RUDOLPH BELARSKI (1900-1983) noted for "pulp fiction" and paperback detective images, was said to be "the perfect paperback artist" by art editor Ken Stuart, of The Saturday Evening Post in the mid-1950s. A master at building suspense through figure, perspective and color, Belarski dazzled the newsstand browser with pictorial headlines of vital action scenes pertaining to the inside story. In doing so, he sold magazines and books to a drama-craving audience, and propelled publishing's mass markets, thus infiltrating American minds with the trends and fashions of pop culture. Belarski's career began in the 1920s, with the pioneering days of American aviation. His best-remembered subjects, however, came along with the crime story fascination in the 1930s: voluptuous dames in distress mixing it up with square-jawed detectives and thugs. His science-fiction subjects of this same time are astonishingly convincing; his constructions of the 25th century adapted microphones, lawnmowers and hubcaps as elements. In his usual timely fashion, Belarski veers in the 1950s away from the slick world of melodrama towards a more natural, realistic world. A great lover of camping and fishing, Belarski also painted a number of covers for Outdoor Life. Understanding medium, palette, subject and time, Belarski captures America's fickle ideals. As his illustrations soar alongside the growth of our history of popular culture, so does the nostalgic trend that he spawned. [This illustration appeared in: The Synthetic Men of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Argosy Jan 7, 1939, oil on canvas, 34 x 23.75"]