Max Altekruse: fifty years an artist for hire

1942 - 1995

The start: Max Altekruse was born and raised in Fort Wayne, and his first art school was the newsstand: he copied Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers in pencil, delighting, in the museum's phrase, in the craft of draughtsmanship. His formal training was this section's own: at the Fort Wayne Art School he studied painting under Homer Davisson and composition under Forrest Stark, then went into commercial art at a local advertising agency.

The career: In the summer of 1942 he married Mary Jane Long, and went to war, three years of service in the South Pacific. Home again, at his wife's urging he resumed training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then at the Art Students League of New York under Frank Reilly, in a singular program of drawing, painting, and picture making. Then came the fifty years: an artist for hire, executing commissions for Eli Lilly, the Ford Motor Company, Chrysler, Goodyear, and the Franklin Mint, and teaching illustration and composition, in his turn, at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Illustration, he held, was an honorable calling, if not a totally rewarding one, and the honors came anyway: first prize at the Scarab Club's annual watercolor show in Detroit in 1962 and again in 1963, the Society of Illustrators' Annual Merit Award in 1980.

The return: He retired from illustration in 1995, and, again at his wife's urging, returned to painting, the work the training had been for: the National Parks Academy of the Arts put his paintings in its Annual Top 100 in 1998 and its Top 200 in 2004. In Michigan, where the career was spent, he also served as president of the Franklin Historical Society and helped make Franklin the first community in that state listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art's exhibition of his work closes the circle the Davisson article opens: the dean's student, hung in the dean's museum. His birth and death years are not given by the museum's page, and the leg prints his documented span, 1942 to the last dated honor, rather than inventing them.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Museum of Art, exhibition page, "Max Altekruse: Artist and Illustrator" (born and raised in Fort Wayne; the Rockwell copies; painting under Davisson and composition under Forrest Stark; the 1942 marriage and the South Pacific service; the Pennsylvania Academy and Frank Reilly; the fifty years and the named clients; the Scarab Club prizes of 1962 and 1963; the Society of Illustrators award of 1980; the 1995 retirement; the National Parks Academy selections of 1998 and 2004; the Franklin preservation presidency).