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 is an early and large oil on canvas by Norman Saunders created as cover art for Dell publications, but never used. An electrifying, spicy pulp era entanglement with all the essential pulp elements of peril, danger, terror with erotic excitement. A damsel in distress is held in bondage as assorted toughs and thugs have it out amongst themselves guns-a-blaze in this art deco scene. Set against the backdrop of a machine-age steamroom, filled with modernist and industrial gadgets, this both speaks to the peril of gangsterism in the Great Depression 30s and the dark side of progress.

Shootout Along The Steampipes

Artist: Norman Saunders

This large scale, colorful cheesecake pin up painting features a Hawaiian hula girl serenaded by Rogue Magazine’s signature wolf and was created as cover art by Lloyd Rognan for an unidentified issue of the infamous early men’s magazine. Beginning with the first issue of Rogue, Rognan developed a series of these cartoonish little red riding hood inspired entanglements, and this example is particularly appealing. A classic example of mid-century hula girl Hawaiiana in which the magazine’s signature “Rogue Wolf” plays the part of the haole (or in this case howly?) in tourist shirt.

A Hula Girl Serenade

Artist: Lloyd Rognan

A classic bad girl paperback cover illustration by the gifted and prolific Rafael DeSoto for the 1951 Signet Book release of Frances Clippinger’s Elinda (The Satellite). Text reads “She Knew All The Tricks – And Used Them”. There has been a recent interest in this era of paperbacks by historians and savvy art collectors, previous auction records by the leading cover artists such as Rudy Nappi, Raymond Pease and James Avati have been recently obliterated as selections from the Charles Martignette collection have found their way to auction.

Elinda The Satellite

Artist: Rafael DeSoto

A gritty Western pulp cover painting by Walter Baumhofer- “The King of Pulps”-created for the May 1933 issue of Dime Western magazine. The image is a humorous wink at the spicy pulp world featuring a tied-up bondage-posed beauty looking askance at the stereotypical cowboy card game scene she finds herself trapped in. 1933 marked the peak in popularity of the short-lived spicy pulp genre, which gleaned much of its success from eye-catching, drama-filled, damsel-in distress covers similar to this.

Blind Man’s Bluff

Artist: Walter Baumhofer

A 1920s original oil on canvas painting by noted New York artist and muralist John Hemming Fry. Like his fellow muralists Eugene Savage and Edwin H. Blashfield, Fry created epic imagery in a dreamscape romanticized style, borrowing freely from classical Greek, Celtic and Roman folklore and imagery. This mythological trilogy on death and dying features three separate vignettes painted in subdued blue and steel gray tones against a background of ancient Northern European hills. A flowing, lyrical, sometimes abstracted composition that also incorporates elements of the contemporaneous Dada and Surrealist movements. An inventive and decorative large antique oil painting that retains its original handsome gesso frame, and is verso inkstamped by the artist.

A Celtic Tragedy

Artist: John Hemming Fry

A south of the border Latin themed large and colorful original pulp cover painting by Rudolph Belarski for the long running magazine Argosy; June 18, 1938. Illustrates the interior story “Senor Coyote” written by Frederick Schiller Faust under the pen name Max Brand. Rudolph Belarski produced many fantastic covers for the pulps he specialized in Aviation themed depictions, his covers were ablaze with color and adventure.

Senor Coyote

Artist: Rudolph Belarski

A rare surviving cover painting by JW Scott, created for a yet unidentified Western pulp publication. A gritty old west scene of a group of cowboys reloading and preparing to fire above a rugged desert pass. The artist created this utilizing an impasto technique that brings a tension and urgent intensity to the Americana Western genre classic. Illustration Magazine recently devoted a large portion of issue #14 on the life and works of John Walter Scott, who worked during the 1930s creating numerous and stylistically diverse pulp covers, the verso canvas notes this was a cover for a “Sept 8 Western,” possibly referring to the “Complete Western Book” or “Wild Western Novels” both of which commissioned covers by Scott.

The Calico Kid

Artist: J. W. Scott

This impactful and eye-catching original pin up oil-on-board by Gil Elvgren was created for a roadside billboard. A pretty blond Elvgren girl who has just stepped out of a swimming pool enjoys a long tall cool one in this classic good-girl example of breweriana advertising art. Painting comes with the original posed double weight photograph of the model taken by Elvgren, and is pictured on page 237 of the monograph “Gil Elvgren All His Glamorous American Pin-ups” (plate 582), written by Charles Martignette and Louis K. Meisel.

A Cool One

Artist: Gil Elvgren

A luminous and rare Golden Age of Illustration cover oil painting for the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “Graduate On Top Of the World”, by Edmund Davenport. This appeared as the cover the June 13, 1925 issue and is a fresh to the market work that finds the artist (who contributed three Post covers in 1925) painting in a Norman Rockwell like illustrative style. The unusual subject, that of a confident, young pretty, independent flapper on graduation day, and the scarcity of surviving Post covers from this era add to the already enormous appeal of this lovely and historic American illustration painting.

Graduate On Top Of The World

Artist: Edmund Davenport

In 1917, Theda Bara was the biggest draw for Fox studios, and a movie star whose popularity was surpassed only by Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. In this photograph by Albert Witzel, hand colored and printed she is seen posed in an early iteration of her Cleopatra headdress, with flowing deep black hair. Inscribed to Tom Mix, the cowboy superstar, who in 1917 had just joined Bara as a headlining performer for Fox studios, this came from Mix’s collection.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra

Artist: Albert Witzel

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