Comic Books Illustration Magazines Obituary

Mort Künstler – RIP

Famed magazine cover artist and illustrator Mort Künstler has passed away.

Mort Künstler studio

Morton (Mort) Künstler

August 28, 1927 – February 2, 2025

Newsday reported the death of the painter and illustrator:

Although Mort Künstler once told an interviewer that he would prefer to be remembered as a great athlete, he had to settle for being hailed as America’s most prominent historical artist.

Künstler, who died Sunday at Good Shepherd Hospice in Rockville Centre at age 97, was a member of four college teams. He even received an athletic scholarship to attend UCLA after three years at Brooklyn College but had to leave in his first semester when his father had a heart attack. After returning to Brooklyn, he studied art at Pratt Institute, where his backup career choice as an illustrator and fine artist took root.

Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.

His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country — one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age. In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.” 

above: early magazine covers by Künstler

[B]efore he gained his current fame as a historical painter, Mort was an exceptionally hard-working — and exceptionally talented — illustration artist.

He created literally thousands of paintings for magazines, book covers, movie posters and advertisements.

Men’s Pulp Mags interviewed Künstler about his years as an illustrator for men’s adventure magazines.

[I]n the early Fifties, illustration was really starting to die. Color photography was coming in. Television was coming in. More and more advertising money was going to television rather than print, and a lot of people were getting their fiction over television rather than reading it. Many magazines that used a lot of illustration were folding and the trend among most of the ones that survived was to use photos instead of illustrations. Fortunately for me and other artists, some of them, like the men’s adventure magazines, continued to use a lot of cover paintings and interior illustrations.

Mort Künstler men’s magazine illustration

From Print Mag – Mort Künstler: Man of Adventure by Don Vaughan

Men’s adventure magazines were the bastard child of the popular pulp magazines of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, and many of the artists who worked for the pulps also put paint to canvas for this next evolution, most famous among them being Norm Saunders. Numerous publishers saw an easy buck in the men’s adventure magazines, but none more so than Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management, whose titles included Male, Stag, Action For Men, Battlefield, Complete Man, For Men Only, Man’s World, and many others.

Künstler started working for the men’s adventure magazines shortly after graduating from Pratt Institute in the early 1950s…

Mort Künstler Male magazine cover – 1957

From The Saturday Evening Post and a 2015 interview:

Even as he was composing lurid covers for men’s adventure magazines (a soldier blasting his way through a pack of rabid wolves with a machine gun; a furious grizzly hoisting a hunter in its jaws), Künstler showed a knack for engaging the viewer in a human way reminiscent of Norman Rockwell. “Mort has the ability to express the power of the individual, often at a moment of triumph, confusion, or humor,” says Martin Mahoney, director of collections and exhibitions at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

A 1966 assignment from National Geographic on the early history of the town of St. Augustine and another one on the discovery of San Francisco Bay would be game changers for the artist.

Employing his innate sense of drama, he brought these historic moments to life. Soon, he was painting scenes from the Civil War.

The Art of Mort Künstler book cover

If Mort’s comic book work is mentioned at all it would be about his 1976 MAD magazine cover but earlier he had, for a short time in 1953, drawn covers for Classics Illustrated publisher Gilberton.

American Art Archives, American Pulps, and Pulp Covers have galleries of Mort’s magazine and book art.

The Mort Künstler website and the Mort Künstler blog have much more.

above: Mort Künstler illustrating a Mario Puzo (as Mario Cleri) story for Stag

all images copyright their respective copyright holders

Previous Post
CSotD: When Chaos Starts Looking Like KAOS

Comments

Leave a Reply

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.