Jean Marcellino
343 East 30th Street, #11A
New York, NY 10016
jcm@naje.com
Making Quick Progress with a Confident Hand
by Bob Bahr

This article was published in 2010 in American Artist “Drawing” Magazine

Cover of American Artist “Drawing” Magazine, Winter, 2010
Jean Marcellino's recent history is startling. In January 2005, she started attending a sketch night with predictable results as a newcomer. “The first few times I went, my drawings were beneath contempt — they were dreadful,” she recalls, “but I gave myself permission to be bad.” As a retiree, Marcellino had plenty of time to devote to her improvement in drawing and painting, and she soon found herself creating art every day. In October 2006, the artist was part of a group who invited retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to sit for a portrait. Marcellino’s oil painting was chosen by the National Portrait Gallery for its collection, and it currently hangs in that Washington, DC, museum. From “beneath contempt” to hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in less than two years? Marcellino’s story is even more interesting and complex than that timeline implies.

She was an art major at The Cooper Union, in New York City, in 1960 when Abstract Expresionism held sway and students were “all trying to copy De Kooning,” according to Marcellino. “I was not in love with AbEx, but i had to please my teachers...”  >> Read more


The Gender Thing
by Jean Marcellino

This article by Jean Marcellino was published in 2000, as part of the book “Mad Ave: Award Winning Advertising of the 20th Century.”

Cover of “Mad Ave: Award Winning Advertising of the 20th Century,” a compendium of work and essays. Published 2000, by Universe, a Division of Rizzoli, in conjunction with The Art Director's Club.
It is true that women have a better shot in advertising than they do in most professions.

A casual glance around most agencies would reveal a 50-50 split between male and female juniors in most creative departments. Maybe 60-40 favoring the male, not a lot more. But as you examine the old ladder, guess what?

Let’s see. There was Mary Welles a few decades ago. Helayne Spivack had a pretty good run for a few years. And, uhhhh.....

In view of the obvious inequalities that exist throughout the business, it may be difficult for a new writer or art director to grasp how enormously things have improved.

Upon graduation from Cooper Union in 1960, I had two job offers. One was an opportunity to work in the matte room of a new agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach for a paltry $60 a week. Then, there was the chance to be an assistant art-director at an almost all-female shop called Ovesey & Strauss, paying the phenomenal weekly salary of $90.With stunning foresight, I went for the big bucks. As you might have guessed, the agency specialized in fashion, mainly children’s fashion. The owner was a very petite and charming woman who wore hats and gloves and smoked a jeweled pipe. Actually, all of the “important” women wore hats all day long. If a secretary had dared to wear one, she would surely have been cast a suspicious glance, because somehow one knew without actually being told that this particular prop carried a decidedly hierarchical message.

Of course, in those days copy was delivered to the art director “under the door.” Except in that hot new agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach where matte room serfs were paid a paltry $60 per week and a revolution was in the making.

By the time I switched jobs in 1965 and went to the advertising department of CBS/Columbia Records, the radical new idea of the “creative team,” a co-equal partnership between a writer and an art director, had taken hold in most agencies. Columbia Records grasped the basic concept, but, since our duties included the design of album covers, labels and other music-biz paraphernalia, the art directors had a lot of work to accomplish for which words were considered an added-extra; consequently, we worked with writers when ads were being developed, but not as dedicated partners on a full-time basis.

This was a very exciting time for me. Nothing could beat the “eureka” effect which sometimes took hold when a magnificent idea magically presented itself, and writer and art director could share the fleeting suspicion that we were, in fact, geniuses. Unfortunately, these moments didn’t happen with the regularity one might have preferred. But they were frequent enough to convince me that I was a participant in the most thrilling occupation on earth.

As to the gender thing, yes, I was one of two female Art Director/Designers in a department of twelve people. But truth be told, I was having such a good time that I barely noticed. The other woman had been my best friend since we were freshmen in Cooper, another contributing factor to my happy days at Columbia Records. Like so many young people in this profession, we labored hard and long, but with a sense of joy. After a while, my friend left to take a job at one of the biggest ad agencies in New York, where she was assigned to the Tampax account. I was surprised when she told me that the other female creatives there, all writers, worked exclusively on detergents, cosmetics, baby foods and other such products. And that she herself was now known as “The Lady Art Director.” But then, this was the sixties. Sexism was an unknown concept.

Like most creative departments, ours at Columbia Records was presided over by a Creative Director. Next in line was the Associate Creative Director who, as vacancies developed, had always been promoted from within the department on the basis of seniority. Both were from the art side, since so many of our projects were skewed toward the visual rather than the verbal. I was flattered when my boss introduced me to people as the “workhorse of the department,” adding that I did the work of any two. And since I was the only art director who was starting to win creative awards, I felt confident that my efforts were appreciated. Quantity and quality.

After a couple of years, an odd thing happened. The Associate Creative Director decided to move on, leaving an opening for the first time since I’d been on staff. I now had departmental seniority (not to mention quantity and quality), but in the wink of an eye the position was filled by a nice young guy who’d started several months after I did.Yes, I was a bit befuddled. Maybe it was a clerical error; they’d confused our starting dates. Or maybe I wasn’t as good as I’d sometimes dared to think. After a while an even odder thing happened.

There were still twelve Art Director/Designers, eleven men and me. Occasionally we would go out to a restaurant after work on Friday night without the bosses. Once during the winter holiday season we were all feeling particularly chipper, which led to a greater than usual consumption of alcohol. Our loosened tongues propelled us toward a subject of conversation which was, and remains, universally taboo. Dare I say it? Our salaries.We all confessed them. And guess what? Not only was I the lowest paid person in the department, but the next lowest salary was 50% more than mine. I was sober enough to be devastated... quantity, quality, seniority and all... and finally determined to confront the Creative Director.

A meeting was arranged. “I can’t tell you how I found this out,” I blurted, “but it’s come to my attention that I’m the lowest paid person in the department,” quickly adding a condensed list of my victories and accomplishments. He cleared his throat. “Jean,” he said with a tone of gravity, “did you know that Steve’s wife is pregnant again? That Morty is over his head with two mortgages? This department has a fixed budget for salaries.When I give to one person, I have to take from someone else. Jean, you’re a single woman. If I gave you more money, what would you do with it? Buy more clothes?”

Talk about speechless. I was stunned... by the degree of my own selfishness. Steve’s cute little kids! I sheepishly left his office and retreated to my own, trying to make sense of it all. There was one co-worker that I’d become quite friendly with, enough at least to single him out as someone I might confide in. After a while, I plopped down into his visitor’s chair and told him the whole story. He looked at me with great sympathy in his eyes and said, “I think you may have a case of penis envy.”

As you might guess, my career at Columbia Records deteriorated from that point on. Doing as little as possible became my primary goal. Each day I’d shut my door, listen to music, and hope no one would bother me with all that work nonsense. True, my zest for advertising had greatly diminished, but it never occurred to me that quitting was an option.Who could leave a job that everybody in America would envy me for? On any given day I might see, or even talk to, Simon and Garfunkel, or Bob Dylan, or Janis Joplin. Everybody in the world of graphic design would kill to work at CBS.

But eventually I did quit. In 1969 it was not unusual for a woman to leave a job “to get married.” When I told my boss, he became the old philosopher, assuring me that women were really most fulfilled as wives and mothers. Honestly, the man must have been more than a bit relieved to see the last of me, since my work habits had become abyssmal.

Although I barely noticed, sometime in the ‘70s Women’s Lib happened. I wasn’t there, but I know it happened because when I returned to the work force in 1977 the world was a different place. There were women everywhere, including creative departments, who were well paid, taken seriously and promoted. In 1980 I had the good fortune to land a job in the ad agency of my dreams, Lord Geller Federico Einstein. All that joie de vivre returned, and once again advertising was the most thrilling occupation on earth. Avon Paperback Books was the business I was hired to work on, but it was understood that after a year I’d have the chance to switch to another account. True, I was offered Vassarette lingerie... but finally I understood that the “girl ghetto” was no place for me. I turned it down. To my astonishment, the creative director suggested IBM. IBM. Can you imagine that?

When I walk down the street, or sit in the bathtub, more often than I like to admit, I’m silently engaged in a diatribe against my old boss at Columbia Records. “I should have said” has been perfected to near-poetry. “Who in this country is paid on the basis of need? Does the janitor with six kids earn more than the CEO without any? Who besides Karl Marx might think it would be a workable idea?”

For the past 20 years I’ve worked in a number of agencies on lots of accounts from Dippity-Doo to Caterpillar Tractors. Fortunately my enthusiasm for the creative process has never again taken a dive. Everywhere I go, and I’ve been in a lot of places (who hasn’t in this business), I see successful women in positions of increasing power, many of them as partners in their own shops. And yet, there’s no denying it, the creative upper echelons of mainstream companies are largely female-free.

The Art Directors Club might ask itself, “Where are the women?” The editors of this book might ask the same question. A good guess is that my generation of female advertising talent remained in the office with the door shut. Or never re-entered after all that wifely/motherly fulfillment. Or, if they did return, missed out on crucial years when TV commercials became an art form and the computer revolutionized the mechanics of how we work.

Advertising should, after all, be the perfect field for us. Sure, we understand the mindsets of all those target audiences in search of detergents and baby food. But we are also as varied in our wits and talents as men. I find that my favorite categories are finance and technology, hardly bastions of traditional female expertise.

When we’re hired, compensated, and promoted on the basis of our abilities, without bias, there can be no doubt that women will occupy the tops of at least half of all those ladders.


Art Direction Magazine, “Jean Marcellino PORTFOLIO”
by Hedi Levine, December 1987

It’s hard to be a monitor of change but Jean Marcellino finds herself in just that position. When she graduated first in her Cooper Union class she was certain that advertising’s combination of idea and image was right for her sort of talent, but her very first job in a female-run advertising agency raised doubts as to what role she could play. The time was the early sixties, and at Regina Ovesey Inc., “The executives wore hats all day long,” Ms. Marcellino, now a VP/Senior AD at J. Walter Thompson, recalls, “They specialized in childrens’ fashion,” she noted, “and the president smoked a jewelled pipe.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like advertising, but I didn’t like that situation.”

Though she speculates that recent entrants to the art direction field are split about 50/50 male-female, Ms. Marcellino remembers her days as a senior art director and designer at CBS, Columbia Records. She was the only woman in a department of twelve. The record industry, particularly in 1965, was the heart of the counterculture camp, she recalled, “It was the dawn of the hippie era. Columbia had Dylan, Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel.” But on a deeper level, the advertising department at Columbia was a bastion of conventional thinking.

“One evening the members of our department did the unthinkable,” she said with a laugh, “we all went out for drinks, without our boss, and confessed our salaries.” Although she was affectionately known as ‘the workhorse’ and had departmental seniority, the horrible truth was, “I was the lowest paid person in the department.” When she confronted her boss with these facts and figures he proceeded to justify the salary decisions with ‘Joe’s son is in college,’ and ‘Steve has a mortgage on a new house,’ etc. “It seems like ancient history,” Ms. Marcellino says, “but, the worst part about it is that I bought it.”

Jean Marcellino is a determined woman, however. After leaving Columbia Records to raise her family and freelance, she gave the record field another chance. This time it was Arista Records. During her three years there she had but one purpose: to get out of records and into advertising. She had a portfolio full of record advertisements and record album covers, but was in love with an IBM ad. She refused to accept the industry wisdom that she was ‘a record person.’

“My portfolio was so heavy, I couldn’t get it off the ground,” she said. But she was able to carry it to a former Arista employee who had become a headhunter for advertising agencies. “I went to her with this immense portfolio and said, ‘I’ll do anything you tell me to do.’ I wanted to get into Lord Geller Federico Einstein, Scali McCabe Sloves, or Ammirati & Puris.”

The out pile grew sky high and the in pile dwindled to those of her recod pieces that were most conceptual. “I could see the wisdom,” Ms. Marcellino recalls. It worked. She was invited to see Dick Thomas, then creative director at Lord Geller Federico Einstein. She admires him still, and not only for the chance he took on her. “He is a daring man. He doesn’t fall into the conventions that affect other people. He often hired people- illustrators and photographers- to work outside of their established specialties.”

He made a deal with her that has an almost fairytale quality: in exchange for one year on Avon books, an account that played off her record-launch expertise, she would get future opportunities to work on other accounts. “Almost one year later, to the day, he said, ‘Ok, you’ve done your time,” she recalled. Then she began to work on the prince of accounts, IBM. “It was another one of those daring moves he’s capable of. I used to tell people that I would go there everyday for nothing,” she said, “I had a wonderful time.”

Jean Marcellino separates art direction into art and craft elements. “Into the art category,” she observes, “falls the concept, the persuasive aspect of advertising. That’s clearly where it’s at if you had to make a choice between the art and craft elements.” Unfortunately, she feels many people have made such a choice. “A lot of what’s going on today in print is a disaster. The art is important, but lets not dump the craft,” she said. “The craft represents visual refinements whose absence is felt. There are kids here, right out of art school, who can’t name a typeface, can’t specify type, and have no sense of scale. It’s sad to have to tolerate a lot of ugliness to see what the idea is.”

It’s the old print versus television dichotomy which, like the old feminism argument, finds itself embodied in Jean Marcellino. Despite the emphasis away from print noodling in favor of the entertaining idea, “It’s rare to find a television commercial that has a good concept,” said Ms. Marcellino, who judges the Clios each year looking for them.

Nevertheless Jean Marcellino, determined, seeks support from industry valedictorians. In this case she pulls a clipping, absolutely yellow with age, from her J.W.T. bulletin board. Circled in red, from a Times interview with Ed McCabe, this quote, “Brilliant, creative advertising is one of the last remaining legal things you can use to gain an unfair advantage over your competition,” continues to inspire the lady.