Imaginary Worlds - Tales of Margaret Brundage

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

In the 1930s Margaret Brundage was the hottest pulp fiction magazine illustrator. She primarily painted covers for Weird Tales magazine, which published the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and other pioneering genre writers. I talk with experts George Hagenauer, Lauren Stump and Steve Korshak of the Korshak Collection about why Brundage’s work was so alluring, and how it taps into current questions about how women are depicted in fantasy worlds. And tattoo artist Mary Joy Scott explains why Brundage had an influence on the art of tattooing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. These machines haven't changed a whole lot in their construction since 1891 when they were invented, the electric tattoo machine. It is early in the morning at Ed Hardy's Tattoo City in San Francisco. Actually, it's not really that early, but it's early for a tattoo parlor where people don't usually show up to the afternoon. Mary Joy Scott is showing me her tattooing equipment, and she's a big deal in the world of tattoo art. But I was not there to get a tattoo. I wanted to talk with her about her craft because one of the artists that she's really inspired by is Margaret Brundage. And if you haven't heard of Margaret Brundage, don't worry, most people haven't.

In the 1930s, Margaret Brundage drew the covers for a Pulp Fiction magazine called Weird Tales. Now, Pulp Fiction is usually thought of as sort of hard-boiled detective stories, but Weird Tales specialized in fantasy and horror stories written by very famous people like H.B. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. And the covers that Margaret Brundage drew for the magazines were just as iconic. They're just so beautifully rendered. They have such an inner life, more so than some pulp illustrations that I've seen. I think the most well-known Brundage illustration has a woman alone on the cover. She's wearing a black sleeveless top. Her arms are raised with the back of her

palms against her cheeks. And she's wearing basically a Batgirl cowl with an actual bat spreading its wings on top. And by the way, that cover's from 1933, seven years before Batman came out. But a typical Bruntage cover had a woman who was either completely naked or barely wearing anything, and there's a sinister figure lurking over her or in the background. It could be a giant wolf or an old witch or a demon with wings or an evil-looking swami or another woman in a position

of domination. Sometimes the main female figure on the page looks like she's terrified. Other times she's reaching out to this otherworldly element. And in some of the illustrations, she's so lost in her own thoughts, she barely notices all the weird stuff happening around her. in her own thoughts, she barely notices all the weird stuff happening around her. I look at her work to see how she arranges the figures together with one another. And I've looked at her faces a lot because she knows how to simplify a face to give you maximum motion and readability from far away, which you need on a cover, right? You need that on a tattoo. You want to be able to see what's going on several feet away. And when you say arrange a figure, what does that mean?

Say I have a back piece I'm working on, and I have to put two different figures on that back. I have to arrange them together with one another, because it's really like working on a vase or something. It's not a flat piece of paper. It's a living, breathing, rounded person that I'm working on. But that visual impact is really important. So things like movie posters, Pulp Fiction covers, these are excellent sources of inspiration and great reference for a tattooer. Mary thinks that this connection between Margaret Brundage and tattoo art goes back to one particular pioneer in the field of tattooing, Ralph Johnstone. I feel convinced that he looked at a lot of Margaret Brundage covers and incorporated them into his work. So we started looking through this book of Ralph Johnstone's tattoos.

And I definitely saw the resemblance to Margaret Brundage's work. And during the Depression, Ralph Johnstone's tattoo parlor was pretty close to the office of Weird Tales in Chicago, so he probably saw her covers in newsstands. I mean, they're hard to miss back then. Oh, look at that. Yeah, that looks exactly like a Margaret Brundage. This is the image that I thought was the most like a Margaret Brundage. Right. How would you describe it? So this image is a woman in a cat costume with claws. Well, you know, long nails.

And she's creeping with her arm up. She's sort of like a little cat burglar. But she's wearing a half shirt with a headdress, but sort of looks like it's all connected. Like a panther almost. With a panther, a black panther on top of her head. But she is fully embodying the sort of slinky black cat spirit creeping through the hallway.

But yeah, it looks like a Margaret Brundage illustration. Yeah, that was my first thought. Yeah, it does. We don't know a lot about Margaret Brundage's life. George Hagenauer is one of the few scholars who's done research about her. And the first time he came across her work, he was not at an art gallery. God, I probably first saw Margaret Brundage's work in the window of a Skid Row bookstore on the north side of Chicago. He would always have weird tales in the front window with the Brundage covers because the Skid Row area had a burlesque house across the street.

Lesk House across the street. And I was sitting there buying nickel comic books, and underneath in the file drawers were her original pastels, but I never realized that at the time. In the 1970s and 80s, only a handful of collectors appreciated these illustrations as being works of art. I mean, now they're being auctioned for thousands of dollars, and we can see that she had a big influence on commercial illustration, tattoo art, and even the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. So who was she? And how did she end up being so important? The life of Margaret Brundage was not a complete mystery. We know that she spent most of her life in Chicago. When she was eight years old, her father died. She was raised by her mother.

And I've seen a few pictures of her as a young woman. And you know in old pictures, sometimes it looks like people could only exist in that era? Margaret Brundage looks like someone that I could imagine walking down my street right now, with her short black hair, with a ponytail up in the back, dark mascara, and dark lipstick. But she definitely was a woman of her time. In fact, she went to high school with Walt Disney.

She actually notoriously denies his illustrations for the school newspaper, which she's editor of. Lauren Stomp works for the Korshak Collection, which owns a few original Brundage pieces. And Lauren says Brundage actually turned down Walt Disney's artwork a few times for the high school paper. They did have a relationship, though. She reaches out to him in the 40s, sort of looking for work at his animation studio. And I think he's working on Cinderella at the time

and says, you know, this is really much more simple than what you're able to give us, but please come out, let's talk. It was nice seeing you kind of thing. So they were friendly, but they didn't really ever work together after high school. Brundage didn't want to work for Disney because she had very deep ties to Chicago.

After high school, she went to the Art Institute there to study fashion illustration. She also got sucked into the scene at a speakeasy slash artist salon called the Dill Pickle Club. The Dill Pickle was an intersection of Chicago avant-garde with political activism. Steve Korshak runs the Korshak Collection, where Lauren Stump works. They focus on early sci-fi and fantasy illustrators. There were hobos and wobblies and Marxists. It was a time, a turbulent time,

just before the depression of burlesque houses and cabarets and nightclubs. It was a time of free expression. There were new dancers. There were different things going on. There was discussions of free love. All of these things Margaret was exposed to, as well as being married to a womanizer.

That womanizer was named Slim. Margaret met him at the club. They got into these deep conversations about politics and art. And when she got pregnant, they had a shotgun wedding. Slim never really committed to the marriage. Slim Brundage would disappear for a month or two at a time, and Margaret wouldn't know where he was. And so Margaret moved out, and she moved in with her mother, the Christian scientist practitioner who had fallen down and broken her mother, the Christian scientist practitioner, who had fallen down and broken her hip, but refused to have it treated, being a Christian science practitioner.

So Brundage is basically a single mother, caring for her own disabled mother. She needs money. She picks up a few gigs doing fashion illustration. And then she walks over to the office of Weird Tales magazine. Now, when I was researching Weird Tales for my last episode about Conan the Barbarian, I got a pretty negative impression of the publisher Farnsworth Wright. He just seemed like a shyster who kept shortchanging his writers. But Margaret Brundage brought out a whole different side of Farnsworth Wright.

Lauren says that Margaret could walk the line between being very feminine and being like one of the boys. She was a woman who has a background in the Dill Pickle Club, so I think that she was able to just really jump, you know, come back with a quick comeback and really develop this strong relationship with him. Farnsworth Wright put Brundage to work on a side publication called Oriental Stories. Yeah, Pulp Fiction was not exactly known for racial sensitivity back then, to put it mildly. But they paid well. She got $90 a cover, which would be about $1,700 today.

And Farnsworth Wright couldn't get enough of her covers. You know, Farnsworth really starts picking out these nude covers, the more scantily clad women sort of the better. And obviously Brundage feeds into that, supplying him with the content that he's more interested in publishing. But the authors get quick to this. They're like, okay, if I include a piece of my story to have a woman in no clothing draped over a wheel or bound, or if I can include those snippets that Brundage is going to pick up on, then it's more likely for my story to make the cover. Well, what about, I know that she faced criticism. There are some authors like Lovecraft were not a fan of these covers because they thought

it distracted from the stories. And some of the readers felt that way too. Do you think that was a legitimate criticism? I can understand the criticism. I don't think it necessarily adds to the story to sort of have this out of left field, you know, naked woman appearing. So yeah, I think that's 100% legitimate. Not all the writers felt that way. Robert E. Howard really liked the covers that she drew for his Conan stories. And later in life, in one of the few

interviews that she ever gave, Brundage said that Howard was her favorite author, and she was devastated when he committed suicide. In fact, George Hagenauer told me something that really surprised me. The original model for Conan the Barbarian, when he first appears on Weird Tales covers, is her husband, Slim. If you look at pencil drawings of Slim during the period that Conan is appearing on the cover, the hairdo and all that stuff and the shape of the face is real similar to Conan. Now, one of the reasons why the Brundage covers were so unique was because she painted with pastels. Most magazine covers back then were painted with acrylics or oils. Now, typically, you would think a pastel drawing would be a bucolic scene of a

farm or a sunset, but she used pastels to give the flesh of her female figures a soft texture with a lot of vibrancy. And she couldn't afford to buy full sets of pastels, so she relied on a lot of basic colors, which made her female figures pop out against the backgrounds that were either midnight blue, blood red, velvet green, or fiery yellow. We have exhibitions of fantasy illustrators. Again, here's Steve Korshak. Many times, a lot of the women will come over during the exhibition and tell me

that their favorite illustrator is actually Margaret Brundage. And I would say to them, gee, that's interesting. I always thought of Brundage's work as being kind of sexual. And they would tell me, no, Margaret's work is sensual. The pastels and the chalks give it a rich, vibrant, sensual feeling. One of the things that really draws Lauren Stump to Margaret Brundage's art is the ambiguity of the female figures. Margaret Brundage's art is the ambiguity of the female figures. There's something about the women that she portrays that you're not really sure if they're victims or not.

They're almost like they're, you know, participating in this really interesting way. Like they're going to be bound, but they're not scared. You know, they're going to be involved and not like this complete damsel. The tattoo artist Mary Joy Scott actually thinks it's really powerful to see how often the women in these illustrations look like they're in danger. Women have been over time victims of a lot of violent crime. And we know that. So there's something in me that I recognize, that sort of fear.

And I find that in some way, that's an essential component to the female hero's journey. You have to descend into the darkness in order to understand that you might survive it. Yeah. Well, what do you think about the fact, I mean, the brundage, the women in the brundage covers are either completely naked or mostly, or half naked or mostly naked.

Do you think that also adds to the sense of vulnerability as well to the women on those covers? Absolutely. Absolutely. Nakedness is, again, that's an archetypal symbol for being laid bare at your most essential state. And it's also getting to that basic experience and that fear in the dark. I think that Brundage herself is modeled in a lot of her actresses, a lot of her characters are someone that she recognizes either in herself or in her peers. And I think that that's real. And it's nothing that a man depicting a woman,

it doesn't work as well. She's interjecting this sort of real sensuality and real presence into her illustrations that you just don't really get with other contemporary illustrators. So I think that that's why I'm so drawn to it. And Mary says this is an issue that we're still dealing with, like how women are depicted in fantasy illustrations or movie posters or comic book covers. When I looked at her work, I did feel that it was painted by a female. I felt that sort of female gaze. There's something about the way that a woman will depict a beautiful woman that sometimes is a little different. a beautiful woman that sometimes is a little different. There's an inner life to the woman, and she's not just tits and ass on a plate. She's doing something, and her spirit is sort of moving her, and yet she's very beautiful. Yeah, well, I think also with a lot of these pictures when they're drawn or painted by men, the women are very aware that they're being looked at by the male viewer, they're and they have

and they look and they look back like saying you know almost to say like well i'm here for you and her women are completely unaware that they're being observed by you they're on a journey i think you hit the nail on the head i think that's what it is because they they really are they're participants in the scene they're fully immersed in the scene. But in the 1930s, the readers of Weird Tales did not always see it that way. The magazine got a ton of complaints about Margaret Brundage's covers. The magazine was in a strange position. It published horror, but it was not schlocky like a lot of other horror magazines back then. It was edgier

than the typical sci-fi magazine, where, by the way, women rarely appeared on the cover. They're usually rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters, until those illustrators started copying Margaret Brundage's style. George Hagenauer says that the pictures that Brundage created were not that different from the sex pulps at the time, but Weird Tales had serious literary ambitions. That's part of the reason you had some of the complaints, was the fact that there are people who realize that the writing in Weird Tales was far better than a large chunk of the writing that was available in your avid fiction magazine. And they then would get somewhat shocked when they would have, like,

a scantily clad woman on the cover making love to a pagan statue or a bondage type of situation. You know, because even though that was part of the stories, they didn't want the visual on the cover. Now, she signed her work M. Brundage. Most people assumed that M. must have stood for a male name. Farnsworth Wright saw an opportunity for a media sensation. So he made a big deal out of revealing that M stood for Margaret. Yeah, he reveals that it's Margaret and people kind of gasp, right? It's like, oh my gosh, a woman did this?

And there was so much speculation about who this woman would be and what kind of woman she was. And like, how how could a woman do this? Right. And even though, I mean, men have been doing it forever. So, yeah, people there were there was like a backlash to her being a woman portraying this hyper sexualized sort of erotic art. Brundage thought the whole controversy was ridiculous, but the backlash did catch up with her. In 1938, the magazine moved to New York for financial reasons, but at the same time, the mayor of New York, Fiorella LaGuardia, passed decency laws that prohibited racy covers on magazines. On top of that, she had a really terrible time getting her newly sanitized artwork to New York because pastels are really delicate.

Farnsworth Wright used to joke that he was afraid to even sneeze around her artwork because he was worried it would disintegrate. Even today, Steve Korshak struggles with that problem. We did an exhibition at the Society of Illustrators in New York, and they wanted the Brundages. And I was so nervous about it, I took them in my car and drove them up to New York and then flew back to Florida. And when I picked them up, I flew to New York and then drove them back. This is the point where Margaret Brundage falls off the radar. She reemerges in the 1960s at a few art fairs, but she doesn't sell much. In 1972, her son dies, possibly of a drug or alcohol overdose, we're not sure.

And then most of her belongings were destroyed in a fire, including her correspondences, which is why we don't have the full picture of her life. And then she dies in 1976 with very little money. Steve Korshak has been leading the way in making the argument that she deserves the respect of an artist, not just a magazine illustrator who is a footnote in pop culture history. For a long time, people didn't consider illustrators to be artists because they worked for a commercial purpose. They weren't like Van Gogh, and they didn't go to Polynesia and bite off Gogan's ear. They were entrepreneurs. That's not what an artist is supposed to be. So maybe the fact that we've overlooked that for so long and thought that you can't be that person and still be an artist, maybe our assumptions were wrong. George Hagenauer thinks that the genres of fantasy and horror actually took a big leap into the public's consciousness because of her illustrations.

If Weird Tales didn't survive, Lovecraft and actually a lot of this type of genre, which became very popular again in the 1960s, wouldn't even have existed. Because that was basically how these writers got the money to live. And I don't think Weird Tales would have made it through the 30s without Margaret Brundage. I mean, if you look at Weird Tales in the late 20s and prior to Margaret Brundage, if you go to collectors meetings, that early stuff is really expensive because there wasn't much of it. And the magazine was continually tottering on the point of falling apart. Once you get into the 30s and you get Brundage as a cover artist, suddenly Weird Tales becomes viable. There are any number of people who tried to compete with Weird Tales who folded in the 20s and 30s. Strange Story, Strange Tales, a lot of these magazines,

Tales of Magic and Mystery, quite often had Lovecraft, had Howard, had a lot of these other people writing for them. But that didn't survive. Weird Tales did. And that was the editorial, but it was the editorial was savvy enough to put Margaret Brundage on the cover. Typically, that's the end of her story, but George has one other point he wants to make. Brundage may have disappeared from the art scene, but she didn't disappear. She got a job working for the Southside Community Arts Center in Chicago, which began as a WPA project that was dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt. A lot of groundbreaking African-American artists worked with that community center,

like Gordon Parks and Margaret Taylor Burroughs. And so she gets down there, gets involved first as an instructor, ultimately becomes president of the board, and works there in some fashion or another for, I don't know, five, six, eight, nine years. And that becomes her life. You know, she's doing art, but she's doing it in the context that's also important to her, which is social change and changing people's lives. So she played a very key role in that for quite a while until the early 50s. The early 50s, her, Margaret Briggs and her husband and a number of people basically had to leave the board because of the McCarthy hearings and a lot of the stuff that's, you know, the HUAC

stuff, the stuff that's going against people who have any ties to the radical parts of American political spectrum. And so people like Margaret Brundage, Margaret Burroughs, and her husband literally left the country to be safe. So they went down to Mexico for four or five or six years. Margaret Brundage is often seen as tragic or forgotten. But to me, this is heroic. as tragic or forgotten. But to me, this is heroic. And remember, she could have made more money if she moved her entire family to Los Angeles

and worked for Walt Disney. She could have also moved them to New York, toned down her style, and gotten steady work at Weird Tales and other magazines. And yet here she is in the 1950s, moving to another country so the Southside Community Art Center could go on during the Red Scare without any controversy. Yeah, I mean, I think the major problem understanding Brundage

is that what little exists on her was all done from the fan perspective. So as well, what did you do in science fiction? What did you do? And, you know, what artwork did you do? Who did you know in the field? For Margaret, that's really part of her life, but probably even almost a secondary part of her life compared to the bigger issues, which is how do you improve society? Working at the Southside Community Arts Center, they worked with like 50,000 kids and adults who were living in poverty, whose only access to the arts were that center. So you compare that to doing, like, a cover for Fantastic Adventures,

there's no comparison, I think. I mean, what makes for a good life? Is it how other people perceive our life or how we experience it? Margaret Brundage put a lot of love into her family, her work, and her community. Her family had a lot of love into her family, her work, and her community. Her family had a lot of heartbreak. Work was stop and go.

But building a community that lasts beyond your own lifetime? That is an art unto itself. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Mary Joy Scott, Lauren Stump, Steve Korshak, and George Hagenauer. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and imagineworldspod, and the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.