In 2013, I did a series of three posts (one, two, and three) on Bern Hill, an artist who made dozens of memorable paintings used by General Motors on the covers of Railway Age magazine. Perhaps the greatest living expert on Bern Hill is Greg Palumbo, whose collection of posters and original artworks by Hill was featured on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow a few years ago. A former EMD employee himself, Palumbo has written several magazine articles about Hill and other EMD artists and he graciously shared with me images of his collection of paintings, posters, and magazine covers.
There are many mysteries about Bern Hill’s work. How many of his paintings were used on Railway Age covers? One of Palumbo’s articles says 65, but he admits that’s just an estimate. Only some of the covers have signatures; in many others, the signatures are cropped out.
How many covers were made into posters? Palumbo counted 29; I count 31, but it could be more.
Palumbo suggests that some people at EMD didn’t like Hill’s early paintings, which deemphasized the locomotives GM was trying to sell in favor of showing spectacular scenery or unusual viewpoints. If so, then why did it make posters of so many of his paintings? If not, then why did it force him to change his style in later years?
I’ll try to answer some of these questions in the next few days. But first I’d like to provide some context for these paintings.
EMD had its own stable of artists, including (in the late 1940s and early 1950s) Ben Dedek (1895-1973) and Harry Bockewitz (1897-1982). Dedek was born in Chicago, probably trained at the Art Institute, and aside from his work for GM he painted scenery for the Chicago Opera. Bockewitz was born in southern Illinois and lived most of his adult life in La Grange, where GM built most of its locomotives. At least some of the GM cover art in the 1940s appears to be by Dedek.
This 1948 ad was typical in that the illustration did not extend into the magazine masthead. The art style appears to be that of EMD illustrator Ben Dedek, who made more than 100 paintings of GM locomotives that were featured on locomotive specification cards. Click image to download a 1.7-MB PDF of this magazine cover.
From at least 1916 through 1957, Railway Age was unusual though not unique in selling its front covers to advertisers. Such companies as Baldwin Locomotive Works, Timken Roller Bearings, Youngstown Steel Doors, Byers Wrought Iron, and many others bought cover ads. General Motors began placing cover ads in 1935 and by the late 1940s it typically bought about 17 or 18 covers per year. These usually included the first or second issue of the year and always included the issue closest to Christmas.
Railway Age was about 8-1/2″x11″ and the top 2-1/3″ was used for the “Railway Age” masthead. Advertisers typically filled the bottom 8-2/3″ with a photo of their product and some text. Once in a while, however, an advertiser would extend the image up into the banner, usually allowing the sky or some other neutral part of the image to form the backdrop of the Railway Age logo and issue date.
This illustration in this January 1 1949 ad is signed by Ben Dedek. The locomotive pose exactly matches many of the specification cards printed around that time. Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this cover.
General Motors did this for its 1937 Christmas advertisement, but the busy background made part of the magazine masthead difficult to read. It tried it again for the August 21, 1948 issue with a photo of what appears to be a train emerging from a tunnel. The rocky cliff above the tunnel forms a messy backdrop for the magazine banner. Unfortunately, to make room for a 4-1/4″x5-3/4″ block of text the train itself was an illustration superimposed on the photo that didn’t really fit the scale of the photo.
A signature in the lower right corner looks something like “John Marc” but I can’t make it out for sure. All three magazine covers on this page were scanned by Google. Click image to download a 2.0-MB PDF of this magazine cover.
In 1949, the artwork in at least six General Motors ads extended up into the masthead, usually putting a blue sky behind the Railway Age banner. Three of the illustrations are photos and three are paintings. Two of the paintings are unsigned but do not appear to be by Dedek or Bockewitz. The third painting is signed but I can’t make out the signature; however, it isn’t Bockewitz, Dedek, or Hill. The painting is unusual for General Motors ads in that the locomotive doesn’t fill most of the frame.
The year 1950 inauspiciously began with a General Motors ad that used the same Ben Dedek image used in 1949, except that the number on the locomotive was changed from “1949” to “1950.” Then, on February 18, came the first cover ad signed by Bern Hill featuring a spectacular image of the California Zephyr passing beneath a large, snow-capped mountain. However, a week before that was a General Motors ad whose artist has never been positively identified. Tomorrow, I’ll make the case that it, too, was by Bern Hill.
Greg Palumbo generously gave me high-resolution images of magazine covers, advertising proofs, posters, paintings, and other items from his collection. In some cases the images are 600 dpi jpgs, many of which are 50 to 100 megabytes in size. I’ve converted them to 300 dpi PDFs, which reduces the size with little loss of quality. For the really high resolution images, I’ve also made 600 dpi PDFs, and will offer both options. I can barely tell the difference when I zoom in but you may prefer the highest possible resolution.
Palumbo is selling parts of his collection on eBay. If you are interested, you can find the items he has for sale on his eBay page. Whether he has sold them or not, I’ll refer to images here as coming from his collection.