Rob Wagner

Rob Wagner
May 11, 1940 issue
Born	August 2, 1872 Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Died	July 20, 1942 (aged 69) Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Michigan (Class of 1894), Academies Julian and Delacluse (1903)
Occupation	writer, artist, film director, magazine publisher

Robert Leicester Wagner (August 2, 1872 – July 20, 1942) was the editor and publisher of Script, a weekly literary film magazine published in Beverly Hills, California, between 1929 and 1949.

Rob Wagner was a magazine writer, screenwriter, director and artist before founding the liberal magazine that focused its coverage on the film industry and California and national politics. Its leftist leanings attracted many of the best artists and writers during the Depression.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 2, 1872, Wagner graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree in 1894. He worked as an illustrator for the Detroit Free Press before moving to New York in 1897 to illustrate magazine covers. He served as art director for The Criterion, a literary magazine considered the forerunner to The New Yorker. His illustrations of coverage of the Spanish–American War and the rising star of Theodore Roosevelt increased circulation and gave considerable weight to the magazine's political commentary and coverage.

Rob Wagner wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, The Western Comrade and Liberty magazines among other publications.

In 1901, he moved to London to work as an illustrator for the Historians' History of the World. He returned a year later to New York to illustrate the Encyclopædia Britannica. He returned to Detroit in 1903 to marry Jessie Brodhead, and then moved to Paris to study art. In 1903–04 he studied at Academies Julian and Delacluse, initially working in charcoal before focusing on oil portraits. Toward the end of his studies, he joined the Paris art studio of Robert MacCameron where his work in oils greatly improved. When he returned to Detroit he took commissions to paint portraits, many of them life-size, of the city's high society families.