Grapefruit Moon Gallery

Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration

art deco

Grapefruit Moon Gallery is ecstatic to offer Sultana, the original Louis F. Dow commissioned calendar pin-up painting by Henry Clive. Created in 1925, Sultana is in all regards the artist’s signature and defining creation, featuring an exotic nearly nude dreamy enchantress in an Art Deco Egyptian fantasy dreamscape. This enchanting artwork is littered with sophisticated touches such as the Moorish architecture which glimmers behind Sultana as she releases a white dove. This timeless image was again issued in 1941 as a mutoscope card with the title Lucky Dove–a vintage calendar print and mutoscope card are included in the sale.

Sultana

Artist: Henry Clive

An original early 1930’s oil on canvas illustration, presumably of exotic silent movie film star, Anna May Wong. Henry Clive did a series of oil paintings titled Enchantresses of the Ages for Randolph Hearst’s American Weekly Magazine of ethnic glamour portrait studies.

Portrait of Anna May Wong

Artist: Henry Clive

This voluptuous dreamy risqué redhead was created as calendar pin up art for the Goes Litho Company by the prolific and talented female Chicago area illustrator Pearl Frush. A red headed femme-fatale, loosely styled after Jean Harlow from her starring turn in the 1932 film Red Headed Woman, appears in a floppy wide brimmed straw hat with […]

Red Headed Woman

Artist: Pearl Frush

This technically dazzling painting by the French-American artist, muralist, and illustrator Andre Durenceau shows a colorful art deco landscape conceived in the manner of Rockwell Kent, with a lake in the foreground and an oversized flying fish adding the surreal touch for which the artist was known to the scene. This gouache on canvas is signed lower right and […]

Flying Fish

Artist: Andre Durenceau

  For nearly three decades the inimitable Enoch Bolles was the sole cover artist for Film Fun magazine, creating larger than life and uniquely erotic pin up creations that bridged the gap between the traditional calendar girl and pulp magazine femme-fatales. In this example, which graced the cover of the June 1940 issue, a streamlined […]

Peek of the Season

Artist: Enoch Bolles

This remarkable art deco Orientalist scene by the American illustrator and cartoonist Frank Godwin, depicts the interior story “Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves”, from the 1920 children’s book Stories The Sandman Told, a complete copy of which is included in the sale. Pictured in this gouache on board painting, is Morgiana, a slave girl who is pouring […]

Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves

Artist: Frank Godwin

This woman in peril, menace themed proposed spicy pulp oil painting by the American illustrator William Soare is a lurid and provocative example of the damsel in distress imagery which proliferated newsstands in the 1930s. To the best of our research, this pulp cover illustration appears to have never been published, which sometimes happened when the fly-by-night titles that commissioned these spicy […]

Danger Girl

Artist: William Soare

This refined pastel portrait of film legend Mary Astor by the American illustrator Rolf Armstrong dates to 1933, during the artist’s brief tenure as a Hollywood portraitist. The elegant and understated large format artwork reflects Armstrong’s desire to move away from the rigid demands and deadline driven style of his in demand career as America’s leading calendar artist. In 1931, Armstrong moved from New York to the West coast and started an independent fine art company “Armstrong Art Services.”

Mary Astor Hollywood Portrait

Artist: Rolf Armstrong

 

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