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Cover Proof: Midwood F212

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As mentioned above, this is the first draft of a work in progress. You are welcome to agree or disagree with my assessments. Many of the Midwood covers are signed, either with his distinctive “Rader” or with a capital “R”. In those cases where the artist’s signature is absent, I have relied on my own eye, and the opinions of a “panel” of Rader collectors. Sometimes we disagreed, and I have tried to indicate such disagreements as they occurred. I do not pretend to be an art expert. Mistakes will be made. Corrections and emendations will appear on future catalogs. Rader’s first paperback cover was probably a Gold Medal, but since the greatest body of his work was at Midwood we have chosen to list all the Midwoods first. We will show when Rader reused Midwood art for other publishers like Bee-line where we can. Other paperback publishers will follow Midwood and the final section will offer a sampling of Rader’s magazine work, much of which remains undiscovered in dusty back issue magazines.

In the introduction to their excellent coffee-table book THE GREAT AMERICAN PIN-UP (Taschen, 1996), Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel show that the grand tradition of pin-up art continued on in other art forms, such as advertising illustration and paperback covers. To illustrate their point they show a handful of paperbacks, and one of them is TEACHER’S PET, a Midwood with a cover by Paul Rader. They include a photo of Rader’s original art, and there is absolutely no difference between that painting and all of the great pin-ups that appear throughout their book. For Rader’s Midwoods are much more like the pin-ups of his favorites Petty and Vargas than the paperback book covers of many of his contemporaries. Although Martignette and Meisel spell his name wrong (the common misspelling Radar), and give the wrong year for TEACHER’S PET and perhaps jump the gun by labeling him “pin-up artist Paul Rader” (if Rader ever did straight pin-up art I’ve yet to find it), they must be commended for making this crucial connection. Hundreds of pieces by Elvgren and Earl Moran and Petty and many others are then shown, but Rader is never mentioned again. I did not find Rader mentioned in any other books on pin-ups or on the great 20th Century American art of illustration. This catalog is an attempt to correct that oversight, and to place Paul Rader in his rightful place, as the 1960’s heir to the American art form of Gibson, Petty and Vargas.




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