Mahlon Blaine has been described as “a well educated man with a knowledge on seemingly any subject… Of Irish descent, Blaine was a large, heavy-set man with graying hair and gray-blue eyes. He delighted in telling friends he was born on Easter Island.” By the early-mid 1940s he had made Greenwich Village his home.
Mahlon Blaine’s best work walked the razor’s edge between the grotesque and beautiful. Blaine was a self-taught American illustrator notable for his darkly erotic, arabesque portrayals. His work appears in over 70 books, magazines and catalogues, notably Ewers’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1927) and Alraune (1927), Flaubert’s Salammbo (1927), Beckford’s Vathek (1928) and de Sade’s Justine (1931). His productive period spans the 1920’s and 30’s, after which he fell into obscurity. He reemerged less spectacularly in the 1950’s and 60’s, illustrating several of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1962, and died in January of 1969.
Though few facts of his life are verifiable, insomuch as anyone can gather, he lived in that no man’s land as well. A childhood accident left the artist blind in his left eye, an accident that contributes to the flattened perspective that marks his work