Margaret Brundage's 'The Carnal God' – Weird Tales June 1937
Before you stands a quintessential Margaret Brundage cover for Weird Tales, June 1937 — her signature pastel-soft yet erotically charged style fully on display. A golden-skinned, animated idol clutches a barely-draped dark-haired woman against a luminous violet and blue circular backdrop, illustrating the featured story 'The Carnal God.' Brundage's sensual, Art Deco-inflected figure work made her the most controversial and celebrated cover artist of the pulp era, and this piece exemplifies exactly why newsstands both gasped and sold out.
Brundage's pastel technique lends an almost delicate, boudoir-painting quality to what is essentially a scene of supernatural assault, creating an unsettling tension between soft beauty and implied menace. The gap between the refined artistic execution and the lurid subject matter is precisely what made her covers simultaneously high art and scandalous newsstand spectacle.
“JUNE Weird Tales A MAGAZINE OF THE BIZARRE AND UNUSUAL 25c THE CARNAL GOD a compelling weird story about a golden image that was instinct with evil life By JOHN R. SPEER and CARLISLE SCHNITZER PAUL ERNST • ROBERT BLOCH • HENRY KUTTNER • HAROLD WARD”
