1967 Ed Valigursky Vietnam Illustrations
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GUEST:
Me and my dad went to an estate sale in Atlanta, Georgia. And, uh, we got this one for $10, and these two each for five dollars, because they thought they were prints.
APPRAISER:
Uh-huh.
GUEST:
We kind of looked at it, and they kind of looked like paintings.
APPRAISER:
Right.
GUEST:
And, uh, "Popular Mechanics" sold these two copies as posters for people's houses. And this is the cover of the "Popular Mechanics" book.
APPRAISER:
Do you know...Do you know the artist of these?
GUEST:
Uh, it says it in the book, and it's, like, Ed... Valenscheri?
APPRAISER:
It's, uh, Ed Valigursky. Yeah, yeah, interesting guy. He just died a couple of years ago. He was born in 1926 and died in 2009. Did you look up anything about him at all?
GUEST:
We saw some of his paintings--one had just sold in an auction, and it went for, I think, $9,000 or $12,000?
APPRAISER:
Yeah, okay. He's an illustrator. He did a lot of illustrations for science fiction magazines and articles, and books, for authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and people like that. Now, these are a little different. And, and you're right, these were done for, um, in "Popular Mechanics." Now, you can actually see these, uh, this advertisement, how they were marketed. You can see, "You can own these paintings." When you get down to reading about it, you see you can get a lithograph for $1.95. And there are your paintings-- U.S. planes in Vietnam, then U.S. helicopters in Vietnam, right here. And these are your, your works right above us. And then this one down here is the cover for a "Popular Mechanics" issue. And you can see right here, it's called "'Tiger Sharks' of the Vietnam Swamps." You see here the piece on the cover of this November 1967 issue, and there it is, right next to the... the original watercolor and gouache. These are all the different planes used in, in Vietnam, but the reason they're so busy and there are so many planes is that they're trying to get all of them in there and trying to give a almost encyclopedic look of what was in the air. It's hard to say, because the Vietnam War, there's still a lot of deep feelings about it, but I think these are really important things for a collector. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of the lithographs made, but only one of the original artwork here, which you have. I would probably put a conservative estimate on these at auction of about $4,000 to $6,000 apiece.
GUEST:
Nice. Okay. So do you think, as a group, they would sell more?
APPRAISER:
I would actually separate them off because you have different buyers for different things.
GUEST:
Okay, thank you.
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