Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration
Publishers of depression-era pulp magazines, post war men’s adventure and girlie magazines, and lurid paperback titles all used risqué, action-packed illustrations to make their offerings jump off the newsstands in the highly competitive market for readers attention. Cover art pushed the boundaries of what was allowable in a heavily-censored era, coming up with increasingly deviant and outlandish portrayals of sex, violence, and perilous escapes from danger. Today, these works—which provide an intriguing peek into the shadow side of 20th century American culture—are studied by historians and coveted by collectors.
Allen Anderson created this damsel in distress, Western spicy pulp oil on canvas painting as the cover of the April 1943 edition of Speed Western Stories, Volume #1 Issue #4 (Trojan Publishing, Chicago). This vivid and rare surviving example of lurid spicy pulp cover art was unearthed by Grapefruit Moon Gallery along with two additional original cover paintings by Allen Anderson that had for many years been displayed at the Cimarron Dude Ranch in Peekskill, New York.
Artist: Allen Anderson
This May 1930 science fiction pulp gouache painting on illustration board by noted comic artist Charles Clarence Beck who signed much of his work C.C. Beck illustrates a poem by Donald Wandrei titled Marmora. Our research suggests this could be the earliest published example of Beck’s work, as it predates his first known job by a few years. The work is sensational with a cobalt blue color palette and precise landscape work which appears to be influenced by Rockwell Kent.
Artist: C. C. Beck
Pre-code Hollywood starlet Verna Hillie is the subject of this erotically charged pastel portrait which was likely used as a cover for the title Reel Movie Fun, a short lived wild and racy publication. Pastel is dated and signed on the back and the sitter is identified in the artist’s hand as seen.
Artist: Cardwell Higgins
This original gouache pulp magazine cover painting by Lloyd Birmingham used for the December 1961 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination illustrates the Daniel Galouye short novel “Spawn of Doom”. The image features an alien astronaut breaking into a museum window to stop a sentient spore-based life form from taking over planet earth and destroying the human race. Painting is handsomely framed and matted behind glass and comes with the magazine which this appeared as cover art for.
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
Original cover art from a story by Ed Harbarcher from the pages of the July 1973 Adventure for Men . Story is titled I Nailed The Nazis From A Galloping Goose. Artwork is a gouache on illustration boardby the listed illustrator Bruce Minney. Men’s adventure is a genre of magazines that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured pin-up photography and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel, or conflict with wild animals.
Artist: Bruce Minney
An eerie and post apocalyptic Los Angeles cityscape appears in this original pulp painting by Lloyd Birmingham used as the cover for “Analog – Science Fact, Science Fiction”, Feb. 15, 1962. Dating both the birth of the era of space exploration (John Glenn would become the first American to orbit the earth one week after the appearance of this issue) and anxieties about the foreign menace of the Cold War Soviet Union, this painting imagines a Los Angeles which has been occupied by aliens and left to rot until it is merely a spaceport for a backwater planet.”
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
The iconic original sci-fi pulp painting by Lloyd Birmingham was created for and used as the cover of “Amazing – Fact and Science Fiction” April 1962. Illustrating the Mark Clifton interior story “Hang Head, Vandal!” this shows a haunting image of a scarecrow made from what remains of a spaceman perched up over the plains of a flatly rendered landscape, made up of but a few perspective lines trailing away into the distance creating a surreal and cerebral science fiction fantasy image.
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
A lurid and genre defining erotic paperback book cover for the 1950 Quarter Books Publishing Company title “Illicit Pleasure” written by Peggy Gaddis. The artwork is unsigned with verso information by our colleague Fred Taraba with affirmation that this work was done by Rudy Nappi. This is an inspired subversive image with our cover girl Linda Blaine showing her “body that could make even the most confirmed woman-hater sit up and beg…” enticing an enlisted man to take notice down at the pier.
Artist: Rudy Nappi
The original cover painting by H.W. McCauley used for the August 1953 cover of “Fate, True Stories of the Strange and Unknown”, illustrating “The Gods of Voodoo” by North Hildabrand. In this offering a dancing pin-up girl levitates oblivious to the black magic and darkness that lurks in the background where a goat is about to get sacrificed in a voodoo ritualistic fire blazing act, creating the collision of beauty and darkness which is in essence what makes the pulp cover paintings by H.J. Ward, H.W. McCauley, Virgil Finlay and other American illustrators fascinating and so desirable today.
Artist: Harold McCauley
An important early cover painting by Jerome Rozen for the June 7, 1927 long running twice monthly adventure pulp title “Popular Stories.” This painting combines Westward Ho, covered wagon western Americana imagery with civil war drama, in a vaguely historical scene with intensely powerful imagery. The depiction, in the strong color blocks for which the pulps were famed, features a confederate soldier menacing an elderly African America slave and sympathetic young damsel who are attempting to flee unspoken horrors through the desolate prairie.
Artist: Jerome Rozen
