The world in which Alcorn worked was that of mass communication, one dictated by the rhythms of commerce and its accompanying deadlines. Just as importantly, it was a world in which the artist drew inspiration from stimuli that were almost entirely externally generated. The nature and content of the assignment, over which the graphic artist had little control, provided the creative impetus. He came to rely on these external stimuli for inspiration; in fact, the vast majority of the art he made was conceived in direct response to an assignment. Time and production constraints (in those days, possibilities of full-color process reproduction remained few and far between) required him to be efficient and resourceful and think conceptually, all the while devising a stylistic shorthand that would be so seductive as to invite repeated viewings on the part of the public.

Looking at Alcorn’s production, particularly in the first years of his career, one can see how the environment that he created for his family found its way into his work. The most obvious and abundant of these references paid homage to his wife Phyllis, his muse. Permutations of the immediately identifiable, archetypal likeness he established for her early on in their marriage weave in and out of his work, becoming an integral part of it. Her presence in his oeuvre constitutes the most eloquent expression of the union of art and life he so steadfastly cultivated.

The History of Art has always been one of the most important sources of inspiration for Alcorn’s work: since he was a young man in his early twenties, he was inclined to look back in time and take a leaf from the history of art. Thanks to the rich archive, one can analyze almost his whole production and guess the cultural references in the works.

The origin of the masterworks of his youth, for example, may be traced back to Picasso’s synthetic cubism, specifically the celebrated pair of monumental paintings titled Three Musicians (1921), which he had seen and admired in the Picasso retrospective mounted in 1957 by the Museum of Modern Art, where he purchased the exhibition catalogue. It is revealing of his temperament that he drew inspiration from synthetic cubism – this most structured and formal of pictorial languages – and that he did so in the late 1950s, at the height of what would come to be known as the heyday of abstract expressionism. The René Magritte exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art of 1965-1966 inspired new solutions in Alcorn’s growing experimentation with painting of the mid-Sixties: his affinity with that artist is hinted at, for example, in two book covers for Anthony Powell and the illustrated volume for Ogden Nash.

But it was his first summer trips to Italy in 1969 that expanded exponentially his vocabulary as a draftsman, and led to breakthroughs in his eloquent use of chiaroscuro, as well an increasingly skillful calibration of text and image. The confluence of history, commerce, applied arts and the daily routine that Alcorn experienced in Italy brought a refreshingly tangible weight and solidity to the forms he drew. The amorphous rhythms and shapes of the late Sixties soon gave way to a decidedly earthier sensibility, one more indebted to the healthy, purposeful pragmatism of the Florentine artisan than to the machinations of New York.

The work Alcorn did in the Italian period reflects, on the one hand, his infatuation with a mythic, pastoral Italy on the cusp of modernization, and on the other a fascination with the country’s venerable history of art, and specifically the Florentine painters of the fifteenth century.

His artistic ability in the free interpretation of these suggestions is reflected in the highly communicative works he created in this period, like several book covers for Rizzoli.