Westhampton Beach artist finds missing Man of Steel

Well, it wasn’t hanging over an icy mantle in the Fortress of Solitude.

Westhampton Beach artist David Saunders—who has built a reputation as a scholar of pulp illustrators—made the news last month when he tracked down a historic portrait of Superman hanging in the library of Lehman College in The Bronx.

The narrative that emerged in a New York Times blog went something like: “Superman fan discovers comic book holy grail.” But Mr. Saunders, 55, said in an interview last week that it was far from a reverence for the Man of Steel, or even comic books in general, that spurred his quest.

“I know nothing about Superman,” he admitted.

Mr. Saunders said that his discovery of the 1940 oil painting—the first image ever to depict costumed Superman in his iconic hands-on-hips pose—started while he was researching the artist, H.J. Ward, for an article in the most recent edition of Illustration magazine.

It was Mr. Ward’s work illustrating the covers of pulp magazines in the 1930s that caught Mr. Saunders’s interest. He said he has spent years researching the commercial artists who painted the covers of the magazines, relics of a genre that has been extinct for decades.

His father, Norman Saunders, who died in 1989, was one of those artists, working on covers for magazines with names like “Spicy Mystery” and “Saucy Movie Tales.” In 2008, Mr. Saunders published a book cataloguing his father’s work. He said he grew up in New York City surrounded by pulp artists whom his father knew, and he began studying them later in his life.

“It hasn’t been until very recently [that] people have begun asking, ‘Who are these people?’” said Mr. Saunders.

Mr. Ward, an artist from the same generation as Mr. Saunders’s father, was hired to paint the Superman portrait in order to promote a Superman radio show for DC Comics, Mr. Saunders said. He began to search for it this summer because he said it was an important piece of Mr. Ward’s biography.

The artist, who died in 1945 at the age of 35, signed it “Hugh J. Ward” rather than his usual signature of “H.J. Ward”—a hint that the Superman portrait was, to the artist, “probably a masterpiece in his own mind,” according to Mr. Saunders.

But when Mr. Saunders called DC Comics in August, they told him that the portrait had been missing for 50 years.

The 60-inch-tall painting had hung behind the desk of Harry Donenfeld, a former owner of DC Comics, for years after it was painted, and became something of an icon within the company. But it disappeared around 1960.

In 1974, a copy of the painting reappeared, on the cover of a collector’s edition Superman comic book. But it had been re-created from a then-decades-old amateur photograph of the original, Mr. Saunders said.

Mr. Saunders said he suspected that Mr. Donenfeld, who died in 1965, took the painting home with him when he retired. So he tracked down everyone with the last name Donenfeld in the 
United States, sending each a letter inquiring about the painting.

About three family members wrote back, saying that they remember the painting hanging in Mr. Donenfeld’s den, although they didn’t know what happened to it. One of them said it might have gone to his son.

Eventually, Mr. Saunders pieced together that a family member had donated it to Lehman College sometime in the 1970s. So he called a Lehman College librarian in February, thinking she could do some research and give him a clue. But Mr. Saunders got a much simpler response.

“She said, ‘Yeah, it’s right here in the library,’” Mr. Saunders said.

The painting started out in the school’s art department and eventually made its way to the office of a school administrator. For a while after that, it was kept in storage, and for the last 15 years or so it hung on the main-floor Leonard Lief Library, according to Mr. Saunders.

Evelyn Santiago, a secretary who has worked at the library for some 20 years, said she had no idea that the painting was a piece of comic book history. “I used to make jokes about it,” she said. “Like, ‘What is a cartoon doing here in higher education at the main floor of a library?’ I thought it was a cartoon.”

In February, Mr. Saunders traveled to the Bronx to photograph the painting. Unfortunately, the latest issue of Illustration featuring his article on Mr. Ward was already on the stands. But Mr. Saunders was able to report back to DC Comics, which was conducting its own search for the painting, that the mystery was solved.

“It was neat for me to dig it up and photograph it,” he said.