The art exhibition at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook contains works that span about 80 years — and they are by one artist, who is still working. That would be Mort Künstler, 88, the subject of “Mort Künstler: The Art of Adventure.”
The retrospective, which includes illustrations he created for pulp adventure magazines early in his career, starts with an accomplished pencil sketch of the artist’s childhood bedroom in Brooklyn, which he figures he drew when he was about 8. The most recent work in the show, made last year, is a detailed oil painting, “Respect of an Army,” depicting Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendering at Appomattox, Va., as Union soldiers doff their hats to him.
“I start out as a kid with talent,” Mr. Künstler, an Oyster Bay resident, said with a wry smile as he showed a reporter around the exhibition, which also features many of his 1970s movie posters (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”) as well as advertisements (Solarcaine for sunburn relief).
The show is part of a tour that was organized two years ago by the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
Joshua Ruff, the Long Island Museum’s chief curator, said his museum had long wanted to showcase Mr. Künstler’s work, so he decided to participate in the tour, for which this is the last stop.
“I believe that when the Norman Rockwell Museum made the decision to put this exhibition together, they recognized what a high-level illustrator he is,” Mr. Ruff said. “He has become a little pigeonholed by some people, who only know him as a Civil War artist.”
Mr. Ruff said he was especially impressed by Mr. Künstler’s skill in using gouache, a kind of watercolor, to create minutely detailed scenes, even in “fantastical subjects, like his pulp fiction work.”
Among the gouache pieces are “Whale Tale and Harpooners,” a ferocious whale-hunting scene he made for the July 1955 issue of the magazine For Men Only; and “The Shy Killer,” a circa 1955 illustration for Outdoor Life that shows a hunter in the jaws of a grizzly bear.
“I was often asked to draw scenes that couldn’t be photographed,” Mr. Künstler said.
He often had to leave open spaces in his pictures for print, like a magazine’s name for a cover illustration, a story’s headline or the opening paragraphs of an inside spread. He was so prolific, he said, that he sometimes used pseudonyms so that the pictures in a magazine would appear to be by different artists.
Mr. Künstler’s military scenes were also popular in men’s magazines. “Scuttling the French Fleet,” represented by the original gouache painting, is a highly detailed work that became the cover of a 1961 Stag magazine.
A few illustrations were slightly racy, like “The Week Chicago Outlawed Sex,” a brothel scene for a 1957 story, and his 1956 work “Fraulein!” for a story in Male magazine.
Sometimes, he used his wife, Deborah Künstler, as a model. A demure 1962 oil portrait of Ms. Künstler, whom he met when both were students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, hangs near the illustrations. She is also an artist and designer.
Among the show’s surprises are illustrations of scenes from Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, “The Godfather,” which were not intended for the book but were used to promote it in the Literary Guild’s bulletin and in Male magazine. According to an exhibition text, one of his depictions of Don Corleone inspired Marlon Brando’s jowly look in the film version.
A 1976 Mad magazine cover on display — showing Alfred E. Neuman swimming past a shark in a parody of the “Jaws” poster — was the only cover he ever did for that magazine, and he signed it with a pseudonym, Mutz. “I thought it was beneath me,” Mr. Künstler said.
By the 1980s, he was being commissioned to create oil paintings to commemorate the launch of the Space Shuttle, a portrait of John F. Kennedy for the Postal Service and many historical paintings. Harold Holzer, a noted Abraham Lincoln scholar, is quoted in an exhibition text praising Mr. Künstler’s “ferocious respect for historical accuracy.”
The Long Island Museum has added a few local paintings to the exhibition, Mr. Ruff said, including two scenes depicting the Culper Spy Ring, which had a link in Oyster Bay during the Revolutionary War; and “Teddy’s Fourth of July,” a 2009 oil on canvas that shows Theodore Roosevelt, who lived in Oyster Bay, motoring through town in a homespun parade as residents line the street.
Mr. Künstler said he no longer had the energy to work the way he used to, though he recently signed contracts for a new advertising campaign and for a series of children history books based on his paintings.
He still puts in four hours of painting daily, he said, but now he takes breaks to enjoy “a nice, pleasant day.”
Written By AILEEN JACOBSON
Source: New York Times
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