JANE GRAIS

The work of artist Eugene Bilbrew might be better known had not a dozen books with his illustrations on the cover been confiscated and outlawed in the late 1950s. While he drew for 20 years, his work is still little known outside a small group of deviant collectors and enthusiasts. A Times Square–based artist (he literally overdosed in a bookstore on 42nd Street), Bilbrew is but one of a school of forgotten artists active in the shady sexual underground of Manhattan during the Eisenhower years. Were you a “man in a grey flannel suit” who stopped in a Times Square shop on your commute back to the suburbs, you might have seen his work wrapped in cellophane and hastily marked with a price ten times the going rate for a clean paperback. Today, his best work looks deviant, but popular Japanese sex comics go much further with less class. So does some contemporary art, but for the most part artists today have to work pretty hard to shock their jaded audience. Bilbrew’s work is now more than 50 years old and it still shocks, if in a campy, vintage, hard-boiled manner.

Torbjørn Kvasbø

Unnamed

2010