Draft:Robert McNab (artist)

Robert Donald McNab (born November 17, 1946) is a writer, documentary TV producer, broadcaster and illustrator of New Zealand, Serb and Hungarian ancestry. He was raised in Hungary, Turkey and Argentina.

Life
Robert McNab was born on November 17, 1946, in Budapest, Hungary. He and his family were expelled from Hungary in 1949, moving to Turkey where his father, RGC McNab, was British Council Director. , then to Argentina from 1953-1957 at which point his parents separated and Robert was sent to boarding school in the UK.

McNab studied 19th and 20th Century art under John Golding at the Courtald Institute of Art. Here he met his late wife, the technical art historian Caroline Villers (1948-2004), with whom he had 3 children. He is married to garden designer and art curator, Joanne Bernstein.

Career
Through the Courtauld Institute, McNab was introduced to art historian Lord Clark, whose assistant he became on two documentary TV series: The Romantic Rebellion and Rembrandt.

Michael Gill invited McNab to work on his BBC series, Royal Heritage, for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. Following this McNab joined the BBC’s Music & Arts Department in Kensington House West London. McNab was assistant to Robert Hughes on the series The Shock of the New. He also contributed to BBC documentary series Arena and Omnibus; the Art in the Third Reich series made with Peter Adam received a BAFTA Award.

McNab also contributed to BBC documentary profiles including of Robert Crumb, Joseph Cornell, and Cindy Sherman.

McNab left the BBC in 1996 and - in frequent collaboration with BBC Radio Producer David Perry - wrote and presented arts documentaries for radio. Landscape of Fear (1998) won the Arts Documentary Award in the Sony Radio Awards 1999.

Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle based on original research and written by McNab was published by Yale University Press in 2004. It traces the impact on Surrealism of travel in the age of steam power. The book describes how steamships, pioneering documentary cinema and anthropology permeated modern art, photography, fashion and everyday life.

With schoolfriend George Trapp, McNab made a comic book on the subject of a tramp steamship plying its trade between Danzig and Rangoon which resulted in Too Much Far Out Rock 'n' Roll (1969), recognised as "the first independent underground comic book written and published in the UK". This developed into a lifelong art project involving many collaborators and spanning media from comic strips, painting, mobile sculpture, 3D assemblage, bespoke merchandise, canned goods, models, puppets, photography and film

McNab’s work as an illustrator and artist has been exhibited in commercial and museum galleries including Fischer Fine Art London, Sunderland Museum Art Gallery, El Greco Galleries London, Quadrangle Gallery Oxford, Cylinder Gallery London, and Gallery 37PK Haarlem NL.