Bob Peak’s movie posters get top billing at Gallery Nucleus

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Bob Peak was called the father of the modern movie poster, but he got his start when his mother handed him a set of watercolors and a drawing board at age 12. Within a year she had died, but he carried on to attend Art Center College of Design in L.A.

After working in advertising, Peak eventually created covers for Time, Sports Illustrated and TV Guide, as well as the movie posters with which he became synonymous. He also designed U.S. stamps to commemorate the 1984 Olympics.

Now, as Susan King writes in today’s Calendar:

Seventeen years after his death at age 65, Peak is receiving his first one-man show in the L.A. area at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, running today through June 25.

“My dad once told me when he worked on a film, he got hired to think,” son Tom Peak says. “They would bring him in and he would talk to the director, the actors. He looked at dailies, and sometimes he would be on the set of a movie and do sketching.”

Read the full story here, and see a gallery of his work here.

-- Scott Sandell

Above: Bob Peak hit his stride with 1964’s “My Fair Lady” poster. Credit: Gallery Nucleus