Grapefruit Moon Gallery

Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration

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!

A dazzling, large oil on canvas painting by frequent Saturday Evening Post cover artist Frederic Stanley. This wild prohibition-era, Charleston-dancing, Roaring Twenties flapper girl celebrates a Loew’s Theatre New York Policeman’s Ball Burlesque show. This is a wonderfully rendered artwork and a piece of New York history originally owned by Eve Green, the first wife of hotel magnate Harry Helmsley. Created for the cover of the program associated with this 1926 review, this important work showcases the 1920s jazz-age aesthetic of Manhattan’s bustling Vaudeville/Burlesque social scene.

The Policeman’s Ball, 1926

Artist: Frederic Stanley

A large, inspired, new to the market oil on canvas by Pal Fried; a smoldering reclining nude in a deeply erotic 1940s moment. Retains original ornate carved wood frame. The canvas is untouched and stamped on the verso and titled in the artist’s hand “Reclining Nude”. A fine well preserved luminous example of what this prolific European painter’s signature work.

Reclining Nude

Artist: Pal Fried

A large and well rendered oil painting by William Medcalf, likely created for The Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company. This dates from the 1940s to early 50s; an era of situationally challenged cheesecake themed entanglements. In this instance, a red head bathing beauty has been startled (or perhaps merely amused) by a green frog. William Medcalf was a leading and prolific illustrator who worked in a variety of styles. His surviving pin-up commissions are especially coveted and this is a fresh-to-the-market, masterful work.

Bathing Beauty Startled by a Frog

Artist: William Medcalf

An erotic and sensational pin-up painting by Mayo Olmstead presumably created for The Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company. The work is mixed media on a Crescent illustration board with pastel used for the central figure and skin tones and oil or acrylic applied in an impasto textured bold technique to the border areas creating an alarming and lively composition. Olmstead was known for his good girl styled beauties, this sun burned she devil on the other hand is entirely of another vernacular.

Crazy From The Heat

Artist: Mayo Olmstead

A smartly rendered late 1960s to 1970s gouache illustration painting by Mayo Olmstead presumably created for a Brown & Bigelow pin-up calendar. Olmstead, along with Fritz Willis, Clair Fry, and Bill Layne, was the Saint Paul, Minnesota calendar company’s star staff illustrator during the tail end of the pin-up craze, when a more modern and contemporary idealized beauty was preferred. A classic example of what is now referred to as “Good Girl Art” or GGA by pin-up collectors and pop culture scholars.

Mod Glamour Girl with Rose

Artist: Mayo Olmstead

This large, epically scaled, WPA-era beach scene is a wonderful fine art painting that takes the forms and themes of the regionalist art movement which was revolutionizing the American art scene in 1939 when this was created, and adapts them to the classic Connecticut shore. Recalling the work of Thomas Hart Benton, and George Bellows, this oil on board shows a group of friends looking on in a mix of shock and wonder at some roughhousing co-eds. Three men appear to have a bathing beauty and appear to be about to toss her into the ocean. Is it all in good fun, or is it something more sinister? By withholding the answer, the artwork takes the beach scene and gives it the provocative modernist spin and Ashcan School grittiness that defined art in the WPA regionalist era.

At The Beach

Artist: Alton Tobey

A wonderful nude mermaid themed Bill Layne Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company commissioned illustration, the second of two are offering at Grapefruit Moon Gallery. A 1950s-60s gouache on board created for one of this calendar company’s jewelry advertising accounts. This depicts a topless pin-up girl mermaid on a balance scale with a tray of freshly mined pearls surrounded underwater by a host of male atomic-age sea dwellers. The type of scene only Bill Layne could envision and execute. The whimsical charm predicts Layne’s later career in the animation department for Walt Disney feature films. We expect Bill Layne to become a wildly collected and important artist in years to come.

A Mermaid Weighs In

Artist: Bill Layne

This fresh and dazzling Gil Elvgren oil on canvas painting titled “Pot Luck” is a rare surviving commissioned work for the Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company, St Paul MN. This image graced calendars in 1961 and also served as the 6 of clubs in the “52 American Beauties” playing card series. The entire deck featured Elvgren pin-up beauties, a fact that demonstrates the incredible popularity of this iconic artist. With its sin city scenario, and Kim Novak/Marilyn Monroe inspired seductress at the one armed bandit, this is exciting, risque and unquestionably one of the most desirable Elvgren artworks to come to market. Recent auction records on the artist top out at $262,900 and on July 15th 2009, 3 Brown & Bigelow original calendar pin-ups closed at $215,100.00, $191,200.00 and $143,400.00 after spirited bidding. Elvgren is without a doubt the most important pin-up artist in American history and this is by all accounts a masterwork and an Elvgren painting for the ages.

Pot Luck!

Artist: Gil Elvgren

Grapefruit Moon Gallery is honored to offer this rare and exceptional original pastel illustration which Henry Clive created for the cover of the Valentines Day edition (February 13, 1937) of “The American Weekly.” Part of Clive’s “Vision of an Artist” series of covers for this Randolph Hearst publication, these Visions illustrated forces of nature such as the tornado and (in this case) Aurora Borealis as mythical images of femininity. The concept of women as natural phenomenon and even natural disasters is something Clive took a personal interest in, as his 6 failed marriages will attest. This enchanting and inventive depiction titled “The Aurora” features favorite Clive model and Randolph Hearst mistress Marion Davies as the goddess of the northern lights, radiating over a polar ice cap.

The Aurora

Artist: Henry Clive

 

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