Antiques Roadshow Detours

Adam: I sent you a meeting invite. Do you wanna tell the people what the name of the meeting invite was?

Marsha: Well, you know, without looking at my calendar, all I remember is one word: surprise.

Adam Narration: Marsha Bemko, my boss at GBH's Antiques Roadshow. When I invite Marsha to these meetings, she never knows what to expect.

Marsha: Adam has sucker punched me. Adam has told me good things, sad things, set me up for wrong answers, all of it. So whatever today's surprise is, Adam. Lay it on me.

Adam: I love that you said sucker punch

Adam Narration:Because today's conversation regards a painting that's very... punch-forward.

Adam: Please describe what's happening in that picture

Marsha: it’s a very violent scene with a man hitting a woman

Adam: Just knocking her like way back.

Adam Narration: The style of this picture is fairly kitschy. But what it depicts is a man in a cowboy hat gritting his teeth, clenching his fists, and punching a woman in the face. The woman is midfall, her own hat knocked off her head, and her gun tumbling to the ground.

Adam: I remember distinctly seeing this one, and I was thinking, Well, that looks problematic.

Appraisal Alasdair: I think it's drawn a few comments today. I mean,

Appraisal guest: it certainly has

Appraisal Alasdair: anything from politically incorrect to luridly misogynistic, I think.

Adam Narration: This painting came to us in Bismark, North Dakota back in 2014. The guest told appraiser Alasdair Nichol how she'd purchased the piece at auction for under $100.

Appraisal guest: Bit of a hard time with a man punching a woman of course, but

Appraisal Alasdair: I was going to say, how about the subject matter?

Appraisal guest: Yes

Marsha: There's never a good reason for that to happen.

Adam Narration: But unlike Marsha, the guest had her own way of rationalizing it.

Appraisal guest: She does have a gun, and so I reasoned that…

Adam: What if she's about to shoot him?(both laughing)

Marsha: Well, but I mean, all right, so he's gonna hit her before she shoots him? All right, then. That, I suppose that, that's fair.

Adam Narration: This baffling picture was painted by a prolific pulp artist named HJ Ward.

Appraisal guest: HJ Ward did magazine covers in the thirties mostly.

Adam Narration: This painting was a 1938 cover for a magazine called Romantic Western.

Appraisal Alasdair: So it's hardly anything but romantic.

Appraisal guest: I know.

Adam Narration: And what makes it even less romantic?

Appraisal guest: My understanding is that he used his wife for his model on all of his covers or most of them.

Adam Narration: An image of his own wife being knocked to the ground by a furious cowboy. Romantic Western, indeed.

Adam Narration: Marsha says she remembers some of the debate around whether we should even film this painting. Like, was this really the kind of image we wanted to put out into the world?

Marsha: Especially for us girls, for us women.

Adam: Yeah!

Marsha: It's like, “Wait a minute, this is a promotional thing?”

Adam Narration: How could this be the cover of a magazine? Like, what's IN that magazine?

Adam Narration: It's a painting that certainly made an impression on me.

Adam: It's just one that's lingered with me forever. I'm like, I have a question about this one. Can you guess what it is?

Marsha: The question is, is why is her shirt green? (both laughing)

Marsha: Is that it, Adam? Did I get it right?

Adam: Why is this man punching this woman?

Adam Narration: I’m Adam Monahan, and this is Antiques Roadshow Detours... Today, "The Sucker and the Punch."

Alasdair: When I saw the image, I mean, my first thought was, “ooh, I'm not sure I'm gonna be filming this.”

Adam Narration: This is the Antiques Roadshow appraiser who evaluated that H.J. Ward painting.

Alasdair: My name is Alasdair Nichol and I do drawings and paintings.

Adam Narration: And Alasdair was adequately compelled by this painting to decide that he DID want to film it. It's partly the guest herself who swayed him.

Alasdair: A, it was a woman, and she was very jolly about the whole thing and, when I said, well, what do you like about it?

Appraisal guest: The first thing that caught my eye was actually the background.

Alasdair: She said she liked the background and of course in the background there's like nothing going on.

Adam Narration: The background--just a large red circle. And in front of that, again, I want to be clear: a man punching a woman so hard that she’s flying through the air backwards.

Appraisal guest: I don't know, it just kind of spoke to me.

Adam Narration: Which, fair enough--you can enjoy a work of art without seeing it as a moral guide.

Alasdair: I think there are problems with applying twenty-first century sensibilities to art that was being made almost a hundred years ago. And this is gonna sound a bit odd but it immediately made me think… Bear with me here. My dad was a big fan of James Cagney. and we used to watch Cagney movies on Sunday afternoons in Scotland. And I remember there's one, public enemy and there's a famous scene in it where he gets a grapefruit, he’s sitting having breakfast with his girlfriend. And he leans over and goes [squelch] in her face. And I remember even as a kid I'm thinking, “That's not right.” And that was sort of in my mind when I saw this

Adam Narration: James Cagney movies, pulp magazine covers... they just exist in a different world than, say, couples counseling.

Alasdair: Pulp was really about drama. All action, shock, horror.

Adam Narration: Pulp magazines took off around the turn of the 19th century. Before that, buying books just wasn't a widespread thing.  People would buy the Bible, and there'd be some books sold every December during Christmas shopping. But that was about it--literacy rates were low, and books were really expensive.

Adam Narration: But by 1875, literacy in the US was up to about 80%, and there was more and more demand for accessible reading material. And thus, the pulp industry was born.

Alasdair: You know, the name pulp comes from the paper that they used and it was sort of wood pulp

Adam Narration: A cheap paper that could be run through a standard newspaper printing press.

Alasdair: Because these things had to be done cheaply. They didn't cost a lot, and it was for wide distribution.

Adam Narration:  These were stories you could pick up at your local newsstand for just five or ten cents, and each issue was usually passed around about twenty to thirty times before it ended up in the trash.

Adam Narration: Pulp was meant to be pure entertainment–

Adam Narration: These stories were similar in vibe to, say, the thriller or romance novel you'd pick up at an airport bookstore today.

Adam Narration: And HJ Ward did covers for TONS of these different pulp titles.

Alasdair: This was Romantic Western, right? But he also did romantic detective, Hollywood detective, and then there's all the spicys. He did spicy detective, spicy mystery, spicy adventure, and of course spicy Western. So he was all about the spice.

Adam Narration: As for this particular cover…

Adam: Do you have any idea what's going on in this scene? Did you ever find out?

Alasdair: No, I mean it's, but you got a sense from the look in the guy's face that he was no stranger to this kind of behavior.

Adam Narration: But while Alasdair can't tell me why this punch is happening... he can tell me what it's worth. Here's what he said in his original appraisal:

Appraisal Alasdair: This is of course, is an original artwork. An oil and canvas by him. The illustration market is really red hot at the moment. and the kitschier and more over the top these pulp covers are, the more they tend to make. I would expect this at auction should comfortably make between 10 and $15,000.

Appraisal guest: nice

Adam: How has the illustration market been? Is it hot still?

Alasdair: Yeah. I, I would say it's, it's hot, hotter still. It's work that's easily understood by people, every picture tells a story. It's illustrative of the story. And if I was to appraise the Ward painting now yeah, I'd probably bump it up probably 15 to 25,000. And given that she paid under a hundred dollars for it, I think she did extremely well regardless of the subject.

Adam Narration: As for the mystery of the punch, the guest herself was able to offer me a clue: the title of the pulp story this cover was for. "Devil's Punchbowl."

Alasdair: At least it's got the word punch in the title, right?

Adam Narration: And devil! That cowboy could be Satan himself, brought to Earth to knock down damsels in distress.

Adam Narration: To get answers, I’ll need to hunt down a copy of that story.

Alasdair: Maybe you're a spicy detective as well. I have to say, I commend you in going down the rabbit hole, but who knows what it's going to do to your psyche?

Adam Narration: And so, bravely, with no regard for my own mental health, I go searching for a copy of "Devil's Punchbowl" from Romantic Western.

Adam Narration:  When I look online, I discover that that issue of the magazine was once sold by Heritage Auctions. Which is how I come to talk to Sarah Jane.

Sarah Jane: My name is Sarah Jane Blum. I'm the director of illustration art at Heritage Auctions.

Adam: I understand you're a bit of a pulp art fan.

Sarah Jane: Yes. I'm a, I'm a huge pulp Art fan. I think Illustration art is often underestimated in people's minds compared to fine art. And then even within illustration art, pulp and pinup kind of gets a bad rap because it's so on the nose, but I love that about it.

Adam Narration: And there was a purpose to this on the nose quality: pulp publishers wanted images that would draw customers in, entice them to pick up the magazine.

Sarah Jane: And so what you find is, they're using lots of bright primary colors. You know, the subjects are really, really large in the frame. It’s at once incredibly over the top. And a hat on a hat, but it's also very minimalistic. It's truly cinematic in that, you know, you can, in your mind, envision the moment before and the moment after, which is what you want in narrative art.

Adam Narration: HJ Ward made his covers stand out by being particularly provocative.

Sarah Jane: What he was really known for was the boundary pushing-ness of his art. And you know, that was obviously a, a lure on a crowded newsstand.

Sarah Jane: Actually, you know, after the appraisal, I ended up acquiring that piece of work.

Adam Narration: That very same HJ Ward painting that we had on the show! In a bizarre coincidence, Sarah Jane bought it!

Sarah Jane: I did. I owned the Devil's punch bowl. I had it hanging in the living room over the fireplace.

Adam: What were people's reactions to it when they saw it?

Sarah Jane: Oh gosh. It obviously was a conversation piece. People were just encountering it without context. You know, you had people coming to the house for a cocktail party or, you know, to inspect the flue in the fireplace or what have you. And they were giggling, you know, everybody found it very fun. Which I also think is, you know, an interesting thing because. You know, in some ways it's quite a violent scene, but there's something about the approach that really reminds you when you're looking at it, that this is not to be taken seriously.

Adam Narration: Sarah Jane acquired the Ward painting well before she came to Heritage--at the time, she ran a gallery that specialized in illustration art. Eventually, she sold the piece on to a collector.

Adam Narration: Sarah Jane can't share the exact sale price. But, she says, it's a lucrative time for old pulp.

Sarah Jane: Published pulp covers… they’re very hard to come across. And so, we, within a day of acquiring it had, you know, somebody who was very interested in it. And we were fortunate that due to the vagaries of life, we got to enjoy it for a lot longer than just one day. But we had no trouble selling it back then. I would say that, you know, at auction it would remain exciting for people.

Adam Narration: I'd reached out to Sarah Jane in the hopes she could get me a copy of the story "Devil's Punchbowl.” But it turns out, that's a more complicated request than I'd thought.

Sarah Jane: When I owned this painting, I didn't have a copy of that pulp. They're, they're hard to get because when they are selling, you know, they can be somewhat spendy.

Adam: I was astonished to see that the, just the magazine, pulp magazine sold for $576 in 2023.

Adam Narration: That’s a pretty big jump from the original price of ten cents, and it’s more than my public media budget has set aside for reading material. Plus, even if I can find someone with a copy of the magazine, there’s no guarantee I'd actually be able to READ it.

Sarah Jane: Much like comic books, people are starting to put them in, in slabs. So they're encapsulated and once they've been encapsulated and graded, you can't actually read them anymore.

Adam Narration: But like a cowboy resolutely knocking a woman to the ground,

Adam Narration: Sarah Jane is determined. And when she got my request, she didn't give up easily.

Sarah Jane: I started looking back through all of the different times that we have sold that magazine, either on its own or in lots. And I worked with a couple of my colleagues and we figured out who we could ask, who was most likely to still have their copy and be happy to be a part of this project.

Adam Narration: And, victory! Sarah Jane finds a collector willing to copy the text of "Devil's Punchbowl" and send it to me.

Adam Narration: After the break... I get some answers.

Adam Narration: Why is this cowboy punching this woman? And what's the deal with HJ Ward--what was going on in the man's head, to paint stuff like this based on his wife?

Adam Narration: Now, maybe you're thinking, Adam needed the story, he's got the story! Question answered! But there's one huge problem I wasn't anticipating.

Adam Narration: And that is... my own laziness.

Adam Narration: You hear "story," you think "short story," meaning "short," meaning the kind of thing I could knock out in between emails. But "Devil's Punchbowl" is, like forty pages, of dense text. And so, unable to summon the pulp enthusiasm of my forebearers, the story sits and sits on my to do list.

Adam Narration: But then... I'm able to book one last interview.

David Saunders: My name is David Saunders I am, uh, the son of Norman Saunders, who was a really legendary, uh, illustrator in America

Adam Narration: When you search online for HJ Ward, there's not a lot of information out there. But one of the sources that does pop up is David Saunders--he wrote a whole biography of Ward.

Adam Narration: Over the years, David's become something of a pulp art expert. It all began with his recollections of his father, and his father's friends.

David Saunders: It was a sentimental thing, but it's also just a, uh, a lifelong kind of interest in preserving all the American artists who have been overlooked, basically. And HJ Ward, Hugh Joseph Ward is one of, uh, my favorite artists and was a good friend of my father's.

Adam Narration: Which is why David is the perfect man to answer my questions.

Adam: Who is this artist? And why is that man punching that woman? Those are the things I was hoping to answer.

David Saunders: Okay, Well I'll answer the, which one first?

Adam: Let's go with who is HJ Ward?

David Saunders: Very little is known about him, but it's, outta proportion to how sensational his work is. It's an interesting way that he has a painting. That's very seductive, uh, technically, and I don't, I don’t expect everyone to appreciate it, but you could tell that there's almost no area of his painting that he’s touched a brush to the same area twice and that's not normal.

David Saunders: His father was a mail carrier and he was an Irish immigrant. They lived in Philadelphia, stuffed in these little brick buildings… Typically they were all working in factories by the time they were 13 years old or 14 years old in those days. And there were eight children in his family, two of them died in infancy. And, the oldest son drowned in the river when he was eight or 10 years old. It was a hard life.

Adam Narration: But Ward found joy in drawing, and he started doing cartoons for the school paper. He was also able to get some artistic training through his mother's job--she worked at a weaving factory that wanted to train people to draw their patterns.

David Saunders: And, luckily got a job on the Philadelphia Inquirer right out of high school.

Adam Narration: Even with a job, Ward continued his artistic education. It’s the same thing David's own father did—he was right around Ward's age.

David Saunders: At that time when they were like 18 years old the people they were getting training from were really legendary artists that, um, that are completely forgotten at this point.

Adam Narration: Those artists may be forgotten as a whole... but they've NOT been forgotten by the fine people of Antiques Roadshow. Every name David brings up is someone I've heard mentioned in an appraisal. Starting with the trunk of this artistic training tree:

David Saunders: Howard Pyle

Appraisal tape: …Howard Pyle, who's one of the great American illustrators…

David Saunders: Howard Pyle died in 1911. And so his legacy lived on, through his students. Harvey Dunn.

Appraisal tape: …studied illustration with people like Harvey Dunn…

David Saunders: And NC Wyeth

Appraisal tape: …NC Wyeth, the very important illustrator and painter.

Adam: You were just doing a checklist of artists that I've seen on Antiques Roadshow, or have heard their names through Antiques Roadshow (laughing)

David Saunders: oh okay, cool

Adam Narration: The only name I couldn't find in an appraisal is Thornton Oakley... so, you know, if you've got an Oakley, bring it on down to the Roadshow.

David Saunders: These are some of the major, classic American illustrators from the turn of the century and they all taught.

Adam Narration: So when people like Ward were getting this artistic training, they weren't getting it from some schmo--these teachers were important artists, and they had their own philosophy about how American illustration should work. For example, in traditional art training, students would spend the end of their studies in Paris or Rome.

David Saunders: But people like Howard Pyle had come up with this idea that to be a truly American art form, that it should not be funded by governments or funded by the church like European art, but should be funded by industry of America. Instead of trying to show the audience how important the king is or how important the Holy Spirit is, they’re really selling an idea that a client is asking them to sell.

Adam Narration: This new form of American art would be funded by any client willing to pay. And in many ways, this new model was much safer.

David Saunders: Many of the great artists that were very important throughout the Renaissance lived lives of tremendous danger because the powers that they were working with would be overthrown and then all their work would be destroyed, or there would be attempts to assassinate them because they were associated with the vision of the crown.

Adam Narration: But the new model had its own problems.

David Saunders: American industry just basically, didn't rise to the occasion in terms of giving artists any ability to express themselves. If you were trying to illustrate something like um, Kellogg cereal, you, you had to do something that was extremely, um, inoffensive for one thing and, and had to be extremely appealing. And so there was a, a horrible, anti-creative drive to trying not to express yourself.

Adam Narration: The one exception?

David Saunders: Pulp magazines, they didn't particularly care what the, um, illustrators were doing. So, the artists just were so grateful for it I think that they just began to do the wildest possible stuff

Adam Narration: You couldn't put a cowboy punching a woman on a cereal box. But you COULD put it on a pulp magazine cover!

David Saunders: And so you do have this distinction between the illustrators that worked for low paying magazines being basically more self-expressive

Adam Narration: So when HJ Ward started looking for illustration jobs, he ended up doing pulp. It was the easiest

Adam Narration: work to get, and he could paint whatever he wanted.

David Saunders: They would pay like, $50 for a cover. And you know, in 1930, 32, that was like a month's rent in Philadelphia. He tried to work for the so-called slick magazines,

Adam Narration: The "slicks," or "glossies," had more prestige than pulp did, and they paid better, too.

David Saunders: The best he could work for was Liberty, and so there he would get $600 for a cover 

Adam Narration: By the 1950s, the whole model was dying--pulp publishers were going out of business. And pulp writers found work for the newly-popular radio or television instead.

Adam Narration: But HJ Ward didn't make it that far. He was drafted during World War II.

David Saunders: He was a workaholic and while being drafted, he was probably the first time he ever had to go to a doctor and get a physical, And they, they discovered that he had a, a cancerous tumor in his lungs

Adam Narration: Ward was a lifelong smoker. Two years later, he died of lung cancer. He was only 35 years old.

David Saunders: It was maybe fortunate for him because the Army paid for all of his medical things and he had an infant daughter, Patricia, so the mother and the daughter were able to survive.

Adam Narration: So, that's who HJ Ward was--the son of Irish immigrants, who worked steadily in pulp art, only to die unexpectedly young and have his legacy largely forgotten.

David Saunders: Going onto the second subject, which is, why is the painting like that?

Adam: Well, I think, I'm just gonna throw it out there, that I think that woman represents the cancer that was growing in of him. (laughs)

David Saunders: he didn't know it at the time.

Adam: It's subconscious.

Adam Narration: David's not buying it. But we can't prove it's NOT true.

Adam Narration: David explains that Ward mostly worked with a publisher called Donenfeld, which was seen as the bottom of the barrel--the seediest of all the pulp publishers.

David Saunders: Whatever topic was popular, they would make a sexy version of it. And so if there was a detective magazine, they would make Spicy Detective. And in each case, they would have sexy girls on the cover.

Adam Narration: Because the best way to set your magazine apart was to have the prettiest girl on the front. In that way, it is romantic that Ward used his wife.

David Saunders: I've read a lot of the stories and they're not at all as bad as they look like on the cover. They're, they're pretty mild. because if you look at Ward's covers, they don't relate to the actual story that's inside

Adam Narration: David explains how, because of the deadlines these artists were on, they often hadn't even read the story they were illustrating. The cover would just be some unrelated picture. So with "Devil's Punchbowl":

Adam: Will this painting have any relation to the actual like story you think?

David Saunders: So, I went back to check that, to make sure, and it doesn't.

Adam: It does not.

David Saunders: It does not.

Adam Narration: David actually read the story, thus showing me up on my own podcast. He says that not only does no one get punched, but the woman in the story is blonde, while the woman on Ward's cover is brunette. And…

David Saunders: The same story appeared in, um, two other of Donenfeld pulps, the exact same story.

Adam Narration: The publisher took the same text, slapped a new title and pen name on it, and recycled it two more times.

David Saunders: “Missing or Dead.” And that appeared in Speed Western, five years later, and then nine years later, it appeared in Fighting Western and it was called “Trigger Payoff.” And so all three of them have completely different covers. They have nothing to do with each other or nothing to do with the story.

Adam Narration: Apparently, this was pretty common in pulp--the same covers and stories would get reused again and again, with slightly different window dressing.

Adam: Oh my gosh. So this story has nothing to do with that cover art.

Adam Narration: So the answer to why that cowboy is punching that woman... is that HJ Ward knew people would go, "Why is that cowboy punching that woman? I better buy Romantic Western and find out."

Adam: I think I just fell into his trap. I'm doing that exact thing. Why is this cowboy punching this woman? And now I'm making a podcast trying to get to the end of the cliffhanger.

Adam Narration: Still, David says--even among pulp artists, Ward's covers were odd. Most cliffhanger type covers would show, say, a cowboy speeding over the horizon to save a damsel in distress.

David Saunders: But a lot of Ward’s covers… There's no hero coming. It's just a, um, a brutal man, abusing a woman, and she's utterly hope, helpless.

Adam Narration: David got to know HJ Ward's daughter, and he asked her why her father tended towards these dark scenarios.

David Saunders: And she's like, well, I, I don't know. I mean, could be just, he had like a, a hopeless attitude about life. And I was thinking, well, you know, he had a pretty rough childhood. He saw his, his beloved older brother drown, and his two siblings die in childhood. And everybody was struggling to make money, and. [00:26:00] you know, it's a tough life. I do think that the idea of kind of making a joke about something that's frightening is a way that people deal with grief. And I just wonder because remember these are all being made during the Great Depression when people are just madly suffering and here's these images of terrible suffering. And it's almost playful the way that he depicts it.

Adam Narration:  Even Ward's use of his wife has a joke-like quality.

David Saunders: I had a, personally, a funny experience. Because my dad also illustrated this type of stuff, and I was always kind of horrified by it. And, I would ask, you know, my mom, like, “didn't that bother you that these, these creepy images and stuff?”And she goes, oh no, no, no, it's all good, clean fun. And somehow they were all laughing about it.

Adam Narration: According to Ward's daughter, her parents had the same attitude--like, “what's all the fuss about? You’ve never seen a cowboy punch a woman before?”

Marsha: Did you find out?

Adam: uh, sort of, yes, I did find out.

Marsha: What's the answer?

Adam Narration: And so, with the mystery solved--or as solved as it'll ever be without a seance to contact HJ Ward--I report back to Marsha on my findings.

Adam: Do you know what clickbait is?

Marsha: Yes, I know what clickbait is. We try to use it.

Adam Narration: And my findings are... that I am a sucker, pulled in by a cruel marketing trick.

Adam:  These characters do not exist in the story that it's advertising.

Marsha:  It just existed in the artist's mind. and nowhere else.

Adam Narration: And now, I guess you're a sucker too--I mean, you stuck around for this whole episode.

<CREDITS>

Adam Narration: Antiques Roadshow Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Kalila Holt; edited and mixed by Tyler Morrisette; our Assistant Producer is Sarah Roach. Our senior producer is Ian Coss and Devin Maverick Robbins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH. Marsha Bemko is the Executive Producer of Antiques Roadshow Detours, and I’m your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is “Once In A Century Storm” by Will Dailey from the album National Throat.

Adam Narration: I’d love to give a special thanks shout out to The Jack And Joanie Kump Pulp Collection for providing me a copy of Devil’s Punchbowl. Apologies for not reading it. It was really really long.

Adam Narration: Thank you all for listening, have a good one.