Gene Bilbrew: Picasso of Porn

Just got in a new batch of vintage porn & I'd like to share...

Gene Bilbrew, like his classmate at the Art Student's League, Eric Stanton, is birthed from the age of Madison Avenue media culture that also illegitimately birthed Mad Magazine. Bilbrew, Stanton, Mad, they all share an apparent sensibility both in straight up line and color style, ie- amusement park caricaturishness and garish colors, as well as a subversive twist on mainstream advertising style. But Bilbrew's similarity to Mad Magazine doesn't bear a simple wink and nudge, but is rather located just this side of the sexual deviant wing of Bellevue. And I don't mean this in a bad way. I just mean it's "edgy". Obviously aware of his "underground" status, lettering is done in a purposeful home-made style like the afterthought $5 price tag on "ToGetHer" or "Frustration" where the lettering seems to have been done with white-out (had it been invented).

Bilbrew's women are oddly drawn cardboard cut-outs, billboards gone awry, collages made from random scraps laying around the drawing board, with dimples and creases almost randomly applied to buttocks, legs, underarms or whatnot... a seemingly mental ward folk-art fetishizing of female bulges and creases assembled into a superwoman of the mind. Compared to Stanton, Bilbrew's men look more sinister, more menacing, more lecherous, his women more depraved, wanton, and perhaps they get kickbacks from the STD clinic down the block. I feel like putting a condom over my head just talking about him! BILBREW.... It just conjures yeast.

Love the exquisitely penned lacy detailing to the undies on the left, while the corset to your right is a piece of architecture straight out of the Futurama exhibition at the '39 Worlds Fair.

This group is all from the late 50s, many printed right here in Brooklyn, by Rainbow Publishing, B & B Press and Kinney Publishing. They did not exactly run a shop with their name on a shingle... rather, they sold "discreetly" through finer retailers in the Times Square area. Publishers and retailers were constantly dodging the law, in Justin Kent's case (a nom de plume you see on a couple of these), he was held as a material witness for a month after police raids on Times Square shops! There's an interesting article by Jay A. Gertzman HERE.

The format is straight up octavo, 8 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, or an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet folded, larger than the usual 12mo sized pocket paperbacks that is the format of most pulp fiction, which is mostly where you find Bilbrew's art. These were the early days of illegal porn. Before Ginzberg's Eros. When much the dirty stuff was still being imported from France!

Anyway, hope you dig these illos as much as I do... if I find out more about them at the Long Island Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend in Garden CIty (see sidebar -->) I'll add (or subtract if appropriate) to this post.

Go HERE to see what is said to be a Bilbrew self-portrait...