Above: US one-sheet for Breakheart Pass (Tom Gries, 1975). Art by Mort Künstler.
The first movie poster painted by Mort Künstler that caught my eye, long before I knew his name, was this vertiginous heart-stopper for a lesser-known Charles Bronson western, Breakheart Pass (1975). Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas called the film, which was a box-office disappointment against Bronson’s million-dollar salary, “a fun if familiar picture ... played so broadly on such an elementary level that it can hope to satisfy only the most undemanding of viewer,” making it sound like the sleepiest of adventure films. But you wouldn’t know that from Künstler’s poster, in which Bronson thrillingly clings onto the edge of a moving train high above a snowy mountain ravine as a booted foot is about to stomp on his bare knuckles. A cliffhanger if ever there was one.
Künstler, who died last month at the age of 97, was the master of capturing action in medias res. His masterpiece is the poster for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), in which a canted image of a crowded subway car is crammed with panicked desperation: ordinary citizens screaming, pressed up against windows, falling to the floor; a mother clutches her children while three men with machine guns frame and hem in this moment of blind panic. Most notable is the man in the foreground making direct eye contact with us as his hand reaches in our direction. As great as Joseph Sargent’s film is, I don’t remember a moment in the film quite as fraught and thrilling as the one Künstler depicts.
Above: US one-sheet for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974). Art by Mort Künstler.
Künstler, who went on to become one of America’s foremost historical painters, honed his craft in the world of pulp fiction in the 1950s, illustrating the covers of dimestore novels and men’s adventure magazines such as Stag, Male, and For Men Only. Michael W. Schantz, director of the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, which mounted the 2019 exhibition Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators, said that “nobody captured hard-boiled action better. ... His full-throttle, action-packed, in-your-face images represent the very essence of the pulp era.”
Born in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, on August 28, 1927, Künstler was an artistic prodigy from an early age. His very surname means “artist” in German, and family legend has it that the name was bestowed on his paternal great-grandfather, a sculptor from a German-speaking region of Poland, by the Russian Czar Alexander III. Ill health in childhood gave Künstler a lot of time to draw and paint, encouraged by his father, an amateur artist. He attended Saturday art classes at the Brooklyn Museum, and in high school was mentored by an influential art teacher, Leon Friend, coauthor of the classic 1936 book Graphic Design. Künstler remembered that Friend
taught me skills in handling materials, gave me an understanding of good design, introduced me to artists and art concepts, and inspired me to be the best I could be. For example, he introduced the Bauhaus School to me and talked about its emphasis on simplified, functional design. He talked about the elements that make an effective poster design [a lesson that helped many of his students win national poster competitions], and he tried to get me away from thinking just in terms of realistic images so that I could understand abstract principles in painting.
Though Künstler was a devout realist, Friend’s teaching no doubt gave him the sense of composition and space that informed all his work.
After becoming something of a jock in high school, he lettered at Brooklyn College and went to UCLA on a basketball scholarship, but returned to Brooklyn after his father had a heart attack and finished his studies at Pratt Institute. After college, he started to freelance for magazines and became so successful and prolific that he would use pen names such as Martin Kay and Emmett Kaye so that it didn’t look like a magazine was using only one illustrator, even when they were. “I would churn out work,” Künstler said. “For many years, every month I did three covers and two inside illustrations for the men’s adventure magazines. Then sometimes there were lengthier assignments, needing six or eight pictures. And that didn't include work I did for other publishers! I worked twelve-hour days, fifteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.”
His first connection to movies came in 1969, when he was commissioned by Mario Puzo to illustrate the Corleone family for a magazine story that would eventually be adapted into The Godfather (1972). His first actual movie poster seems to have been for The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. In true Künstler style, he depicts the split second that the water explodes into the interior of the capsized titular ship, while Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Stella Stevens run for their lives in the foreground. As he would in his epic historical canvasses, as well as all his movie posters, Künstler fills the frame with detail and action: partygoers hanging from dining tables that are now on the ceiling, Shelley Winters trying to wriggle through an escape hatch... You don’t really need the too literal explanation at the top of the poster of what is going on.
Above: US one-sheet for The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972). Art by Mort Künstler.
Künstler painted posters for war films, Blaxploitation films, action comedies, and fantasy features, all of them similarly arresting. They catch your eye with their dynamism and reward your attention with their detail.
Above: US half-sheet for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1974). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: US one-sheet for Three the Hard Way (Gordon Parks Jr., 1974). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: US one-sheet for Busting (Peter Hyams, 1974). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: US one-sheet for Amazing Grace (Stan Lathan, 1974). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: US one-sheet for The Devil’s Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: French grande for Go Tell the Spartans (Ted Post, 1978). Art by Mort Künstler.
Above: US one-sheet for The Passage (J. Lee Thompson, 1979). Art by Mort Künstler.
One of his last movie posters was for Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979). Even if the sequel was disastrous, it’s fitting that the franchise should bookend his decade-long career in movie posters.
Above: US one-sheet for Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (Irwin Allen, 1979). Art by Mort Künstler.
In the late 1970s, moving from commercial to fine art—along with a stint as the official Space Shuttle artist for NASA in 1979—Künstler started to paint scenes from American history, concentrating especially on the Civil War. He eventually became its foremost artistic chronicler in over 300 paintings, for which he was known as “America’s artist.” He had his first of more than 60 solo shows in 1977 and published the first of more than twenty books in 1979. In 2011, at the age of 84, he reimagined Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” augmenting it with the well-researched historical accuracy he had become renowned for but still retaining the gripping tension he had brought to his movie posters.
Quoted in his New York Times obituary, Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, called Künstler “one of the most highly regarded contemporary historical painters of our time,” adding: “There was a cinematic sense about his work. Mort was an exceptional draftsman with an eye for creating drama.” This was never more true than in the dozen movie posters he illustrated in the 1970s.