Bergey
Earle K.
Earle K. Bergey (August 26, 1901 – 1952) was an American
illustrator who painted cover art for a wide diversity of magazines
and paperback books. Today Bergey is best recognized for creating
the iconic cover of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for Popular Library at
the height of his career in 1948.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bergey attended Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts from 1921 to 1926. He initially went to work in
the art department of the Philadelphia's Public Ledger, and he drew
the comic strip Deb Days in 1927. Early in his career, Bergey
contributed many covers to the pulp magazines of publisher Fiction
House. By the mid 1930s, Bergey made a home and studio in Bucks
County, Pennsylvania, and he married in 1935.
Throughout the 1930s, Bergey worked freelance for a number of
publishing houses. His eye-catching paintings were predominately
featured as covers on a wide array of pulp magazines, including
romance (Thrilling Love, Popular Love, Love Romances) as well as
detective, adventure, aviation, and westerns. Bergey illustrated
mainstream publications, such as The Saturday Evening Post, during
this time. He illustrated covers for fitness magazines, and he was
one of the first major American pin-up artists, contributing
numerous covers for men's magazines such as Gay Book Magazine, Pep
Stories, and Snappy.
During the 1940s, Bergey continued to paint covers for romance,
sports, and detective pulp magazines, and he began working on a
number of science fiction magazines, including Standard
Publications' Strange Stories and Captain Future, and later for
Fantastic Story Magazine. His illustrations of scantily-clad women
in space helmets served as an inspiration for Princess Leia's
slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi and Madonna's brass
brassiere. Bergey's science fiction covers, often described as "Bim,
BEM, Bum," usually featured a woman being menaced by a Bug-Eyed
Monster, alien, or robot, with an heroic male astronaut coming to
her assistance. The bikini-tops worn by the girls often resembled
coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase "the girl in the brass
bra," sometimes used in reference to this sort of art.
In 1948, Bergey made the transition to the rapidly expanding
paperback book industry along with skilled pulp artists like Rudolph
Belarski, whose work is often confused with Bergey's. While
continuing to paint pulp covers at this time, Bergey sold
illustrations to at least four (4) leading paperback publishing
houses, including Popular Library and Pocket Books. His art graced
the covers of dozens of novels and helped to sell millions of
volumes. His paperback cover illustrations were as diverse as his
work for the pulps. In addition to his work on Anita Loos' famous
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bergey painted cover art for well-known
authors from Émile Zola to the Western master, Zane Grey, whose 1951
Pocket Books edition cover painting for Spirit Of The Border is a
Bergey classic. Many of his paperbacks are now cult classics, some
featuring hidden self-portraits. Bergey died suddenly in 1952 in a
doctor's office with family at his side.
