MARGARET BRUNDAGE

Margaret Brundage is one of my all-time favourite pulp artists.

Margaret Brundage was born Margaret Hedda Johnson on December 9, 1900 in Chicago, IL. She studied fashion design at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1921-23, but failed to graduate.

Her first pulp cover was for the September 1932 Oriental Stories. She eventually sold 66 original pulp cover illustrations to Weird Tales from 1933 to 1945. Brundage covers were very popular with the readers of Weird Tales, but most of the public was not aware of the artist’s gender, because her work was usually signed “M. Brundage.” When puritanic social forces complained about the overt sexuality of Weird Tales cover art, the editor finally revealed that the artist was a woman, hoping to mollify the perceived offensiveness of her work. It didn’t help.


Aside from the remarkable aesthetic of her approach to pulp art, and the rarity of her being a woman in a field that was almost entirely composed of men, Brundage was also unique in the fact that most of her work is created with pastel on illustration board.

After the publishers of Weird Tales moved to NYC in 1938, Brundage continued to create fantasy scenes in pastel for the rest of her life, but she was never again able to find a steady publisher for her work.She appeared at a number of science fiction conventions and art fairs, where some of her original period works were stolen. Yet she never fully recovered financially from the loss of regular work at WT; her later years were spent in relative poverty.

She continued to work until her death in 1976.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio