Art, Times and Tragedy

Frame Shop Gallery
July 17, 2009 through September 27, 2009

A public reception will be held during
Gallery Night, Friday, August 21, 2009 from 7–10 p.m.

The Museum is pleased to be able to present a survey of the work of
Roger T. Hane (1939-1974). A native of Bradford, PA, Hane was a highly regarded illustrator known for his surreal, fanciful art. In his eleven-year professional career, before he was tragically killed in a mugging in Central Park, Hane produced over 300 published illustrations. Book-lovers, and practically anyone who looked at a book rack during the early 1970s, will recognize Hane’s cover illustrations. His work adorns the covers of the Collier-Macmillan editions of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books, as well as Carlos Castaneda’s best-selling The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality, published by Simon & Schuster.

Like the illustrators who were his greatest influences—Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and J.C. Leyendecker—Hane was a meticulous craftsman. Also like them, he developed an original style particularly well suited to the time in which he worked—a style that helped to define the visual characteristics of the era. Hane worked in acrylic on canvas, using flat areas of color, crisply defined and modeled by directional light and shadow.

Hane also created artwork for Avon Books, E.P. Dutton Company, and Collier Books. Among his many magazine clients were Ladies Home Journal, Life, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, New York magazine, Redbook, The Lamp, Look, Vista, the Saturday Review, Travel and Leisure, Sylvania, Ramparts, the National Lampoon, and Playboy.

Hane also designed record album covers for RCA, Columbia Records, and Philadelphia International Records. He received numerous awards and honors during his short life, including, posthumously, the New York Artist Guild’s Artist of the Year Award in 1974. His alma mater, the Philadelphia College of Art, gives an annual Roger T. Hane Memorial Award to the student with the year’s top illustration portfolio.