1960s

Alberto Vargas’ first work for Playboy Magazine appeared September of 1960, exactly one year before the publication of this artwork. In this flirtatious view, a pretty brunette in a diaphanous pink nightgown smiles to the viewer after applying red lipstick to her full lips. This was generously gifted by Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine to an Easter Seals charity telethon auction in Chicago in the 1970s. This work was chosen specifically by the foundation, which wanted an image that could be shown on TV.

Vargas Girl – Playboy 1961

Artist: Alberto Vargas

This stirring oil on canvas presents a traditional Indonesian dance filled with music, movement, and joy. Martha Sawyers, the artist, made a name in the illustration world for her deeply sensitive and captivating portraits of Far Eastern life–she returned to the region time and again, and her appreciation for the variety of cultures and peoples she encountered culminated in the book she co-authored with her husband William Reusswig “India and Southeast Asia.”

Indonesian Dance

Artist: Martha Sawyers

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.

Spawn of Doom

Artist: Lloyd Birmingham

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.

Marilyn Monroe in the Nude

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.”

Spaceport : 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.

Hang Head, Vandal!

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.

The Unteleported Man

Artist: Lloyd Birmingham

A brilliantly rendered pen & ink illustration by the legendary New York City illustrator Al Hirschfeld. In this tightly rendered “two worlds collide” image in which by the Russian populist poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko embraced by America as represented by cultural icon Bob Hope. The scene offers a lighter look at the Cold War tensions that occurred as politically active Soviet poets gained prominence in the US.

Bob Hope and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Artist: Al Hirschfeld

Cubist Maidens is a lyrical and poignant original mixed medium fine art painting by the prolific and well remembered science fiction and pulp cover artist Virgil Finlay. Work is signed and dated lower left and again on the verso. Modernist and inventive in style, the work is executed in grease pencil and water color, with a scratchboard technique of cutting back into the drawing used to define the faces. This unusual example deftly shows the technical mastery and imagination of this important American illustrator.

Cubist Maidens

Artist: Virgil Finlay

This good girl art original pastel exemplifies the beauty and personality which kept pin up and glamour a mainstay of calendar imagery even after illustration began giving way to photography in popularity. This features a fresh faced brunette envisioned by the leading female pin-up illustrator Pearl Frush and published by Gerlach-Barklow of Joliet Illinois. It was customary for calendar salesmen to reward premiere advertising accounts with original illustrations as incentive to keep advertising with the firm.

Miss 1964

Artist: Pearl Frush

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