An original Fortune magazine cover for June 1937. These covers were printed on 125-pound card stock through a gravure printing process.
Henry Luce, publisher of Fortune, said he wanted "the new magazine to be as beautiful a magazine as exists in the United States. If possible, the undisputed most beautiful". To that end leading artists of the day contributed to the design of the covers including Antonio Petruccelli, Ervine Metzl, Walter Buehr and Ernest Hamlin Baker.
This cover was done by Antonio Petruccelli. More information on him appears below.
It is framed and matted beautifully, and the glazing is "Tru-Vue," which provides 99% UV protection to help protect against fading, has a proprietary coating process that creates a nearly invisible, anti-reflective surface, and is anti-static and abrasion resistant.
Size: 19.5" x 23.5"
Shipping: $35. Please allow two weeks for shipping.
Historical background: Antonio Petruccelli
Mid-Century Americans Didn't Know Antonio Petruccelli's Name, but They Sure Knew His Art
The New York artist created covers for the nation's most illustrious magazines. Now, the originals are on display as fine art.
ANTONIO PETRUCCELLI (1907–94) [was] a wildly talented American artist who did illustrations, and frequently cover art, for FORTUNE, VANITY FAIR, LIFE and the NEW YORKER, among other publications. His heyday was the 1930s to the 1960s, not coincidentally the heyday of magazines in the United States. The images are redolent of their era: Multiple scenes reference World War II and the scientific and technological advances of the day (including a detailed 1930s illustration of a nuclear warhead for The Lamp, the magazine of Standard Oil).
But somehow, Petruccelli's name is virtually unknown.
The New York artist created covers for the nation's most illustrious magazines. Now, the originals are on display as fine art.
"I love his work," says Lea Nickless, a curator at the WOLFSONIAN MUSEUM, part of Florida International University in Miami Beach. "He was a super-talented maker of highly stylized images." . . .
Illustrating came early. "From middle school onwards, he was always making art," says Mike Petruccelli [the artist's son]. "It was a passion for him." He attended a special New York high school for textile design and later practiced it as a profession. . . .
He met his future wife, Toby, when they were both designing textiles for the same company. They moved to New Jersey and worked freelance from home long before that became a typical modus operandi. His textile training strikes Nickless, who's also a fabric artist, as a vital part of his biography. "Look at the covers — there's all this patterning at the base of them," she points out.
Sometime in the 1930s, Petruccelli showed up at the offices of Fortune magazine. "He walked in there off the streets with his portfolio, after taking it all over town," Mike says. "The art director liked him, and he had three covers in the first year."
Prolific and skilled, Petruccelli definitely found a market for his kind of art, although it was a grueling grind. "He lived his whole life as a freelance commercial artist," says Nickless. "It shows how hard you have to work, the connections you have to keep, to do that."
Once Petruccelli's works went into print, that was the end of them as far as he was concerned. "To the best of my knowledge, he never sold a painting after it was published," says Mike. That's partly because back in those days, "illustrations were not considered art," says Sherman. "It was what fine artists did to make a living."
Source: 1st Dibs
Historical background: Fortune magazine in the 1930s
The first issue of Fortune magazine hit the stands in February of 1930, four months after the stock market crash in October 1929. That kind of timing may seem the result of an ironic, if not an unfortunate, business decision, but the release date of America's first real business journal was actually quite a savvy maneuver. It reflected the good intuition the magazine's founder, Henry R. Luce, would continue to demonstrate in the coming decade. At a time when other dealmakers were cowering, Luce built Fortune magazine into one cornerstone of a media empire.
The crash only piqued Wall Street's desire for a smart and stylish journal of entrpreneurial culture. Briton Hadden, Luce's partner and the man who had founded Time with him in 1923, thought that a magazine devoted to business would be boring and unmarketable. But Henry persisted, and Fortune's 184 bright, lavish pages debuted with 30,000 subscribers. Luce believed that most businessmen were stodgy, uncultured, and lacking a social conscience. The spate of trade periodicals available at the time attested to this. They were no more than facts and statistics printed in black and white, and the Wall Street Journal was hardly the comprehensive paper it is today. So Luce didn't hire MBAs or experienced economists to write his copy; he recruited young literary talent instead. Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred Kazin filled the pages of Fortune with flowing human interest articles that were brash, irreverent, and critical. Fortune's advertisements were colorful and lush, and the photography of Margaret Bourke-White provided stunning looks inside the factories and farms that fed the American economic machine. Fortune style was an upscale and intelligent upgrade of the older and more middle-class Time. The result was a product that matched Luce's vision of business itself, an activity he called "the distinctive expression of the American genius*-
Henry wanted to bring entrepreneurs out of their back offices, give them an identity, and make them accountable to the public. In those first months after the crash, most people expected economic recovery. But when no recovery came and the decade wore on, Luce turned the attention of Fortune to a tempered brand of muckraking. It exposed the munitions industry without losing advertisers. It published pieces which alternately criticized both Hoover and Roosevelt. And though the tone of its columns had a socialist twinge, Fortune presented a disturbing picture of communist Russia in March of 1932 while praising Italian fascism in July of 1934. Fortune seemed to have a magical ability to be seen as both a challenge to business and a boon, to keep its integrity while throwing its hat into the political ring. This balance yielded consistent and respectable profits, and in 1937 the magazine netted close to half a million dollars with a circulation of 460,000. By decade's end Fortune had become required reading on Wall Street.
Source: 1 Kobler, pg. 85.
Bibliography
Kobler, John. Luce; his Time, Life, and Fortune. Doubleday: New York, 1968.