Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators
Huntington, NY
Mort Künstler has painted a little bit of everything. Plane crashes, submarine battles, paratroopers raiding an enemy bridge, mobster summits, POW escapes, bank robberies, a shoot-out on a roller coaster with bikini-clad women and seemingly every possible scenario of animal attack, including one simply titled Giant Rats! “The animal attacks were always fun,” Künstler says. “And ridiculous too. One that I did a long time ago was pangolins. It was as ridiculous as it sounds.”
Before Künstler became the great Civil War painter, he bounced from subject to subject early in his career illustrating for men’s adventure magazines and other pulp fiction publications. In previous decades, this pulp era was more of a footnote for the famous artist, but as time passes and new generations discover the splendid zaniness of men’s adventure magazines—with titles such as Stag, Male, Man’s World, Action for Men and For Men Only—künstler has become, once again, a defining icon of the movement. Works from this influential period are now on view in Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York.
The museum is just a short drive from Künstler’s home in Oyster Bay, where the 92-year-old painter still maintains an active studio and business related to his 67-year career. The show, which runs through November 17, opened in August so the artist has already seen the exhibition and visitors’ reaction to it. “The response was quite positive, which is funny for me after all these years. Back then I was just turning them out as fast as I could. And today there is more interest in those works than anything else I painted, including the Civil War,” he says, adding that the interest comes from the time period in which the works were created. “No question about it, there’s a certain nostalgia there for those images. You just don’t see those things anymore, and I did a large variety of subjects, from sexy girls and World War II to mysteries to murder stories. Most of them were for one company, though I did do some covers for another company, always as a freelance artist. I just loved the subjects. Each one was a change of pace, and I rarely did the same thing twice.”
Künstler says he would occasionally be given a completed story to illustrate, but it was often the case where he was given a general subject and then a writer would tailor the text around his finished artwork. In many instances, he invented entirely new weapons, military hardware or vehicles. In Jet-sled
Raid on Russia’s Ice Cap Pleasure Stockade, for instance, he created a jet-powered snowmobile—“just look at that thing. It would never work, but it was my job to make it seem believable,” he says. Some of his best work appeared in Argosy, Adventure and True, all of which were leaders of the genre in the era, as well as on domestic and foreign movie posters for films such as The Poseiden Adventure, The Taking of Pelham 123 and The Hindenburg. He also did early work on Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, back when Puzo was using the pen name Mario Cleri. Though Künstler’s work on the mob story was limited, some of his basic character designs can be seen all the way through to Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic film in 1972.
One thing that stands out about the works in the show, and in the artist’s career as whole, is his supreme grasp of composition. Every image is packed with information, and all of it is relayed to the viewer in a thrilling way with lots of fascinating perspectives and angles, prominent relationships between foreground and background subjects, highoctane action spilling from every corner and a sense of movement coming from every element. “I never had a formula for these images. Mostly it all came down to light and dark, and creating interesting lines for the eye to follow,” Künstler says. “The big key was to make everything convincing, no matter how unbelievable it was. If you could believe in the story, then it was a success.”