Mort Künstler

"[2] Künstler began his career in the 1950s as a freelance artist, illustrating paperback book covers and men's adventure magazines.Collections of Künstler's work are published as limited-edition prints, and his artistic output places him at the forefront of contemporary historical realism.He earned awards for basketball, diving, football and track, and ultimate honors in the Brooklyn College Sports Hall of Fame.That goal became difficult at the time, which led him to work instead as an apprentice at a studio, where he ran errands, cleaned up and touched up paintings by other artists.Künstler wanted to be a professional illustrator, but discovered that the early 1950s was a bad time to enter the field, since photography and television were replacing the need for artists.Almost always six days a week, from nine o’clock in the morning to ten or eleven at night.”[6] Eventually he began to share a studio with another already established adventure artist, George Gross,[13][14] whose family was friends with his.It was a wonderful thing for me.”[6][11] Künstler began working full-time as a freelance artist, illustrating magazine covers and paperback fiction adventure books, typically oriented toward men, such as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, and Stag.[15] Künstler credits the experience gained from illustrating men’s adventure magazines in the 1950s and 1960s with teaching him how to compose and tell a story, which he says prepared him for his later work.[11] In the 1970s, Künstler painted covers for Newsweek, Reader's Digest and other magazines, although the bulk of his work during this period came from doing advertising art.[20][11] In 1975 Künstler created the illustration for a MAD Magazine back cover depicting women's liberation; several issues later, he crafted a front cover which parodied the movie Jaws [21][22][16] By the early 1970s, his paintings were attracting the attention of serious art collectors, which led him to begin retaining the reproduction rights to his original paintings.In 1977 his military art drew attention from even more important galleries, which made him widely recognized as an accurate historical artist.[11] Hammer said "his paintings have continually confirmed his talent, and the caliber of Künstler's overall artistic output has now placed him at the forefront of contemporary realism.[24] In 1982, after getting a commission from CBS-TV to do a painting for the 3-part mini-series, The Blue and the Gray (televised November 1982,) Künstler's interest turned towards the Civil War.In preparation for his 1992 painting, “The Gunner and the Colonel,” for instance, he researched the exact uniforms the soldiers wore and even the weather on that day, to learn which way the wind was blowing so the flags were unfurled in the right direction.Historians including James M. McPherson would state: Of all the artists working in the Civil War field, none captures the human element, the aura of leadership, the sense of being there and sharing in the drama, quite like Mort Künstler."[2] Civil War historian Harold Holzer, formerly with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the original Leutze painting, called Künstler "the best-known and most respected historical artist in this country.