Framed Vintage Magazine Art
Although most magazines today use photographs on the cover, for many decades, artists typically painted covers for magazines. A few magazines still maintain this tradition Some of the most enduring ones are available as framed vintage magazine posters.
One magazine that has continued the tradition of painted covers is The Saturday Evening Post. Readers often look forward to the cover as much as they do the magazine’s content. The artist most frequently associated with The Saturday Evening Post is Norman Rockwell. “Grandpa’s Little Ballerina” and “Triple Self-Portrait” are just a few of the dozens of examples of framed vintage magazine artwork that Rockwell painted for that magazine over several decades. J.C. Leyendecker’s “Feeding Time” and Ellen Pyle’s “Bathing Beauty and Beach Ball” also adorned the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and have a similar artistic style to Rockwell.
The types of magazine covers that often go on to become framed vintage magazine wall art typically come from aspirational lifestyle magazines. Sports Afield, a magazine for hunters, used an image of a large moose for its July 1941 cover as something many of its readers would presumably like to catch. Redbook’s June 1935 cover shows a carefree young woman on a bicycle, an image that many of its readers probably wished to achieve.
Occasionally a collector will wish to preserve newspaper articles as well as magazine covers. While newspapers are not as aesthetically driven as magazines, their more frequent publication makes them popular choices for marking historical events. For instance, “Wall Street Crash!” was the headline in the London Herald marking the 1929 stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression.