Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire
by Jim Silke
Dark Horse, 2010
96 pp. $25:00
Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire reproduces and comments on the classic paperback novel covers drawn and painted by Maguire, from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Maguire ended his career by painting Romance-novel images of he-men and half-dressed women posed before gloomy castles, but he is famed for his 1950s-1960s depictions of bad belles and femmes fatales, often with a gun in hand or in easy reach.
Silke opines that Maguire, “With pencil, brush and a lot of talent, … (made) deities out of simple dames: fallen angels, cunning chippies, hash slingers in greasy spoons, immoral spectacles in high heels and vermillion, and the girl next door.” He also finds that Maguire was born to paint the “particular girl in a dramatic situation.” As a “genius” within popular culture, he drew fetchingly the distressed damsel. Before Maguire, says Silke, “there had never been an artist who made the commonplace female so beautiful, nor the beautiful female so human.”
Yet Maguire “idealized” his female figures. He worked with live models, but altered them in his art: The finished head would be smaller, the legs longer and slimmer, and the bust more pronounced. While Maguire illustrated cliché stories by no-name writers, he also turned in covers for novels by Gustave Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence, and the pioneering U.S. lesbian writer Gale Wilhelm.
Silke’s a Maguire fan, and his critique is welcome, but this book is about those novel covers, and the reproductions are so lavish and telling, that it is a pity that they mainly grace garage-sale books as opposed to household walls.
No Comments so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.