Each month, the Men Who Are Thursday gather at a different member’s house amid the leafy streets of Greenwich, Connecticut. The men bring along brown-bag lunches; the host provides libations, hot soup, and dessert. The meetings, which started somewhere around 1969—no one’s exactly sure of the year—began in that ad hoc way such assemblages do, comprising an accomplished synod of artists and writers who, in the mid-20th century, had recast how America saw itself. At various points the brotherhood’s roster included co-founders David Burt, the sculptor, and Robert Miller Jones, a Grammy-winning art director for Columbia Records, along with novelist and screenwriter Herman Raucher, who wrote Summer of ‘42; sculptor Reuben Nakian, a contemporary of de Kooning’s; New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon; Gerald Green, one of the creators of the Today show; Alvin Moscow, a Richard Nixon speechwriter; and illustrator John Cullen Murphy, best known for the “Prince Valiant” comic strip.

The club borrowed its curious name from a 1908 G. K. Chesterton novel about a group of underground anarchists in London; to this day, there has been a longstanding tradition to admit a new member only when an old member dies. The lunches are marathon affairs. “The only thing you were assured of, going in, was that for the next three to four hours there was going to be wit—real wit, the kind you weren’t going to find anywhere else,” recalled cartoonist Jerry Dumas, 86, who wrote gags for comic strips like “Beetle Bailey.” Cohort Roy Rowan, 96, a correspondent for Time, Life, and Fortune, would remark in July, “We have what we call ‘Show and Tell’ [of our current projects]—very little ‘show,’ but a lot of bullshit. The whole group is reverting to childhood, really.” (Both Dumas and Rowan passed away, sadly, in late 2016.)

Indeed, most of the inaugural Men Who Are Thursday have taken their leave. But their spirit and artistic genius endure, best personified in the crew’s quietest member: Robert McGinnis. “[All] are immensely charming, funny, lively men—livelier than a lot of 20- and 30-year-olds I’ve been around,” says screenwriter Jon Connolly, of boomer age, unlike his lunch companions. “A lot of guys had serious success but were very loath to advertise themselves. And Bob McGinnis is the most extreme. I mean, he is almost pathologically modest. He has no idea how good he was—how good he still is.”

Much of the public doesn’t know Robert McGinnis. But he is one of the most prolific and influential midcentury commercial artists, and his imprimatur on American illustration literally speaks volumes. During the swinging heyday of graphic design, his 1,400-plus paperback covers, along with his movie posters and magazine work, embodied and influenced pop culture’s loose, liberated visual style. And in the past decade, that cool McGinnis aesthetic has roared back into vogue as everyone from advertising executives to interior designers re-discovers its magic. “If you look at his book covers,” says Brad Bird, the director of Pixar’s The Incredibles, who hired McGinnis to produce a poster for the film, “they’re very much trying to convey and entice: ‘This is going to be fun.’ It doesn’t have pretention of being deep art.”

Last year, best-selling author Neil Gaiman conscripted McGinnis to illustrate the covers of his reissued novels, having been a McGinnis acolyte since his boyhood, when he would scour South London bookshops in search of import softcovers bearing McGinnis art. The covers of the new Gaiman paperbacks—one featuring sultry beauties, another an otherworldly Merlin character—are “an homage to Robert McGinnis,” Gaiman asserts, “by Robert McGinnis.”

Book covers by Robert McGinnis. Credit: Courtesy of Robert McGinnis.

From Adman to Pop Pioneer

The artist is now 91. He paints every day inside his musty studio, located on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Old Greenwich. His hair is a shiny silver white, his hands veined and weathered. Two bushy brows hood his eyes, lending him an eccentric air that doesn’t quite suit him. He is an old man and he knows it. He also knows he’s blessed. “I don’t know what I would do,” he says plainly, “if I ever stopped painting.”