american

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

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

A large whimsical 1963 Calendar commissioned gouache painting for The Louis F. Dow Calendar Company signed “Arnquist” a pseudonym which allowed Bill Layne (who was under contract with Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company) to also get paid for calendar works he created for the rival Saint Paul Minnesota competing calendar company. A printed tear sheet of the painting titled “Cat Nap” used as a calendar page March 1963 is included in the sale. This work features a xylophone and a band of mice as the central components as a snoozing cat gets his whiskers trimmed in blissful oblivion to the happenings. Nicely matted and framed and ready to enjoy.

Cat Nap

Artist: Bill Layne

The finest example of a Bill Layne Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company commissioned illustration we have had to offer. A 1950s-era gouache on board titled “Pearl Gardens, for Cultivated Pearls”. Created for one of this calendar company’s jewelry advertising accounts, the image depicts a pair of topless pin-up girl mermaids in an underwater oyster mine with a host of male atomic-age sea dwellers. The type of scene only Bill Layne could envision and execute.

Pearl Gardens

Artist: Bill Layne

A 1940s gouache painting on illustration board showing a silk stockings wearing heartbreaker exposing her garter and getting the worst of a little winter fun. This is by the pin-up artist Winer who created numerous covers for the pin-up magazine titles of the day such as Beauty Parade, Titter, and Wink. Work is unsigned but comes from a Los Angeles estate which featured several signed examples by the artist similar in all regards and artistic aspects.

Bullseye

Artist: Winer

Grapefruit Moon Gallery is pleased to offer a rare surviving Jerome Rozen pulp cover painting from an as of yet undetermined Street & Smith 1930s publication. This macabre and defining oil on canvas shows an old west tavern with a handsome, smoking-gun-holding cowboy menaced by a hooded villain in Day of the Dead Calaca mask. This masterful dark western themed artwork is tense with imminent danger. Signed lower right; painting has been relined and is ready to frame and enjoy.

The Day of the Dead

Artist: Jerome Rozen

This April 16, 1927 cover painting for “Detective Story Magazine” by John A. Coughlin is titled on verso “Hoodooed.” The well rendered oil on canvas, signed lower left, depicts a train robbery heist scene, that from the title appears to fit into a larger intrigue of voodoo and mystery. This rare Street and Smith commissioned cover painting has been relined and stretched on new pine stretchers and is ready to frame and enjoy.

Hoodooed

Artist: John Coughlin

A charming scarce surviving Street & Smith published pulp cover painting by John A. Coughlin, this was most likely used as the cover of the May 13, 1922 issue of “Detective Story Magazine”. The verso is titled “The Stolen Clew”, the dramatic and mysterious scene features Fu Manchu emerging from the background into the lair of a mad scientist. Research leads us to believe that this illustrates a scene from “Dr. Kreener’s Last Experiment,” a serialized story from Sax Rohmer’s “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,” which was published in Detective Story Magazine.

The Stolen Clew

Artist: John Coughlin

A rare surviving oil on canvas depicting the rogue pulp detective magazine villain Maxwell Sanderson in one of his serialized escapades. This was created as a commissioned cover for the July 16, 1929 issue of Street and Smith’s “Detective Story Magazine.” Painted by John A. Coughlin, this work finds Sanderson with his hand caught in the safe–verso is notated with a publishing date and the title “Sanderson Trapped.” Relined and ready to frame and enjoy.

Maxwell Sanderson Trapped

Artist: John Coughlin

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