Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration
On offer is a classic cheesecake pin up painting featuring a decidedly sexy bed-headed platinum blonde ala Marilyn Monroe by the prolific American pin-up artist Bill Randall. Bill Randall is best remembered for his wildly popular spiral bound “Randall’s Date Book” 12 page calendars for The Kemper-Thomas Calendar Company. He also created a series of works in […]
Artist: Bill Randall
A wonderful and rare surviving original watercolor and graphite illustration by the legendary Art Nouveau artist Raphael Kirchner. The image shows a sexually provocative “Kirchner Girl” in rolled silk stockings, seductively grilling the many hearts she has stolen. This appeared in print in La Vie Parisienne with the German language quip “Können Diese Herzen Warm Genug Sein?”, which translates loosely to “Are […]
Artist: Raphael Kirchner
For nearly three decades the inimitable Enoch Bolles was the sole cover artist for Film Fun magazine, creating larger than life and uniquely erotic pin up creations that bridged the gap between the traditional calendar girl and pulp magazine femme-fatales. In this example, which graced the cover of the June 1940 issue, a streamlined […]
Artist: Enoch Bolles
This remarkable art deco Orientalist scene by the American illustrator and cartoonist Frank Godwin, depicts the interior story “Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves”, from the 1920 children’s book Stories The Sandman Told, a complete copy of which is included in the sale. Pictured in this gouache on board painting, is Morgiana, a slave girl who is pouring […]
Artist: Frank Godwin
This woman in peril, menace themed proposed spicy pulp oil painting by the American illustrator William Soare is a lurid and provocative example of the damsel in distress imagery which proliferated newsstands in the 1930s. To the best of our research, this pulp cover illustration appears to have never been published, which sometimes happened when the fly-by-night titles that commissioned these spicy […]
Artist: William Soare
This playfully spirited and sexy original oil on canvas pin-up painting by Edward Runci was published by the Shaw-Barton Calendar Company in 1947 with the title “Wish You Were Here.” The artist was an outstanding painter of pin-ups during the 1940s and 50s whose smooth style was much admired by his contemporaries. Unlike the majority of other […]
Artist: Edward Runci
In this original oil on canvas pulp painting by Harold McCauley, used as the cover for the November, 1954 pulp digest, Imaginative Tales #2, a near nude runaway pin-up girl seductively rides a speeding red bullet – with the next stop being the moon… Created to illustrate an interior serialized novella story by Charles F. […]
Artist: Harold McCauley
This oil on canvasboard painting by Harold (H.W.) McCauley was created for use as the cover for the 1959 Nightstand digest pulp novel Carnival of Lust by J.X. Williams. In this offering a near-nude harem girl flirtatiously eyes a martini drinking genie. The painting is a dynamic and well-rendered example by this prolific and gifted American illustrator, and a great artifact […]
Artist: Harold McCauley
From a recent east coast estate auction, Grapefruit Moon Gallery is delighted to have acquired a previously unseen collection of American Impressionist oil paintings dating to the 1940s and executed in a WPA, Regionalist, and often times stark Ashcan School design aesthetic. These are the work of the important American photo-journalist Alfred Statler, who was […]
Artist: Alfred Statler
This trio of images by Thornton Utz was created to illustrate a single story in the flagship Curtis Publishing magazine The Saturday Evening Post. With a bold mid-century modern aesthetic and the dry brush gouache technique popular in glossy magazines in the 1950s, the set presents an enticing take on American femininity as idealized during the Cold […]
Artist: Thornton Utz
