Frank Frazetta has been the undisputed king of fantasy art for 50 years, and his fame has grown steadily in the years since his death. His energetic oil paintings of Tarzan, Conan, Vampirella and his signature Death Dealer define fantasy worlds and the bodies that populate them: fleshy, muscular, tactile and sensual.

The king of fantasy art

Frank Frazetta in the book he deserved

Frank Frazetta has been the undisputed king of fantasy art for 50 years, and his fame has only grown in the years since his death. Now that his paintings are breaking auction records (Egyptian Queen sold for $5.4 million in 2019), the need for a full monograph is clear.
Born into a family of Sicilian immigrants in Brooklyn in 1928, Frazetta was a minor-league jock, a petty criminal and a serial seducer with movie-star looks and extraordinary talent. He claimed he only did art when he had nothing better to do (he preferred to play baseball), but he began his professional career in comics at the age of 16. His work as a comic strip artist led him toEC Comics, and from there he went on to paint oil paintings for the covers of cheap Tarzan and Conan. Both characters were played by many before him, but as he explained in the 1970s, "I put a lot of emphasis on the physicality. In Brooklyn, I met Conan. I knew guys like him. Frazetta used that first-hand knowledge of muscle and the macho figure to redefine fantasy heroes by making them bigger, more menacing and testosteronic than ever before. In return, he created a new generation of women, as naked as censorship allowed, with pixie faces and rotund bodies: thick thighs, rotund buttocks and firm breasts combined with soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. Add action, creatures and twilight worlds of eerie shadows and the result is a work as addictive as crisps.

About the authors

Dan Nadeles is a curator at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California at Davis and a contributor to the New York Review of Books andArtforum. Nadel's books and exhibitions include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945-1976 (2020), Chicago Comics, 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2021), and the forthcoming biography of Robert Crumb (Scribner, 2024). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Zak Smith is an artist whose works are included in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of several books and writes a column for Artillery magazine. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

About the editor

Dian Hanson produced a number of men's magazines between 1976 and 2001, includingJuggs, Outlaw BikeryLeg Show, before becoming editor of TASCHEN's Sexy Books collection. Her titles include the body part series, The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy ArtyRen Hang.

Publisher: Taschen