Don Draper has opened a 37th floor window into the art of post-war American advertising, but a new exhibit of illustrations called Mac Conner: A New York Life is attempting to fill in the picture without all the alcohol-fueled melodrama.

Born in 1913, McCauley "Mac" Conner studied art via correspondence classes as a meek teen during the Depression. In 1937, he graduated from the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and worked as a sign painter, where he mastered the ability to paint letterforms, a skill that would later translate into the ability to perfectly capture corporate logos. As World War II erupted, Conner worked with the US Navy to create training aids, refreshing his figure drawing skills. The post-war economic boom left brands like Ford and United Airlines, as well as magazines like Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post, clamoring for his services as an illustrator. By his mid-thirties, Conner had cofounded a creative agency representing over a dozen illustrators.

A Window Into a Changing Society

The exhibit covers this period, the 1950s, when Conners was at the peak of his powers, rendering scenes of American technical progress and romantic entanglements that highlighted the changing norms and mores of the age.

Conner prefers to be called an illustrator rather than an artist and the exhibit is faithful to that position. In addition to 70 paintings, the walls are lined with correspondence from editors and art directors, revealing the mechanized nature of the illustration business at the time. Illustrators would specialize, some only drawing cars, while others would fill in smiling families surrounding the new Oldsmobile. The business was much assembly line as atelier and to further communicate the commercial nature of the works, A 16-foot-wide map of New York City shows the connections between the agencies that lined Madison Avenue during the Mad Men era.

The collection is a fascinating time capsule documenting women entering the workplace, the struggle of African-Americans, and a myriad of other social developments, but captured as primary documents rather than artfully recreated prestige cable dramas.

Illustration for "The Trouble With Love" in Good Housekeeping, August 1952. Gouache on illustration board. Mac Conner

Despite the focus on the commercial aspects of the illustration business, the curators took pains to highlight Conner's aesthetic contributions. Conner taught apprentices that they all used the same brushes, the same models, and the same paints—what differentiated each illustrator was their thoughts, translated into a sense of design.

Clever Constraints

His favored style used color sparingly, and instead focused on capturing dramatic scenes with high-contrast drawings. This had two benefits, color could be used to draw attention to the subject, like the crimson red lips of The Girl Who Was Crazy about Jimmy Durante, and was a technique that enabled rapid turnaround—critical in an era where dropboxes were physical objects and photo shop was an actual room.

According to Terrence C. Brown, a guest curator at the museum and a former director of the Society of Illustrators, there is no direct analog to Mac Conner working today. However, he has no doubt a new generation of illustrators will step and continue the tradition he picked up from Norman Rockwell. "One can only imagine the brave new world ahead for applied art as print morphs to digital opening the publishing page to be animated. As Google Glass projects the publishing page before you in full touch screen modality, illustrators will be there, as they always have, and they will amaze," says Brown. "Artists who toil in this trade of visual problem solving under deadline are proud to be great in their era and continue to create wherever the market takes them."

As photography displaced illustration in ads and magazines in the early 1960s, Conner's stock-in-trade morphed from prestige fashion magazines to genre paperbacks where he spent the next two decades painting wizards and dire wolves. Thankfully, the 100-year-old Conner is still kicking and was able to hoist a martini, Roger Sterling style, at the opening of the show in his honor.

Mac Conner: An New York Life is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through January 15, 2015.