The four FIU students included Joseph Perez, who focused on the depiction and demonization of Muslim people in pulp adventure cover art Erica Melamed, who studied how women became increasingly sexualized over the decades on the covers Tiffany Breslawski, who looked at how violence towards women frequently appeared on crime covers and Mauriel Fernandez, who concentrated on the tropes of women being kidnapped and used as human shields, whether the villain was a local gangster or a foreign enemy.Īll of these themes are present in the compact exhibition at the Wolfsonian, ranging from a 1934 edition of Argosy Weekly titled “Lion of Morocco,” showing a larger-than-life man with a beard and turban menacingly reaching a hand over the sand dunes, to a 1945 issue of Black Mask, where just a woman’s legs, clad in red heels that hint at a fallen woman status, are visible, the majority of the cover consumed by a sidewalk grate under which an armed man is preparing to shoot.
At a time when Hollywood films were censored, the pulp periodicals and books tantalized readers with the promise of crime, sexuality, and violence. “Four of the undergraduate history students elected to work on a curatorial project examining themes of sex, stereotyping, and violence using the Wolfsonian–FIU Library’s collection of pulp periodicals and paperbacks and linking them to pre-code and film noir Hollywood cinema,” Luca explained.
Munsey Company, New York (courtesy the Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca)Īlong with his work as the Wolfsonian’s chief librarian, Luca moonlights as a history professor at FIU, and the exhibition evolved from a recent history and film course called “The Underbelly of America” concentrating on American social problems from the 1900s to the 1950s. For instance, the 2015-16 Margin of Error included 1930s work safety postcards and accident insurance company posters among paintings and photographs. “As many of the ‘pulps’ sold millions of issues, the artwork designed to sell the stories definitely qualifies them as powerfully persuasive art,” Luca added.ĭetective Fiction, December 1941 issue of the periodical, Frank A. “The Wolfsonian–FIU has always adopted a different approach towards art appreciation, collecting, and exhibiting art that some might not consider fine art, but rather commercial, propagandistic, or persuasive art,” Frank Luca, the Wolfsonian’s chief librarian and the organizer of In the Shadows, told Hyperallergic. The exhibition at the Miami Beach museum features 28 examples of this vivid popular art, where a whole story was conveyed from the cheap paperback’s cover, whether a wide-eyed blonde victim waiting for her gun-toting savior, or a stereotyped foreigner threatening a chiseled-faced American.
In the Shadows: American Pulp Cover Artat the Wolfsonian–Florida International University (FIU) explores how 1920s to 1950s pulp fiction reveals the social issues of its time. Murder for What? (1936), cover illustration by George Dunsford Klein book by Kurt Steel (pseudonym for Rudolf Kagey), Select Publication, Inc., New York (courtesy the Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca)
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