Frank Frazetta was the 20th century’s greatest fantasy artist. Most would say he’s the greatest that ever lived.
From comic strips and books to his iconic paintings for Conan and Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks, rock albums and horror magazines, the Brooklyn-born artist, who passed away in 2010, visually defined entire genres with muscular, imaginative and aesthetic prowess to burn. The influence his brutal barbarians and bodacious babes have had on pop culture is incalculable.
And now you can own a piece of him. A very lovely piece.
On Friday, Calabasas-based Profiles in History will auction Frazetta authority Doc Dave Winiewicz’s collection of mostly watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings by the master, along with works by other great fantasy artists, Frazetta artifacts and signed publications and memorabilia.
“I hate to use the words ‘fine art,’ but he was just in a different category,” Profiles owner Joseph Maddalena said of Frazetta. “Having looked at this stuff for months now and collecting art for years, he’s a (very) good artist. Especially when you look at the black-and-white stuff and realize he’s starting with a pencil and then inking it; that’s hard to do. You look at the fine detail and the wash, the techniques he uses — I mean, how do you do that?”
Winiewicz, a retired medieval philosophy professor who now lives in Las Vegas, has a better idea of how Frazetta did it than most. A lifelong collector of comic books and then their original art, he wrote many scholarly articles about the artist’s work and was his close personal friend for more than three decades. Winiewicz spent countless happy hours watching Frazetta draw at his home studio and many more sharing beers and laughs with his idol.
“As our friendship deepened and I learned more about him and was able to talk to him, I could really understand the creative process,” said Winiewicz, 65 (the age at which he’d promised his wife he’d sell the collection for their golden years’ nest egg).
“Here’s a guy that would sit down and just make it up. Ninety-five percent of everything that he did is made up, 5 percent is drawn from photo references and swipes and homages. There’s been no other person I can think of who simply has that kind of imagination and that kind of ability to work directly out of his imagination.”
Some examples of that among the 129 lots at auction include “Flash Gordon Battles the Monster from Mongo” (1950) with a shirtless space warrior, a barefoot Dale Arden and the beautifully ghastly beast of the title; “A Gentle Breeze” (1962), one of Frazetta’s few men’s magazine nudes; “Tarzan and Princess” (1965), which became the cover for “Tarzan and the Castaways”; the sinewy “Lord of the Savage Jungle” (1965), which is also the cover image for the auction’s fine art book-quality catalog; and a wild “Pterodactyls and Sabertooth” battle scene (1965).
Though Frazetta’s four children own most of the monumental paintings their father made for sword-and-sorcery books and Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines in the 1960s, some marvelous, full-color works such as “Tarzan at the Earth’s Core” (1963), “The Lion Queen” (1960) and “Conan and the Savage Sea” (1970) have been appraised between $15,000 and $60,000 for this auction.
Many other pieces are assessed from several hundred dollars to four figures, however. There’s even some hard-core porn that illustrates how Frank not only inspired geeks but half of the Internet as well.
“Art wasn’t his top priority,” Winiewicz revealed. “In fact, it was well down the list. There were so many other things that he enjoyed doing more. No. 1, he loved sex. I never met a human being who loved sex and women more than Frank Frazetta.”
An accomplished athlete whose own physique resembled the muscular mighty men he depicted, Frazetta was once offered a contract with the old New York Giants. He turned it down because he treasured his freedom more than he loved baseball, though not by very much.
Winiewicz, if you haven’t guessed, treasured Frazetta’s art more than anything else, which drove him to purchase and horse trade pieces for decades and even cajole a few drawings out of the man himself. An unprecedented collection was the result.
“There’s not even a No. 2,” Maddalena said of rivals to the Winiewicz trove. “Every collector, the Frazetta family will tell you that. Over the years, Dave was able to get the best example of every category because he not only had the eye, he had Frank, he had access. So Dave was constantly trading and upgrading, upgrading and upgrading to get the very best. Over the course of those years, Dave owned it all at one time or another, and he was able to judge and say, ‘OK, these are the four best; I’m going to keep these. These are the best Kubla Khan plates, this is the best “Lord of the Rings” plate, I’m gonna keep it.’ ”
By next week, though, all he’ll have left is a portrait of himself that his friend drew.
“It’s difficult,” Winiewicz confessed about selling his collection. “My entire house has always been covered with originals on the walls, and mostly Frazetta originals. Every day I would draw strength and inspiration and warmth and light and everything else from looking at these things.
“So this is different. But you know, life has an arc, and I’ve come to that point in my life when it’s time to share the treasures with the rest of the world.”
The Frazetta auction starts 11 a.m. Friday at Profiles in History, 26662 Agoura Road in Calabasas. Bidding can be done in person or by telephone, fax, absentee bid submissions or live online in real time. For more information, phone 310-859-7701 or go to www.profilesinhistory.com.
