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Summary:

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for 50 years, with his fame only growing in the years since his death. His high-energy oils of Tarzan, Conan, Vampirella and his signature Death Dealer define not just fantasy worlds, but the bodies that occupy them: fleshy, muscular, tactile and sensual. With his paintings now breaking auction records (Egyptian Queen sold for $ 5.4 million in 2019) he’s long overdue for this ultimate monograph.

Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in Brooklyn, 1928, Frazetta was a minor league athlete, petty criminal and serial seducer with movie star looks and phenomenal talent. He claimed to only make art when there was nothing better to do – he preferred playing baseball - yet began his professional career in comics at age 16.

Strip work led him to the infamous EC Comics, then to oils for Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Both characters were interpreted by many before him, but as he explained in the 1970s, “I’m very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him,” and he used this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho to redefine fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before. As counterbalance he created a new breed of women, nude as censorship allowed, with pixie faces and multiparous bodies: thick thighed, heavy buttocked, breasts cantilevered out to there, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real.

Add in the action, the creatures, the twilit worlds of haunting shadow and Frazetta’s art is addictive as potato chips.

About the Author:

Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, and a contributor to the New York Review of Books and Artforum. Nadel’s books and exhibitions include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945–1976 (2020), Chicago Comics, 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021), and the forthcoming biography of Robert Crumb (Scribner, 2024). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Zak Smith is an artist whose work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of several books, writes a regular column for Artillery magazine and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Dian Hanson is a senior editor and writer for TASCHEN, with over 50 books to her credit. In addition to ARNOLD, her recent works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Art / Individual Artists / Monographs
• Art / Subjects & Themes / Science Fiction & Fantasy