Zoë MOZERT

Taken from Dave Saunders's website: Zoë Mozert (1907-1993) was born Alice Adelaide Moser on April 27, 1907 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. From 1925 to 1928 she studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where she took advanced classes with Thorton Oakley in 1927 and 1928. She paid for her tuition by modeling at the school, most likely also posing for H. J. Ward, several of whose paintings from this time period portray a woman with strikingly similar features. She began her own career as an artist in 1927, while working for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. In 1932 she moved to New York City to look for entry-level freelance work in the magazine industry. Her first illustration jobs were for Bernarr Macfadden's True Story. At this time she adopted a professional name, Zoe Mozert. From 1934 to 1937 she created many sensual and glamourous covers for pulp magazines, such as Smart Love Stories, Love Revels, and Night Life Tales. Fawcett Publications hired her to work full time as a staff artist on True Confessions, but at the same time she also worked in her free time as a freelance artist. In this way her work appeared in a wide range of glamour magazines, such as American Weekly, Romantic Movie Stories, Romantic Stories, and Screen Stories. She was soon a prosperous and busy illustrator, who had grown beyond the low-paying pulp magazine industry. By 1937 her unique style of illustration was so central to the ideal of Hollywood glamour that she was hired by Paramount Pictures to create the movie poster for the film, True Confession, starring Carole Lombard. In 1941 she signed an exclusive fifteen-year contract as a top Pin-Up calendar artist for Brown & Bigelow. She also worked as an art adviser and painter with Warner Brothers for whom she created many artworks that were used as props within films, such as Never Say Goodbye and Calendar Girl. She also painted the controversial movie poster of Jane Russell for the classic Howard Hughes film, The Outlaw. In 1978 she retired to Sedona, Arizona. She later moved to a county facility in Flagstaff, where she died at the age of 85 years on February 1, 1993.