While we’re aware that web searches generate different results depending on the where and when, we were still a bit thrilled when we did a random search today on Italian poster artist Sandro Symeoni and came up as the number one result. That has to do with having featured his art in three different posts over the last couple of years. Today, we have another rare Symeoni, a piece of production art he painted for the Clint Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. It’s truly brilliant. We also located several more of Symeoni’s posters and uploaded those below. Symeoni died in 2007. There was a posthumous exhibition in Italy last year that raised his profile a bit, and we suspect collectors will focus on his work even more in the coming years. If you want to see a bit more on him, definitely do so at our previous posts here, here, and here.

No, these aren’t pulp classics that somehow escaped your notice. They’re props from the 2005 film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, in which Robert Downey, Jr. played a thief accidentally cast in a Hollywood film. The movie was based on Brett Halliday’s pulp novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them, and so the producers of the film mocked up four pieces of faux fiction as a sort of tribute, and used Robert McGinnis art to do so. The paintings are of course wonderful, but to our eyes the overall designs aren’t fully convincing. This is mainly due to the uninspired font choices and rather limp colors utilized for the overall graphics. One gets the sense the designers didn’t have a true affinity for pulp style. But even if the covers are less than authentic, the McGinnis art is still to die for.