Raging Beasts and Riveting Busts

Mort Künstler, the Brooklyn, New York-born artist best known for painting paperback book covers, illustrations for men’s magazines, and depictions of historical events, died on February 2 at age 97. The newspaper Newsday recalls that as a young man, Künstler

was a member of four college teams. He even received an athletic scholarship to attend UCLA after three years at Brooklyn College but had to leave in his first semester when his father had a heart attack. After returning to Brooklyn, he studied art at Pratt Institute, where his backup career choice as an illustrator and fine artist took root.

Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.

His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country—one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age.

In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote, “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.”

Like probably most readers of this blog, though, I am more familiar with Künstler’s year’s working for periodicals and book publishers.

(Above) Two examples of Mort Künstler’s work for men’s magazines. Top: From Stag, May 1972, art by Kunstler as “Emmett Kaye.” Bottom: Male, February 1965. (Hat tip to Robert Deis)

A biographical sketch at his Web site says that, after apprenticing with elder artist George Gross, Künstler started out in the early 1950s seeking employment as an advertising illustrator—just as ad agencies were “increasingly moving towards television rather than print media. This loss of revenue caused magazines to fail or merge, as more illustration work was being replaced by color photography.

However, Mort worked hard and thrived in this competitive environment. By the mid-1950s he had become a skilled working artist receiving jobs from many of the most prominent and popular publishers of the day. Book publisher Dodd, Mead & Company, and magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Classics Illustrated, Sports Afield, Boys’ Life, Outdoor Life, and Magazine Management’s Men’s Adventure, Male, and True Magazine regularly published his work for covers and interior illustrations. They liked his dynamic illustrations, which focused on themes of man’s encounters with nature, criminals and mobsters, damsels in distress, espionage, and military conflicts. They were gripping, rich in detail and immensely popular.

Mort completed at least three cover illustrations and two inside illustrations every month for one publisher, Magazine Management Company, alone. It’s the main reason he used pen names such as Martin Kay and Emmett Kaye: the editors didn’t want it to look like one person was doing all of the magazines’ illustrations.

If you would like to revisit Künstler’s book and magazine art, both Flickr and Pulp Covers host excellent examples of that work. Or take a rewarding spin through the blog he wrote for 15 years.

His Web site notes that during the 1970s, Künstler began receiving assignments from mainstream magazines such as Newsweek and Good Housekeeping. It was during that same period that he started painting movie posters (for The Poseidon Adventure, for instance). In 1979, he was hired by NASA as official artist for the Space Shuttle Columbia, and three years later, Künstler was commissioned to create artwork for the CBS-TV mini-series The Blue and the Gray. That convinced him to concentrate on imagery from the American Civil War and U.S. history. Samples of his work in that field can be enjoyed at this link.

Mort Künstler was an exceptional artist, who could capture drama, danger, and the delicacy of a beautiful woman in the stroke of a brush. He will be sorely missed, but his work lives on and will likely continue to earn new fans well into the future.