Art Deco Fortune Magazine Cover, February 1938

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PRESENTING a FABULOUS Original Art Deco Fortune Magazine Cover February 1938.

The cover of Fortune Magazine for February 1938, framed … Read more PRESENTING a FABULOUS Original Art Deco Fortune Magazine Cover February 1938.

The cover of Fortune Magazine for February 1938, framed and matted.

This is an ORIGINAL COVER, not a re-print or copy. It is the cover of an actual 1938 Fortune Magazine and we can 100% certify it’s authenticity. We have attached a COA on the back of the frame.

The frame is modern. It is a faux distressed wood white poster frame with acid free sky blue beveled matting. Perspex front. The frame and matting are perfect for the style of the era.

The cover print is an Art Deco depiction of a snow plough clearing a path for a delivery truck and car in CLASSIC ART DECO STYLE !

The cover is in near mint condition as can be seen from the photos.

This is one of the more iconic covers of Fortune !

Pained by ‘Alan Atkins’ as noted and signed on the bottom right.

Biography Alan Atkins
Born in Piedmont, California on June 26, 1910. Atkins studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts and with W. P. Robins in England. He lived in Oakland and maintained a studio in San Francisco during the 1930s.

He is best known for his poster of the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. He later was art director at the University of California Extension media center in Berkeley and for films for Boeing, Standard Oil, and others. During his last years he resided in Arnold, Calaveras County, California, where an exhibition of his paintings was held in summer 1990 to mark his 80th birthday. He died in Sacramento, California on December 14, 1990.

Member: Bohemian Club.

Exhibit

Source: Edan Hughes, “Artists in California, 1786-1940”
Who’s Who in American Art 1938-41; SF Chronicle, 12-27-1990 (obituary).

Fortune was founded by The Atlantic Monthly Company co-founder Henry Luce in 1929 as “the Ideal Super-Class Magazine”, a “distinguished and de luxe” publication “vividly portraying, interpreting and recording the Industrial Civilization”.[4] Briton Hadden, Luce’s business partner, was not enthusiastic about the idea – which Luce originally thought to title Power – but Luce went forward with it after Hadden’s sudden death on February 27, 1929.[5]

In late October 1929, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred, marking the onset of the Great Depression. In a memo to the Time Inc. board in November 1929, Luce wrote: “We will not be over-optimistic. We will recognize that this business slump may last as long as an entire year.”[6] The publication made its official debut in February 1930. Its editor was Luce, managing editor Parker Lloyd-Smith, and art director Thomas Maitland Cleland.[7] Single copies of the first issue cost US$1 ($15.3 in 2019).[6] An urban legend says that Cleland mocked up the cover of the first issue with the $1 price because no one had yet decided how much to charge; the magazine was printed before anyone realized it, and when people saw it for sale, they thought that the magazine must really have worthwhile content. In fact, there were 30,000 subscribers who had already signed up to receive that initial 184-page issue. By 1937, the number of subscribers had grown to 460,000, and the magazine had turned half million dollars in annual profit.[8]

At a time when business publications were little more than numbers and statistics printed in black and white, Fortune was an oversized 11″×14″, using creamy heavy paper, and art on a cover printed by a special process.[9] Fortune was also noted for its photography, featuring the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Ansel Adams, and others. Walker Evans served as its photography editor from 1945 to 1965.

During the Great Depression, the magazine developed a reputation for its social conscience, for Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White‘s color photographs, and for a team of writers including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred Kazin, hired specifically for their writing abilities. The magazine became an important leg of Luce’s media empire;[citation needed] after the successful launch of Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930, Luce went on to launch Life in 1936 and Sports Illustrated in 1954.

From its launch in 1930 to 1978, Fortune was published monthly. In January 1978, it began publishing biweekly. In October 2009, citing declining advertising revenue and circulation, Fortune began publishing every three weeks.[10][11] As of 2018, Fortune is published 14 times a year. See less