Eric Stanton has been described as the most famous fetish artist in the world, a claim well argued in a new book by fetish art enthusiast and historian Richard Pérez Seves. His exhaustive biography of the artist with its comprehensive catalogue of his output also embraces many other colourful folk such as Irving Klaw, Bettie Page, John Willie, Eneg, Leonard Burtman and Spider-Man creator Steve Ditko, who were part of Stanton’s world during the vintage fetish years. Review: Tony Mitchell

Eric Stanton has been described as the most famous fetish artist in the world, a claim well argued in a new book by fetish art enthusiast and historian Richard Pérez Seves. His exhaustive biography of the artist with its comprehensive catalogue of his output also embraces many other colourful folk such as Irving Klaw, Bettie Page, John Willie, Eneg, Leonard Burtman and Spider-Man creator Steve Ditko, who were part of Stanton’s world during the vintage fetish years. Review: Tony Mitchell

Pub: Schiffer Publishing/Schifferbooks.com $29.99(Amazon: $22.52/£26.50/€28.49)

With an amazing 50 years of underground art output to his credit, there is a solid case for claiming that Eric Stanton had, by the time of his death in 1999. become the most famous fetish artist in the world.

And that case is nowhere more convincingly made than by fetish art enthusiast and historian Richard Pérez Seves in his eagerly awaited Stanton biography, Eric Stanton & The History of the Bizarre Underground.

Into the 288 pages of this 7 x 10in ‘junior A4’-sized hardback, Pérez Seves packs the most exhaustive examination of Stanton’s life and work — including more than 400 colour and b&w images — attempted by any writer.

But as its full title implies, this book is much more than just an Eric Stanton biography.

Because of the many overlapping circles Stanton moved in, it is actually an impressively forensic record of an entire era — often referred to as the golden age of fetish publishing.

The author’s account of this period — spanning just over two decades from the late 1940s to the early ’70s — is populated not just with now-legendary artists and models, but also with the various publishers and distributors they worked for, some of whom were notorious and a couple of whom were very shady indeed.

Richard Pérez Seves had already given us a taste of his expertise in the realm of vintage fetish with his revealing biography of Charles Guyette (Charles Guyette: Godfather of American Fetish Art).

This self-published, profusely illustrated paperback (reviewed by us on August 25, 2017) was actually put together by the author while awaiting publication of his Stanton meisterwerk.

Guyette was a previously unsung hero of the genre whose work, though likely to be familiar to anyone with an interest in vintage imagery, was rarely attributed to him by name. He was a major influence on many of the people who now surface in this new book as part of Stanton’s story.

Not the least of these was publisher Irving Klaw, who in 1949 was the first to employ Stanton as a fetish artist.

As Pérez Seves explains, Stanton’s work for Klaw, and subsequently with a variety of other publishers, including another fetish publishing legend, Leonard Burtman, founder of Exotique magazine, brought him into contact with an ever-widening circle of fetish artists that included Gwendoline creator John Willie (John Alexander Scott Coutts) and Eneg (Gene Bilbrew).

During Stanton’s early days with Klaw (the man who famously made a star out of Bettie Page) his job included censoring artwork from other artists to meet Klaw’s strict ‘dressode’, in place to keep him out of trouble with the law (a recurrent problem for fetish artists, photographers and publishers of that era).

Pérez Seves reveals that Stanton was upset by Klaw’s insistence that his hero John Willie’s artwork must be censored (generally by adding more clothing) prior to publication.

And he didn’t much enjoy having to do similar cover-up work on the bondage photographs of Bettie Page and her model chums that soon became a staple of Klaw’s business.

But Eric always had an eye to putting food on the table for the children of his first (unhappy) marriage, and he applied his artistic talents wherever he could to bring money into the family home.