page_title: Margaret Brundage
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Brundage / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: The cover of Weird Tales issue May 1934 featuring Queen of the Black Coast, one of Robert E. Howard's original stories about Conan the Barbarian. Painting by Margaret Brundage. Italiano: Copertina di Weird Tales, maggio 1934 Nederlands: Weird Tales; Queen of the Black Coast, een van Robert E. Howard's originele verhalen over Conan de Barbaar, mei 1934 Português: Weird Tales edição da revista de 1934.
context_page_description: Margaret Brundage, born Margaret Hedda Johnson, was an American illustrator and painter who is remembered chiefly for having illustrated the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Working in pastels on illustration board, she created most of the covers for Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938.
context_section_description: In 1932 Brundage was looking for more work, and found herself at the office of Farnsworth Wright, then editor of Weird Tales. Brundage began working for Wright by doing a few covers for his side publication Oriental Stories, later known as The Magic Carpet. Wright was so impressed with these that he hired Brundage to draw for Weird Tales. Over the period from 1933 to 1938, Brundage executed cover art, first for then, famously, for Weird Tales. She was the most frequently-appearing cover artist on Weird Tales during her stint with the magazine. Her first cover appeared on the September 1932 issue; she created covers for 39 straight issues from June 1933 to August 1936. Her last original cover was for the Jan. 1945 issue, for a total of 66 original-artwork covers. (The total of 67, often cited in sources, includes a repeat of that final 1945 cover on the November 1953 issue.) She was paid $90 per cover—enough to support herself, her son, and her invalid mother (died 1940) in years when her husband contributed nothing to the family's survival. From 1936 through 1938, Brundage often alternated with others as cover artist; Virgil Finlay was her chief competitor.
  Brundage's art frequently featured damsels in distress in various states of full or partial nudity; her whipping scenes were especially noteworthy and controversial. Her sensual images usually illustrated scenes from the pieces chosen by editor Farnsworth Wright as cover stories; her work was so popular among readers that some WT writers, like Seabury Quinn, cannily included scenes in their stories that would make good Brundage covers, since cover feature stories earned their authors more money.
  Pulp covers were notorious for their explicit content, and Brundage's were no exception. Since she signed her work "M. Brundage", many of the magazine's readers were unaware that the artist was female. (Complaints about the erotic nature of her work increased after October 1934, when editor Wright revealed that the "M." stood for "Margaret," that the artist was a woman.)  After 1938, when the magazine's editorial offices moved from Chicago to New York City, a new 'decency' standard was imposed (primarily through the efforts of then-mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia) on pulp magazines sold at newsstands, and the nude or semi-nude young women that had been the primary subjects of Brundage's covers were out. Practical problems with shipping Brundage's fragile pastel art from Chicago to New York also diminished her appeal to the editorial regime that followed Wright's 1940 departure.
  She continued to draw after her relationship with the magazine ended, and appeared at a number of science fiction conventions and art fairs, where some of her original period works were stolen. Yet she never fully recovered financially from the loss of regular work at WT; her later years were spent in relative poverty. She continued to work until her death.
caption: In Weird Tales, Brundage illustrates Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast, a story about Conan the Barbarian.
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