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.
On offer is a remarkable published pulp cover painting by Lejaren Hiller (American, 1880-1969), titled Absinthe, for Flynn's Weekly Detective Fiction Magazine - April 21, 1928. Between 1924 and 1939, the artist created hundreds of covers for this long running title, and this is among the most captivating. The image showcases an up-to-the-minute smoking flapper girl feeling strangely […]
Artist: Lejaren Hiller
Price: $8,500.00
A fresh to the market, good girl art painting by Howard Connelly, created as the June 1950 cover of the Thrilling Publications pulp title Thrilling Love. A pretty pin-up girl enjoys a soda fountain strawberry shake against a vibrant yellow fade away design aesthetic that is modernist and impactful. The 1940s and 50s saw the creation of […]
Artist: Howard Connelly
Price: $2,500.00
Large and stark, this gouache on board artwork by an obscure pulp & science fiction illustrator using the name Ross appeared as the cover the the May 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrating a story titled "The Man Who Could Not Stop." The story tells the tale of a […]
Artist: Ross
Price: $3,500.00
A ghastly and macabre pulp cover painting by Mel Hunter for the January, 1958 edition of Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, this loosely illustrated a story by Floyd Mahannah titled The Broken Angel. A voluptuous redheaded vixen appears in a moodily conceived graveyard at night with an ominous figure in a top-hat looming near an […]
Artist: Mel Hunter
Price: $3,950.00
A lurid and outright creepy cover painting by Nicholas Solovioff for the August, 1955 edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, loosely illustrated the interior story Bride In Danger. A beautiful corpse, a once blushing bride on her honeymoon, is now found alone on a desolate beach, bloodied and left in the open […]
Artist: Nicholas Solovioff
Price: $3,500.00
This fabulous other-wordly cover painting by the important American genre artist Paul Lehr was created for the July,1972 issue of Occult Magazine.
Artist: Paul Lehr
Price: $1,995.00
In this gouache-on-board cover illustration for 1952's The Scarlet Slipper, James Meese captures the unique mixture of the American homestead with a tough-talking private eye in the mix.
Artist: James Alfred Meese
Price: $3,850.00
This was the original camera ready artwork used in the production of the 1970 Avon paperback edition of the novel The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen.
Artist: Milton Charles
Price: $850.00
This gouache illustration painting appeared on the cover of Naked Sinner, the 1959 "savage novel of a wild call girl and her shocking immoral affairs".
Artist: American Artist
Price: $4,800.00
A subversive youth gone wild party scene original cover painting by Peter Driben likely used for a paperback book title published by the Novel Library imprint. During the 1950s a hedonistic bohemian fictional sub-culture existed where teens smoked reefer and engaged in orgiastic exploits while becoming addicted to heroin. In showing these delinquents pursuing their darkest sinful desires, the illustrators of the day seemed to take great joy and this is a prime example of this sort of homage to debauchery.
Artist: Peter Driben
Price: $4,500.00
This dramatic, futuristic sci-fi interior pulp illustration was created by Harold McCauley for an as-of-yet unidentified Ziff-Davis title.
Artist: Harold McCauley
Price: $2,950.00
Death Makes a Mistake is an eerie, dark, and foreboding interior pulp illustration by Harold McCauley which appeared in the January 1943 issue of the sci-fi/fantasy pulp magazine Amazing Stories accompanying the P.F. Costello story of the same title. The caption beneath reads "Reggie looked at the second rose, and then he knew...!" Nicely matted and framed under glass, this […]
Artist: Harold McCauley
Price: $2,350.00
