Ben Denison , Red Corvette, Hot Car - Playboy Cartoon - Mid-Century, 1961

The cop admires the car while the viewer admires the drawing of the car.
The enduring legacy of Ben Denison may not be that he was an early cartoonist for Playboy, but for his style of painting. Reassessing his work a half a century later, it's the art as much as the message. The comic aspect of this work fades, but the visual part endures and blossoms.
Denison's approach was to employ a stripped-down, flat use of bold color, eliminating unnecessary detail, with a high sense of patterning. Along with other Illustration luminaries of his generation, he helped define the look of the late 1950s and early 1960s in magazine illustration. Many of his works are as abstract as they are representational. There may be a reference to Matisse, but Denison has carved out his own simplified narrative style, which is light, airy, and with an underlying sense of joyfulness. He is one of the most significant painters to emerge after World War II. Yet, he is still relatively unknown.
Red Corvette exemplifies this. From a slightly elevated view, we look down on a traffic stop. The hot car, presumably pulled over for a speeding ticket, is depicted as a large, mostly flat area of puchy red. It deliberately occupies about half of the pictorial space of the composition. Denison drives home the point that hot red equals attention-getting drama. The surrounding area complements the car in soothing cool blues and greens. Signed lower right
Frame size 20.73 x 23.13, Elegantly framed with new metal frame and mat under glass
Provenance: The Playboy Collection.
The present work is published on page 173 in the November 1961 issue of Playboy with the caption: "I've Been Thrilled by the Dazzling Breakaway of your Four-Speed, Close-Ratio, Synchromesh, Manual Transmission and the Lusty Surge of Your 315-Horsepower, Fuel-Injection, High-Lift Cam Engine." The work also appears on page 15 of The Playboy Cartoon Album #2 by Hugh Hefner (Playboy Press, 1968)
Condition: Very Good - with fresh looking color, Some surface abrasions, most notably to the upper center, upper right partially on standing figure's arm, and lower left to corvette hood.
Ben Denison, American, 1926–2008
Mixed Media on Illustration Board
20.75 - 23.25 inches
US$16,500