“Amazing Stories” (January 1933)

 

We think of Pulp cover art as concatenations of bright hues: scarlets and purples, green-skinned aliens and yellow skies. And many Pulp covers are indeed styled that way: eye-grabbing riots of composition and colour, coal-tar dyes, expressive, quasi-fauvist colouration. But not all. Here is the cover of the January 1933 Amazing Stories. The imagee is by Albert Sigmund, sometimes known as Albert Sigmond: a German-born jeweller and artist who had emigrated to New York after the First World War.

It's as striking for its restraint in colour, cool shades of blue, as for the bold diagonals of its composition. The rocket ship, tailless, piscine-shaped, its twenty-two square portholes arranged neatly down its fuselage like buttons, flies past two featureless planets. It is superposed upon the larger of the two, yet seems to be passing behind the semi-transparent globe of the other. The curve of the magazine’s name, like a tsuba on a sword, balances the composition: if the spaceship is passing top-left to bottom right (or possibly bottom-right to top-left) AMAZING STORIES reads from lower left to upper right, and the poignard end of the craft directs the eye to the promise of SCIENTIFIC FICTION. That, apar from the month and price, is all the image includes.

This is an example of Art Deco, a style of design and artistic composition that takes its name as a shortening of the phrase L'Art Décoratifs, ‘Decorative Arts’. During the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, held in Paris in 1925, the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier published an influential series of articles in his magazine L'Esprit Nouveau: ‘1925 EXPO. ARTS. DÉCO’—later published as a book, L'art décoratif d'aujourd'hui. Le Corbusier attacked the over-busy, lavishly coloured and ornate objects and artworks being exhibited in Paris in 1925 as gaudy, vulgar and ugly. Art and design, he insisted, should be shorn of such excesses. Buildings and practical objects like furniture, he argued, must be plain, pure, elegantly styled: ‘Modern decoration,’ he concluded, ‘has no decoration’. In the words of Rosemary Hill, Art Deco was “a style that favoured angles, shadows and faceted planes, machine-turned, bevel-edged furniture and teapots on the slant, a style in which the machine age met the jazz age.” Through the later 1920s and into the 1930s his ideas found multiple expressions: the clean lines of the soaring Chrysler Building in New York City (1930 designed by William Van Alen) towering over the modern metropolis, through the streets of which swept automobiles designed on Art Deco lines. There is something architectural about Sigmund’s space-ship here, a skyscraper in space, portholes like tower-block windows, but it is a building in motion.

Art Deco was associated with luxury and wealth, and there is something classy about this cover that sets it apart from the more melodramatic, gnashing and soft-porn images Amazing often put on its covers—the handsome crimson-clad space-captain firing lasers at the bug-eyed alien beast as a scantily clad maiden swoons against him. Sex sells, as the old adage has it, and it’s hard to deny that there is something suggestive about Sigmund’s image: the phallic rocket, and its two testicular globes, dominating the page. But this is a composition of forceful yet elegant simplicity, an arrangement of shapes and lines, that transcends the merely representational.