For the Masses: Pulp Fiction Cover Art at the Martin Museum of Art, Waco

The pulp novel doesn’t hit like it used to. Compared to today, from the 1950s through the 70s — the decades of post-war consumption, bubbling social strife, and the beginnings of a marked break from a monoculture — there were fewer elements of escapism. Not to be reductive and say life was simpler back then, but diversion-wise, without the ubiquity of the internet, seeing the world outside of oneself required more effort. Pulp novels, with their over-exaggerated storylines, sexed-up scenes, and sci-fi bents, were a cheap and accessible way for the masses to get out of their own heads. The books were imagination starters, create-your-own-world scripts, save for the one image on their covers which set the scene.

Because these illustrations were the only grounding for pulp stories, they were disproportionately important. When seen isolated on a shelf, the covers depict unique worlds, dominated by American ruggedness, individuality, exoticism, and grit, but taken together in a group, their stereotypical underpinnings come out in full force. The scenes are only vaguely grounded in reality, oftentimes featuring variations of the same (pre-Fabio) hunky dude, who is thrust into different situations — wielding a gun, rescuing a damsel, ogling a mysterious woman, and/or wielding power as a working professional.

More than 30 of these pulp illustrations — commissioned for books and magazines — were collected in CLICKBAIT! A Treasure Trove of Pulp Fiction Cover Art at the Martin Museum of Art in Waco, Texas. The museum didn’t bury the lede — their press release went straight into the meat of the show: “Sex, war, communists, cowboys, and killers. What do these all have in common?”

The covers came from Baylor University’s archives; though the show never explained how this collection was amassed, the works are the perfect objects for an art department to own, because they collapse conversations around painting, product design, audience, and graphic illustration. On their most base level, they’re sensationalistic and of their time — since they were created to appeal to the primal instincts of readers, they lean into the idea of judging a book by its cover. Every painting in the show was dynamic: a few were abstract and ethereal, some depicted the peaks of climactic events, and others left blank spaces that, as illustrated by accompanying images of the finished covers, were later filled with blocky title letters. A few of the works seemed to prefigure series by contemporary artists — Richard Prince’s nurse paintings and Lisa Yuskavage’s women came to mind.

The mainspring of these paintings was their ability to sell not only a story, but a moment of escapism. While many of the works felt slightly unfinished, as if they were hurriedly produced on deadline, this only added to their appeal. Even in their slapdash nature, it was clear the artists (some of whom were unnamed in the show — these pieces after all weren’t designed to make them famous) were keen to the potency of visual language as a propagandistic tool. The best of these illustrations communicate power and desire, while also weaving in a subtext of U.S. cultural and political superiority.

I’d wager that the overwhelming consensus about these paintings is that they aren’t mid-century America’s apical artistic output. I’ll go further and argue that nowadays we see them as representing some of our worst impulses, our basest world views. Wall text in the exhibition sought to contextualize the pieces through a similar contemporary lens, reading: “The images in this exhibition are a product of the time in which they were produced…but that does not mean they are right.” It went on, justifying the point of the show: “…to censor or omit them from view would imply that they never existed or are not worth viewing to learn…This is our chance to learn and grow while acknowledging what our past looked like.”

Looking back at vernacular art is uncomfortable when the message of that art is so clearly complicated. If this ostensibly was art for the people (as pulp books and magazines were blatantly for the masses), then what does it say about everyone who consumed it? Considered in this wider context, these paintings demonstrate how culture can be narrowly uniform, even when it has the appearance of taking a broader worldview. The covers still resonate as paint on paperboard — they are slick, well-made, and visually punchy. Even more so, however, they prevail as 1900s totems. Images clearly have a disproportionate power; throughout human history they have persuaded us to gather, disperse, kill, rebel, conform, conquer, and imagine. It is only by looking at how they have inspired us in the past that we can navigate how to morally use them in the future. 

 

CLICKBAIT! A Treasure Trove of Pulp Fiction Cover Art was on view through September 1, 2024 at the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University.