Pulp Art seems
more like a collection of essays about the art
of pulp
magazine covers than a full book. Each
chapter-essay focuses on a particular genre.
Similarly, author Robert Lesser comes across as a
knowledgeable enthusiast more than an academic or a professional writer. At times he is almost a florid as the
magazines that are his topic.
What will draw someone to this coffee-table book is not the
history, though that is interesting. The
attraction is the large reproductions of pulp magazine cover art.
The art in this book is a little strange. Part of the strangeness comes from its
quality. Many of these artists were much
more skilled and creative than they needed to be.
The other element of strangeness is that such well-crafted
art had such unabashedly commercial intent.
The covers were intended to sell magazines.
Oh, how they sold magazines.
Pulps were fundamentally adventure stories. They covered several genres, detective,
fantasy, science fiction, western, horror, even romance, but the intent of all
was to give the reader a thrilling escape.
“Spicy” (i.e. sexy) stories did very well to, and they had
correspondingly suggestive covers.
In some ways, the best thing about pulp art is the implied
story. Storytelling in art goes back to
the earliest art. The pulp covers had to
imply a story that suggested the kind of adventure, danger, and weirdness within. They often drew their subject from one of the
stories in the issue, but sometimes a great painting was the inspiration for a
story. The art was not always strictly representational,
it sometimes approached the subject in an abstract way. Energy and dynamism come through the
paintings, and even the artists with the most static style infused their image with
a sense of the exotic and otherworldly.
Pulps are collected now more for their covers than for the
stories they contain. Lesser devotes a
chapter to pulp collecting. The
collector, or potential collector, might be the main audience for the book.
Lesser includes brief biographies of the artists he
discusses. Many of them had success
outside of pulps, and many fine artists resorted to pulps to pay the
bills. Lesser includes several pieces by
other who were pulp artists or had connections to them with their recollections
of the pulp era and its art.
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