White. Fuchs also illustrated several children's picture books. He painted portraits of several U.S. Presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and athletes and celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Ted Koppel and Katharine Hepburn as well as illustrations of Carol Burnett.
Fuchs was the youngest illustrator ever elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. In 1991, Fuchs was named Sport Artist of the Year by the American Sport Art Museum and Archives.
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- Fuchs was commissioned in 1992 to create an image to represent downhill skiing.
- He was commissioned again in 1994 to create an image to commemorate cycling.
As one of America’s foremost artists, Bernie Fuchs has achieved an unusually high degree of recognition in his lifetime. He has become legendary in the art world. Going back to the fundamentals, Fuchs’ drawings are what fuel his realistically detailed paintings. You are able to see in most of his paintings the unique use of light and its ability to transform a setting or object into something completely new.
Many viewers of Fuchs’ work are astonished that every time they view the same piece they can find something they did not notice the last time they looked at it. This allows the viewers endless amounts of enjoyment with these pieces.
Just before his 30th birthday Fuchs was named “Artist of the Year” by the Artist Guild in New York. He also became the youngest artist to ever be selected to joing such luminaries as Normal Rockwell, Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer in the Society of Illustrators’ prestigious Hall of Fame.