EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 17 © 2016 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

3 magnificent, and historically accurate, Civil War art. Born in 1927, Mort Künstler studied at Brooklyn College, UCLA and Pratt Institute. He began freelancing in New York shortly after graduating, landing some assignments from various book and magazine publishers in the early ’50s. He even created painted covers for several Classics Illustrated titles (such as ‘Pitcairn’s Island’ and ‘A Study in Scarlet’), but it was while working as a cover painter and interior illustrator for the men’s adventure magazines that he rose to prominence. The so called “sweat-pulp magazines" (as they were referred to) featured bare- chested GIs on their covers, fending o either rabid rats, razor-toothed pirahnas, irascible grizzlys, sadistic Nazis, torturing communists, dirty FACING PAGE TOP: The artist in his New York studio. FACING PAGE BOTTOM: The Movement West (1975), oil on board. “On a day like today in 1859… the freedom to move about as we please is another of those rights which are often taken for granted in our country but denied to countless millions in other parts of the world.” ABOVE: The Fighting 69th: General Meagher and the Irish Brigade, Fredericksburg, Virginia, December 2, 1862 (1998), oil on canvas. BELOW: Heavy Traffic on the Valley Pike (2010), oil on canvas, a scene from Strasburg, Virginia, in the summer of 1861.