Offered here is an original piece of camera ready artwork–pen and ink with collage elements–created for billboard advertising usage during World War II.
Artist: Cardwell Higgins
Sorry, It's Sold
Welcome to Grapefruit Moon Gallery. Here you will find an archived visual history of past sales. Pretty to look at, some are quite old; but when they're in here, consider them sold!
This sassy secretary pin up pastel was created by Earl Moran for the Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company in about 1940. The work appeared as a mutoscope card with the title “A Sweet Job”. Office girl pin-up depictions were common during the pre-WWII lean economic years of the Great Depression, and this is an inspired example of that genre. A published mutoscope card of the image is included in the sale.
Artist: Earl Moran
This important and defining oil on canvas portrait features a stylized Mata Hari in the midst of one of her sensual, almost trance-like dances. The highly moody piece is a wonderful example of the 1900-1915 century Spanish modernismo movement by Anselmo Miguel Nieto, one of its brightest talents. This classically inspired yet fully modern painting applies formal chiaroscuro technique (the exaggerated use of light and dark to create a dramatic perspective) to one of the great courtesans of early 20th century Europe to create a sexually and politically subversive yet beautiful work.
Artist: Anselmo Miguel Nieto
Legendary American pin-up illustrator Earl Moran was one of the first to discover a muse in the iconic Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe. During the late 1940s Monroe famously worked as a pin-up model for the Blue Book agency, posing under her real name of Norma Jeane Dougherty. After Moran transitioned away from the hectic life of a calendar artist to focus on his fine art painting, he revisited Marilyn, who was by then a platinum blonde Hollywood bombshell, through an arrangement with The Aaron Brothers Galleries, Laguna Beach CA.
Artist: Earl Moran
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
The original gouache cover painting by Lloyd Birmingham used for the December 1964 “Stories of Imagination – Fantastic” pulp magazine published by Ziff-Davis, illustrating the Philip K. Dick short novel “The Unteleported Man”. A fresh to the market cover published pulp painting that had remained for decades in the artists upstate New York estate. Work is handsomely framed in a retro looking limed oak fine gallery frame behind glass, comes with the complete published December 1964 edition of Fantastic Stories of Imagination.
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
One of two 1930s oil on stretched canvas paintings we have acquired by Robert T. Riley, a New York state fine artist and illustrator who worked in a social realist / WPA bleak stylized Regionalist aesthetic. In this expressive work, Riley evokes the anxieties caused by a football injury as a player is carted off the field, capturing the multitude of pained expressions on the faces of those gathered. This somber, painting was created during the depths of the Great Depression and it offers bleak commentary on the hardships endured by all men.
Artist: Robert Riley
A kinetic art deco era flapper girl bathing beauty is captured frolicking in the waves in this original oil on canvas pin-up painting by William Soare. Likely created for a pin-up calendar, the work is signed lower left and also marked on the back canvas in the artists hand. William Fulton Soare was a versatile illustrator who was prolific during the 1920s – 30s creating covers for many pulp magazines titles and Boy’s Adventure Magazines. His first assignments were illustrations for calendar reproduction.
Artist: William Soare
