The Cover As PULP ART

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2003 by Geoff Van Dyke

Byline: Geoff Van Dyke

The days of the magazine cover as an honest-to-goodness art object may be gone, but they're certainly not forgotten. "Pulp Art," which opens at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on the 15th, presents more than 100 paintings, mostly from the 1930s and '40s, that graced the covers of the "pulp" magazines of that era. Many of the paintings will be shown with the magazine covers they illustrated, including titles such as Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Terror Tales.

Magazines generally commissioned the images - which often depicted sensational scenes in order to catch eyes at the newsstand (some things never change) - and then discarded the original paintings. "Almost all of these artists were trained in the best art schools in the country - they were incredible draftsmen," says Anne Pasternak, guest curator of the exhibition and the executive director of Creative Time. "They would have preferred to do their own paintings but if they were going to have to do commercial art, it was much more lucrative and much more respected to be able to work for the slicks like Esquire or Collier's. Working for the pulps was considered lowbrow." Of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 of such paintings, only around 1,000 survive. "[The exhibition] is an opportunity to take a look at the importance of pulp art, because those artists told us a lot about the first half of the 20th century."