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| original painting for the November 1935 issue of WEIRD TALES |
Margaret Hedda Johnson was born in Chicago on December 9, 1900. In the early 1920s she attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Art where she studied fashion design. Afterwards, she became a freelance artist as a fashion illustrator for various newspapers. She married Myron "Slim" Brundage in 1927 and they had one son, Kerlyn. The marriage didn't last long and they separated, leaving Margaret to care for her child alone, as well as a mother in poor health, with little, if any, financial support from her husband. They divorced in 1939.
Desperate to get away from the mundane world of fashion -- and of black and white art -- she brought her portfolio to WEIRD TALES, "the magazine of the bizarre and unusual", whose offices were located in Chicago. The magazine was founded by publisher Clark Henneberger in 1923, and Farnsworth Wright took over as editor in 1924 after former editor Edwin Baird was fired. After seeing a drawing of an Oriental dancer, they gave her work as a cover artist for another of their titles, ORIENTAL STORIES, despite her limited knowledge of colour reproduction. Her first cover was for the Summer 1932 issue. (ORIENTAL STORIES would soon be renamed THE MAGIC CARPET; it only ran sporadically from October 1930 to January 1934.)
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| Brundage's first cover: ORIENTAL STORIES, Summer 1932 issue |
She moved on to the more famous WEIRD TALES with the September 1932 issue, and would paint a total of 66 covers for the magazine, including all nine of the Conan covers. One of those covers helped make the issue a sell-out. Illustrating "The Slithering Shadow", a Conan tale by Robert E. Howard, Brundage's cover showed a naked blonde in bondage being whipped by a scantily-clad brunette, set against a crimson background and exaggerated shadows.
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| original painting for the September 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES |
She became the most prolific of the magazine's cover artists, with an unbroken streak from June, 1933 to September, 1936. (There was no August issue for 1936.) Her lurid covers were sensational and controversial, if their letters page, “The Eyrie”, is any indication. While fans -- and many of them were female -- didn't object to the nudity, some thought the covers were misrepresenting the magazine as sleazy trash rather than as a distinguished periodical of weird fiction. But Brundage's nude covers sold issues, and that was all that Wright needed to know. She signed her name "M. Brundage". This is how she was credited in the magazine until the February 1935 issue, where her full name is given, identifying her as a woman. (This may have been an attempt at mollifying the critics who thought the covers were sexist and misogynistic.)
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| original painting for the January 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES |
Brundage's fashion training all but went out the window. Occasionally she would sneak in a pretty dress, but usually her soft-skinned heroines were either completely naked or covered in nothing more than a wisp of gossamer. With wide eyes and parted lips, these damsels in peril were being menaced by monsters or dagger-wielding cultists; often they were in bondage being whipped by evil priestesses; sometimes they were the ones in control, running naked through the snow with wolves. In any case, they were young and built like goddesses. There was little, if any, background in the composition, but always there were sexy, shapely females to titillate the viewer. Actually, there was a female on all but three of Brundage's covers (the April, May and August 1935 issues being the exceptions). Of Brundage's 66 WEIRD TALES covers, a dozen featured bondage and/or flagellation.
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| original painting for the January 1935 issue of WEIRD TALES |
Brundage visited Farnsworth Wright at the WEIRD TALES offices at least once a month. A particular scene from a story was chosen for her to illustrate, often one of bondage and sadism or with lesbian overtones, and Brundage would submit a few pencil sketches. Wright would then choose one to be rendered for the cover. Not surprisingly, writers would sometimes fit a bondage and whipping sequence into their yarn hoping to make the cover.
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| A few vintage Brundage illustrations reproduced in the fanzine XENOPHILE #28 (November/December 1976) |
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Forrest Ackerman visited Brundage at her second floor apartment in Chicago, with two guides and a friend in tow, for a prearranged interview published in the February 1941 issue of THE ALCHEMIST, a science fiction fanzine. He described her as "tall, blonde, affable."
Brundage rarely used models to work from, being a luxury she simply couldn't afford. Occasionally a friend would pose for the female figures, but she usually worked from the pure ether of her imagination, or from photos. The models for the cover of the November 1940 issue of WEIRD TALES were Robert Taylor and Loretta Young, presumably from a still from the 1936 film, PRIVATE NUMBER. She was paid $90 per cover (later reduced to $50), always rendered in pastels, her chosen medium, and usually measuring 20 inches in height, but with varying widths, and rarely completed within less than a week. Brundage was rarely asked to make corrections and, under Wright's editorship, never asked to cover up her nudes. "They would always pick the one with the least amount of clothing," Brundage said. What's more, she was asked "to make larger and larger breasts".
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| original painting for the August 1934 issue of WEIRD TALES |
WEIRD TALES was sold in 1938 to a New York publisher, where the editorial offices were also located. Dorothy McIlwraith was brought in to assist Wright. Office politics and health issues forced Wright to resign by 1940, and he died later that year from Parkinson's disease. McIlwraith became the new editor.
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| original painting for the October 1935 issue of WEIRD TALES |
Because Brundage could no longer deliver the artwork in person it had to be shipped, which meant she had to create covers in much less time. Materials, packaging and shipping cost her about $15. This, coupled with the fact that the pastels would smear during shipping causing a need for corrections and more shipping, marked the end of Brundage's reign as leading cover artist for the magazine. She made one attempt at oils, which the editors didn't like, and after the October 1938 issue she only did eight more WEIRD TALES covers, the last being for the January 1945 issue. (She did no covers for the 1939 issues.) The magazine went to bi-monthly status after 1939, so even if she had remained Queen of the Pulps her earnings would have been halved. In the late 1930s under new ownership the covers were no longer risque. Wright's two other discoveries, Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, both amazing artists, were on hand to provide technically proficient and bizarre covers (respectively), and help bring the magazine back to its weird roots. The magazine continued until September 1954.
Brundage, one of the few women artists working for pulp magazines, lived mostly in obscurity and poverty. She continued painting and gave some brief interviews in the 1970s. She died April 9, 1976, predeceased by her son, who died in 1972.
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| original painting for Brundage's first WEIRD TALES cover, September 1932 |
Her covers for Weird Tales are highly valued by collectors, and the originals sell for large sums at auction. The cover for the September 1932 issue of Weird Tales (her first for that magazine) sold for $50,000 in 2008, and in 2010 the cover for the January 1936 issue sold for $37,000. Often overlooked, often underrated, the best of Margaret Brundage's pastel covers for the pulps deserve to be hanging in museums!
Here's a selection of WEIRD TALES covers:
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| October 1932 |
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| March 1933 |
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| The original art for the March 1933 issue |
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| cover for a CONAN story, June 1933 |
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| July 1933 |
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| cover for a CONAN story, September 1933 |
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| October 1933 |
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| November 1933 |
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| December 1933 |
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| The original art for the December 1933 issue |
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| January 1934 |
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| March 1934 |
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| April 1934 |
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| CONAN cover, May 1934 |
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| CONAN cover, August 1934 |
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| cover for a CONAN story, September 1934 |
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| October 1934 |
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| November 1934 |
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| cover for a CONAN story, December 1934 |
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| Margaret Brundage gets swiped: this small ad appeared in the April 1935 issue of WEIRD TALES. |
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| January 1935 |
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| February 1935 |
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| June 1935 |
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| cover for a CONAN story, November 1935 |
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| CONAN cover, December 1935 |
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| January 1936 |
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| March 1936 |
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| The original art for the March 1936 issue |
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| April 1936. A letter by Robert E. Howard was published in The Eyrie for the June 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES, praising this cover: "The colour combination is vivid and attractive, the lady is luscious, and altogether I think it's the best thing Mrs Brundage has done since she illustrated my Black Colossus." (See the June 1933 cover.) |
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| cover for a CONAN story, July 1936 |
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| November 1936 |
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| January 1937 |
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| March 1937 |
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| May 1937 |
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| June 1937 |
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| Original art for the June 1937 issue (in this photo, Brundage's painted border design is obscured by a frame) |
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| September 1937 |
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| October 1937 |
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| November 1937 |
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| January 1938 |
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| At the famous Ackermansion: Forry Ackerman once owned Margaret's original pastel painting (upper right) for the January 1938 cover of WEIRD TALES. (Photo from FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #24, August 1963.) Ackerman met Brundage and was granted a rare interview for THE ALCHEMIST #5 (February 1941), a mimeographed science fiction/fantasy fanzine. Typical of his alliterative style, he called her "fantasy fiction's foremost exponent of the unclothed feminine form". |
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| March 1938 |
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| May 1938 |
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| June 1938 |
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| August 1938 |
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| July 1942 |
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| Margaret Brundage, 1948 |
(The illustrations for Robert E. Howard's Weird Tales stories can be found
here)
