Mort Künstler spent decades in the trenches of American illustration working in the fields of pulp and men’s adventure magazines. His assignments would range from deep-cover spies and elite commandos to man-eating wildlife and violent street gangs—babes, beasts, bullets and bombs. It was an astonishing opening chapter of a long and distinguished career. Künstler, often referred to as the Godfather of Pulp, died February 2. He was 97 years old.
Mort Künstler in his Oyster Boy, New York, studio in 2015. The artist was the subject of a Collector Home feature for Western Art Collector. Photo by Francis Smith.
While Künstler is widely known for his pulp work—in titles such as Male, Argosy, Stag, True, For Men Only—it was his later work of the Old West and Civil War that caught the attention of fine art collectors and brought him worldwide acclaim. He was celebrated for his extensive research and attention to detail, especially with his Civil War subjects. “It all comes down to the details. Those little things add up within the story,” he said in 2014. “And story is everything.”Born in Coney Island in New York City, Künstler—which means “artist” in German—was exposed to art by his father, who was an amateur painter. After learning art from a series of influential teachers, Künstler attended the Pratt Institute and then joined an illustration studio in New York City. The gig only lasted a few months before he left to become a freelance painter. Throughout the 1950s, Künstler would hone his craft at many of the popular pulp titles of the era. His work became so prolific that he created pseudonyms—Emmett Kaye and Martin Kay, both variations of his initials, M.K.—so he could sell his work to more magazines.
The Kansan, 1973, book cover for The Kansan by Richard Brister, oil on board. Collection of the artist. © Mort Künstler Inc.
His career took a turn in 1965 when he took an assignment for National Geographic about the history of St. Augustine, Florida. “[The assignment] introduced Mort to the detailed and comprehensive research needed to render a historically accurate scene,” his website notes. “He learned the value of working with historians and subject matter experts which informed his whole approach to historical paintings from that point on.”
The Night the Mob Took Over Thrill Park, for Men Only magazine cover, November 1967, gouache on board, 11½ x 165/8 in.
Künstler often took advice from some of his artist friends, including Frank McCarthy, James Bama and Tom Lovell, all former illustrators who turned to Western art. It was Lovell who encouraged the painter to take several early and important commissions. In the 1970s, with his career still in transition, Künstler did posters for The Poseidon Adventure and The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three, and he also created work for Newsweek, MAD, Good Housekeeping and even NASA. The Civil War as a subject entered his studio in 1982 and remained a force in his career for much of the rest of his life.
Künstler’s pulp material experienced a resurgence after the 2003 release of the book It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps. More books would follow, as well as museum exhibitions. The sudden fame of these images helped connect the Golden Age Illustration of Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker to the many artists who worked later in illustration, and then left for the American West in the 1970s.
LaGrange vs. LaGrange, 2015, oil
Künstler admitted he was astonished that people wanted to see that work. “If I told you how many [of those paintings] I threw out and burned, you’d be horrified. Even the company I worked for probably threw the things out,” he said in Western Art Collector in 2014. “Back then, if I would have thought these pieces would be in a museum, everyone would have thought I was smoking funny cigarettes…I was just working, trying to make ends meet. My personal feeling is that artists remind me of salmon swimming upstream. They all want to make a living, and they all want to eat and not have their kids starve. They try a little here, and if that doesn’t work out they back out and try another way. That’s what I was doing with all those great images back then.” —
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