Mort Künstler

Künstler was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927 and raised there during the Great Depression.[4] His parents had Polish and Austrian roots and were of Jewish heritage.[5] Their name derived from the German word "künstler," which means "artist." His great-grandfather was given that name by the Tsar of Russia as thanks after he created a carving of him when he ruled Germany.[5]

His father was an amateur artist, and both his parents saw his artistic talent at the age of two and a half.[6] His father encouraged his son, who was often home sick, by setting up still lifes for him to draw. His mother also encouraged his budding talent by enrolling him in Saturday classes at the Brooklyn Museum. He said "My mother was a schoolteacher, and she would take me to the museums by subway every Saturday morning."[7]

By the time he was in kindergarten he could already "draw very well," he says.[6] And when he was twelve, he adds, "I could draw almost as well as I can today."[6][8] His talent in art was further supported when he was at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. There, he along with a number of classmates, were inspired by their art teacher, Leon Friend, who had also written a book on graphic design.[6][9][10]

After graduating high school he enrolled at Brooklyn College to study art, although his main focus changed away from art and instead toward athletics. He was diver on the swimming team and a hurdler on the track team, and sports now dominated his life. He earned awards for basketball, diving, football and track, and ultimate honors in the Brooklyn College Sports Hall of Fame.[11] He then received a basketball scholarship from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he continued to focus on sports.

But after his father suffered a heart attack, he returned to New York to help his family, and enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[4] He studied to become a fine art illustrator, and graduated after three years.[6] During his senior year he met his wife-to-be, Deborah, who was then a freshman at the school.[7] They married soon after he graduated.[7]

Among the artists whose work he studied that would influence his later career were Norman Rockwell, Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington.[5]

After graduating from Pratt he worked as a freelance artist in New York, where he tried to get assignments from book and magazine publishers. That goal became difficult at the time, which led him to work instead as an apprentice at a studio, where he ran errands, cleaned up and touched up paintings by other artists. Künstler wanted to be a professional illustrator, but discovered that the early 1950s was a bad time to enter the field, since photography and television were replacing the need for artists. And the few magazines that still relied on artists were folding.[6]

However, he did find a niche market as a freelancer for adventure magazines, which still appreciated his art: “Fortunately for me and other artists, some of them, like the men’s adventure magazines, would still prefer having paintings made for their covers and interior illustrations.”[6][12] He continued doing those throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Although to make ends meet he had to live with his parents who supported him during this early period: “I worked 12 hour days, 15 hour days, sometimes seven days a week. Almost always six days a week, from nine o’clock in the morning to ten or eleven at night.”[6]

Eventually he began to share a studio with another already established adventure artist, George Gross,[13][14] whose family was friends with his. “I used to call him Uncle George and I chose him as my mentor.”[6] George, 22 years his senior, had also attended Pratt Institute, and his father had a successful art career. As a result, says Künstler, “I wasn’t just a kid working out of his house anymore... George sort of took me under his wing, and he taught me whatever he could. It was a wonderful thing for me.”[6][11]

The Rough Riders, painted by Künstler for the National Guard

Künstler began working full-time as a freelance artist, illustrating magazine covers and paperback fiction adventure books, typically oriented toward men, such as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, and Stag.[15] Künstler credits the experience gained from illustrating men’s adventure magazines in the 1950s and 1960s with teaching him how to compose and tell a story, which he says prepared him for his later work.[16]

He received his first assignment to do a historic painting from National Geographic magazine in 1965. He was to paint an illustration for a story about the history of St. Augustine, Florida. He traveled to Florida, spent an afternoon with the two National Park Service historians at the National Historic Site “Castillo de San Marcos” to learn whatever he could, before beginning.[6] Künstler's later historical paintings would also rely on collaboration with experts who would guide and provide him with the historic facts he needed before beginning.[11]

In the 1970s Künstler painted covers for Newsweek, Reader's Digest and other magazines, although the bulk of his work during this period came from doing advertising art.[11][17] He also did the box covers for Aurora models.[18]

He illustrated a number of movie posters for adventure films, such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972)[19] and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).[20][11] In 1975 Künstler created the illustration for a MAD Magazine back cover depicting women's liberation; several issues later, he crafted a front cover which parodied the movie Jaws [21][22][16]

By the early 1970s his paintings were attracting the attention of serious art collectors, which led him to begin retaining the reproduction rights to his original paintings. In 1975 he submitted a number of paintings to galleries, all of which sold, to his surprise. In 1977 his military art drew attention from even more important galleries, which made him widely recognized as an accurate historical artist.

The first major gallery to give him a one-man show was the prestigious Hammer Galleries in New York City. He would have 13 additional one-man shows at the gallery in subsequent years, while his work was also being exhibited in museums nationwide.[23] Armand Hammer, founder of Hammer Galleries, supported, encouraged and promoted Künstler's work, helping him become recognized as one of America's leading historical artists.[11] Hammer said "his paintings have continually confirmed his talent, and the caliber of Künstler's overall artistic output has now placed him at the forefront of contemporary realism."[11]

As a result of major galleries and museums exhibiting his work, his career soon took on new dimensions. From his early popularity as an illustrator for pulp and popular magazines, then to movie posters, National Geographic images, and now to fine art historical paintings and prints, along with books of images, he was acknowledged as one of the few remaining artists of historical subjects.[24]

In 1982, after getting a commission from CBS-TV to do a painting for the 3-part mini-series, The Blue and the Gray (televised November 1982,) Künstler's interest turned towards the Civil War.[23] By 1988 he was concentrating almost entirely on Civil War subjects, which eventually made him the “most collected Civil War artist in America.”[25]

His focus on that war led to him having the first one-man Civil War exhibitions at venues such as the Gettysburg National Battlefield, New York's Nassau County Museum of Art in 1998, the North Carolina Museum of History, Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy and other centers of art and history.[25] They included images of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg,[26]

His exhibition at the Nassau County Museum, which lasted seven weeks, attracted more than 30,000 visitors, surpassing the previous attendance record set by a Picasso exhibit. The success of that exhibit led the museum to hold a second one-man exhibit of his work in 2006.[28]

To create his paintings he undertook careful and painstaking research into the settings and events he would paint.[23] It meant he needed to consult with expert historians and walk the actual battlefields before drawing them, always looking for landmarks to incorporate into the artwork.[29] This obsession to detail, he says, came from his experience illustrating men's magazines and his work for National Geographic.

In preparation for his 1992 painting, “The Gunner and the Colonel,” for instance, he researched the exact uniforms the soldier's wore and even the weather on that day, to learn which way the wind was blowing so the flags were unfurled in the right direction.[30] With each new painting, Künstler says he takes on the role of a historian:

I feel like I'm opening a window on a little part of history. What I try to do is create an image that will make you feel like you were there. I try to make it as accurate and as dramatic as possible.[31]

His battle of Gettysburg painting, titled “High Water Mark,” was unveiled at the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum on the 125th anniversary of that climactic confrontation.[31] The original was reproduced with 750,000 limited-edition prints, all of which sold out after two months.[31] But Künstler also painted individual soldiers in periods of personal crisis, as he did of Stonewall Jackson after Jackson learned that a close friend's 5-year-old daughter had died.[32]

With collections of his work published as limited edition prints and sold nationwide. Historians including James M. McPherson would state:

Of all the artists working in the Civil War field, none captures the human element, the aura of leadership, the sense of being there and sharing in the drama, quite like Mort Künstler.[33]

Künstler takes a month or two to complete a painting, with many selling for over $100,000. Limited edition prints often sell out quickly. The American Print Gallery's limited edition of 4,150 of Moonlight and Magnolias was sold out in three weeks after publication.[5] By 2015, Künstler had painted more than 350 Civil War subjects.[16] He painted his final Civil War painting in 2015, depicting the end of the war, titled "LaGrange vs. LaGrange."[34][35]

• 1992. Painted a United States postage stamp depicting the Buffalo Soldiers.[23][46]
• 1993. a one-hour television special with Stacy Keach entitled Images of the Civil War: The Paintings of Mort Künstler, was shown on the A&E network.[27] (DVD released in 2014)[47]
• 1999. Virginia officially declared a “Mort Künstler Day.”[23]
• 2000. Virginia Governor James Gilmore officially opened an exhibition at Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy. The exhibit, titled, The Confederate Spirit: The Paintings of Mort Künstler, was the first one-man exhibition that the museum had ever held.[23]
• 2001. Made official artist for the motion picture Gods and Generals.[27]
• 2001. He received the Henry Timrod Southern Culture Award.[23]
• 2002. Künstler became the first artist to be honored by a six-month, one-man exhibition at the new National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.[23]
• 2003. He received the Jefferson Davis Southern Heritage Award, both by the Military Order of the Stars and Bars.[23]
• 2003. A residence hall at Timber Ridge School - a residency academy for special students in Winchester, Virginia, was named Mort Künstler Hall in his honor, because of his art assistance.[27]
• 2004. Named an official artist for the H. L. Hunley, a submarine of the Confederate States of America, at which time he unveiled a new painting of the vessel during ceremonies in Charleston, South Carolina.[23]
• 2004. Commissioned to furnish all the artwork for the Middletown, Ohio, Veterans Memorial, which was unveiled on July 4, 2004.[23]
• 2011. His depiction of George Washington crossing the Delaware River was unveiled at the New York Historical Society on December 26, 2011, the 235th anniversary of the actual event, to great acclaim.[23]

• Images of the Civil War: the Paintings of Mort Künstler (1992), ISBN 978-0-517-07356-8
• Gettysburg: The Paintings of Mort Künstler (Text by James M. McPherson) (1993), ISBN 1-878685-79-1
• The American Spirit: The Paintings of Mort Kunstler (1994) ISBN 1558533095
• Jackson & Lee: Legends in Gray (1995), ISBN 978-1-55853-333-2
• Mort Künstler's Old West. Cowboys. (1998), ISBN 978-1-55853-588-6
• Mort Künstler's Old West. Indians. (1998), ISBN 978-1-55853-589-3
• Gods and Generals: the Paintings of Mort Künstler (2002), ISBN 978-0-86713-084-3
• The Civil War Paintings of Mort Künstler (2006), ISBN 978-1-58182-556-5
• For Us the Living: The Civil War in Paintings and Eyewitness Accounts (2010), ISBN 978-1-4027-7034-0

• Pritzker Military Museum & Library

• American Gallery showing art by Mort Kunstler
• Early men's magazine art by Kunstler
• Crossing the Delaware, More Accurately
• Mort Künstler at American Art Archives
• King James Gallery of Mort Kunstler art