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Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture, 1942-1962

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Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 showcases the life and work of an American artist who left The High School of Industrial arts at the age of fifteen and twenty years later painted astronaut Scott Carpenter's portrait for NASA. Everett Raymond Kinstler went on to paint the official White House portraits of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and is currently painting the official mayoral portrait of Rudy Giuliani. Featuring an extensively annotated biography, this seminal work follows Kinstler's personal and artistic development from his first job as an apprentice comic book inker to his decision to leave the commercial art field and devote his life to portraiture. Enhanced with extensive galleries of Kinstler's efforts in comics, pulps, and books, there are a total of 375 images reproduced directly from original drawings and paintings. The remainder of the examples and illustrations are from carefully restored tear sheets and comics from the collections of the author and artist. An engaging read and commended as a superbly written and presented biography, Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 is a welcome and very highly recommended addition to both academic and community library American Art History collections.

This is the model of what such a book should be! At 240 pages, it's a generous, thorough presentation of Kinstler's work for the pulps, comics and hardback and paperback books. The reproduction is truly superb, mostly from original art or proofs from Kinstler's own collection. The paper is the highest quality, heavy coated stock, with no show-through. The text is intelligent, insightful, and thorough, quite different from so many other books about artists in popular culture that have come out in recent years. It paints a very vivid picture of a young man marching to his own drum. Kinstler's early life is fascinating because he sought out the early masters of twentieth-century commercial illustration and got to know them at a time when they were largely forgotten. Instead of trying for a common, homogenized style, co-author Vadeboncoeur writes with his own keen, personal viewpoint and allows Kinstler also to speak in his own voice with generous direct quotes from oral reminiscences done for the book, which has advantages for both authors. Vadeboncoeur is respectful but not fawning and offers insightful critical commentary as well as historical information. The book is also replete with roughs, unpublished drawings, relevant photographs and juvenilia. The heart of the book is the pages and pages of incredibly well-reproduced pen and brush illustrations from the forties and fifties for a variety of venues. This includes his well known (to the cognicenti) visual contents-pages for countless Avon comics as well as more obscure pulp work, virtually all reproduced from the original art. Among the revelations of the book are Kinstler's contributions to obscure, hard-to-find western-romance pulps. Though paid just $15 apiece for most of these, Kinstler gave them his all, producing little masterpieces, each a fully-realized, detailed, complexly-rendered illustration. What is most impressive is that not only are all his women stunningly beautiful in a very realistic way, but that each is a completely different, separate personality, and a different SORT of "beautiful." Just a great book for anyone interested in the art of illustration in the last century.

This is the model of what such a book should be! At 240 pages, it's a generous, thorough presentation of Kinstler's work for the pulps, comics and hardback and paperback books. The reproduction is truly superb, mostly from original art or proofs from Kinstler's own collection. The paper is the highest quality, heavy coated stock, with no show-through. The text is intelligent, insightful, and thorough, quite different from so many other books about artists in popular culture that have come out in recent years. It paints a very vivid picture of a young man marching to his own drum. Kinstler's early life is fascinating because he sought out the early masters of twentieth-century commercial illustration and got to know them at a time when they were largely forgotten. Instead of trying for a common, homogenized style, co-author Vadeboncoeur writes with his own keen, personal viewpoint and allows Kinstler also to speak in his own voice with generous direct quotes from oral reminiscences done for the book, which has advantages for both authors. Vadeboncoeur is respectful but not fawning and offers insightful critical commentary as well as historical information. The book is also replete with roughs, unpublished drawings, relevant photographs and juvenilia. The heart of the book is the pages and pages of incredibly well-reproduced pen and brush illustrations from the forties and fifties for a variety of venues. This includes his well known (to the cognicenti) visual contents-pages for countless Avon comics as well as more obscure pulp work, virtually all reproduced from the original art. Among the revelations of the book are Kinstler's contributions to obscure, hard-to-find western-romance pulps. Though paid just $15 apiece for most of these, Kinstler gave them his all, producing little masterpieces, each a fully-realized, detailed, complexly-rendered illustration. What is most impressive is that not only are all his women stunningly beautiful in a very realistic way, but that each is a completely different, separate personality, and a different SORT of "beautiful." Just a great book for anyone interested in the art of illustration in the last century. (Review based on paperback edition.)

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 showcases the life and work of an American artist who left The High School of Industrial arts at the age of fifteen and twenty years later painted astronaut Scott Carpenter's portrait for NASA. Everett Raymond Kinstler went on to paint the official White House portraits of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, as well as having painted the official mayoral portrait of Rudy Giuliani. Featuring an extensively annotated biography, this seminal work follows Kinstler's personal and artistic development from his first job as an apprentice comic book inker to his decision to leave the commercial art field and devote his life to portraiture. Enhanced with extensive galleries of Kinstler's efforts in comics, pulps, and books, there are a total of 375 images reproduced directly from original drawings and paintings. The remainder of the examples and illustrations are from carefully restored tear sheets and comics from the collections of the author and artist. An engaging read and commended as a superbly written and presented biography, Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 is a welcome and very highly recommended addition to both academic and community library American Art History collections.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 showcases the life and work of an American artist who left The High School of Industrial arts at the age of fifteen and twenty years later painted astronaut Scott Carpenter's portrait for NASA. Everett Raymond Kinstler went on to paint the official White House portraits of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, as well as having painted the official mayoral portrait of Rudy Giuliani. Featuring an extensively annotated biography, this seminal work follows Kinstler's personal and artistic development from his first job as an apprentice comic book inker to his decision to leave the commercial art field and devote his life to portraiture. Enhanced with extensive galleries of Kinstler's efforts in comics, pulps, and books, there are a total of 375 images reproduced directly from original drawings and paintings. The remainder of the examples and illustrations are from carefully restored tear sheets and comics from the collections of the author and artist. An engaging read and commended as a superbly written and presented biography, Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 is a welcome and very highly recommended addition to both academic and community library American Art History collections.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 showcases the life and work of an American artist who left The High School of Industrial arts at the age of fifteen and twenty years later painted astronaut Scott Carpenter's portrait for NASA. Everett Raymond Kinstler went on to paint the official White House portraits of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, as well as having painted the official mayoral portrait of Rudy Giuliani. Featuring an extensively annotated biography, this seminal work follows Kinstler's personal and artistic development from his first job as an apprentice comic book inker to his decision to leave the commercial art field and devote his life to portraiture. Enhanced with extensive galleries of Kinstler's efforts in comics, pulps, and books, there are a total of 375 images reproduced directly from original drawings and paintings. The remainder of the examples and illustrations are from carefully restored tear sheets and comics from the collections of the author and artist. An engaging read and commended as a superbly written and presented biography, Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture 1942-1962 is a welcome and very highly recommended addition to both academic and community library American Art History collections.