Lesser has preserved and presented these canvasses in a way that makes the colors pop out. They are often accompanied by a copy of the magazine on which the illustration appeared, allowing us to see a faded print against the vibrant original, and displayed against colored satin that corresponds to the primary colors of the painting. Color itself might be the subject of H. Winfield Scott's "The Oklahoma Kid" (1938) in which the cowboy hero's face is obscured under the brim of his ten-gallon hat and the emphasis is on his canary yellow shirt and read neckerchief. Of course on a real cowboy, or even in a John Ford movie, this would look more Village People than Dodge City. Here it speaks to the pulp artists' preoccupation with fantasy -- and with aesthetics -- rather than verisimilitude.

Some, like Rafael de Soto's "The Bookie and the Blonde" (1940), look like a deliberate subversion of the Americana of Rockwell and commercial illustration. A cop eats his lunch at a roadside counter, framed in a box of sunlight, while out of his view a thug with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his wrist holds a gun on the waitress, forcing her to pour poison into the coffee she's about to serve the policeman. There's no getting around the fact that women in peril were one of the pulp's biggest selling points, and that often the women have had their clothes ripped to reveal the lingerie underneath. In H.J. Ward's "Two Hands to Choke" (1934), a redhead in shredded clothes digs her nails into the face of the brute trying to subdue her.

In the 1938 "Black Pool for Hell Maidens" -- you know it's good just from that title -- a women is chained in the foreground while an evil-looking dwarf advances on her, and in the background another lovely is lowered into a vat of some boiling liquid. Some of the pulp readership was bound to get off on these images of women in distress. But I'd argue that the real appeal for the largely male pulp audience came from the next frame they conjured up in their heads -- the one where the rescued female offers up the charms we've glimpsed to her gallant rescuer. That was the role that the pulp readers wanted to imagine themselves in, and it seems even more obvious in the paintings where no women are present, where just one lone, usually good-looking hero moves in to finish off the usually brutish (or even deformed) villain. De Soto's "Revolt of the Underworld" (1942), an illustration for "The Spider," shows the eponymous hero swinging down on a rope to crash his feet into the throat of a nearly skeletal baddie. A spider web fans out on the wall behind the Spider and the shadow of a wolf, its jaws bared as if moving in for the kill, is also visible.

The fantasy covers are not usually so explicitly violent, but they represent some of the wildest flights of pulp art imagination -- not just the futuristic "Metropolis" architecture and the robots and flying saucers, but the figures. In Virgil Finlay's "Burn, Witch, Burn!" (1942) a naked women, her body spangled in stars, rises above a scene of villagers who appear to be thrashing a burning field. Behind her, the face of a green demon floats in the sky. The realistic figures here are literally dwarfed by the comely apparition, and no matter what the story it was meant to illustrate holds, you can't imagine cheering for them over this floating goddess. One of my favorites, "Creep Shadow," also by Finlay and also from 1942, shows a nude Jean Harlow-like blonde reclining on the backs of some frog-like sea creatures bearing her up to the crest of a wave. It's art nouveau gone gaga, a mix of sexual enticement and the delicacy of the lines forming the pattern of the waves.

For sheer visual impact and pleasure, I don't know when I've enjoyed an exhibit as much as this one. The paintings may have no depth; they are made to yield up their pleasure at once. But it would be foolish to underestimate how deeply they reach into our brains and our libidos. They inspire a lustful greed in the viewer, a sheer appetite for adventure and flesh that's bracing precisely because it's the opposite of politeness and refinement and taste. Pulp art was an open secret, a brazen display of the appetites we didn't acknowledge there on the newsstands every month. They were also among the most vibrant and colorful and exciting works of American commercial illustration. They should be celebrated for that, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit should be appreciated for shunning the hypocrisy that has long characterized the way they are regarded. Our spiciest, most violent fantasies are up on the walls for all to see. It's as if long-buried American desires are finally declaring themselves and saying, "Look how beautiful."