asphaltman

This will rest ur politics for a few.

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Men Still Love Pin-Ups

Posted: 25 May 2015 12:35 PM PDT
According to WikiPedia - In the late 19th century, burlesque performers and actresses sometimes used photographic advertisement as business cards to promote themselves. These adverts and business cards could often be found in almost every green room, pinned-up or stuck into "frames of the looking-glasses, and in the joints of the gas-burners..."

Artwork by Enoch Bolles
Understanding the power of photographic advertisements to promote their shows, burlesque women self-constructed their identity to make themselves visible. Being recognized not only within the theater itself but also outside challenged the conventions of women's place and women's potential in the public sphere. "To understand both the complicated identity and the subversive nature of the 19th-century actress, one must also understand that the era's views on women's potential were inextricably tied to their sexuality, which in turn was tied to their level of visibility in the public sphere: regardless of race, class or background, it was generally assumed that the more public the woman, the more 'public,' or available, her sexuality", according to historian Maria Elena Buszek.

Being sexually fantasized, famous actresses in early 20th-century film were both drawn and photographed and put on posters to be sold for personal entertainment. Among the celebrities who were considered sex symbols, one of the most popular early pin-up girls was Betty Grable, whose poster was ubiquitous in the lockers of G.I.s during World War II.

In “The Art of Pin-up,” Dian Hanson describes a pin-up simply as a "provocative but never explicit image of an attractive woman created specifically for public display in a male environment."

Zoe Rozert painting Jane Russell for the now famous "The Outlaw" poster
Dian concludes that this imaginary female isn't just attractive. "Her sexiness is natural and uncontrived, and her exposure is always accidental: A fishhook catches her bikini top, an outboard motor shreds her skirt, a spunky puppy trips her up or the ever-present playful breeze lifts her hem, revealing stocking tops and garter straps, but never the whole enchilada."

Since they skyrocketed to popularity in the World War II era, pin-up images have occupied a variety of roles -- military inspiration, commercial photography, kitsch nostalgia and cult aesthetic. But, sadly, the images of buxom hips and red lips rarely fall into the category of fine art.

Taschen's newest work of bound eye candy, titled "The Art of Pin-up," explores the work of ten major pin-up artists, delving into the histories that inspired their salacious artwork.

The erotic compendium features images created from 1920 to 1970, largely sourced from original publications -- a rarity for pin-up literature. "I bought every pin-up book there was," Hanson said, "and there have been many books done on pin-ups and all of them done from poor original sources, from calendars, magazine centerfolds and bad scans."

"Then there came a man named Charles Martignette; he had over 4,000 pieces. So much of the material of this kind had been destroyed by publishers and calendar makers because they owned it outright. Because of the frivolous nature of this material, that it was something meant to entertain men, they didn't see it as having any value. Even when the originals were large oil paintings they didn't see them as having any intrinsic value."

The idealized images, sexual without being graphic, are a delicious throwback to simpler times, when there was no Internet and a naked woman wasn't just a click away. The arguably feminist images also scream of women's liberation at its earliest stages. And while ogling attractive females isn't really anything new, examining the brushstrokes that made them is surprisingly recent.

"This one man was able to gather up most everything and package it away and put it in storage units down in Florida where no one could see it. When he died in 2008, this collection was dispersed and suddenly all this pin-up art came on the market and could be photographed, could be seen, could be spread around. It was a tragic thing for him -- he died young -- but it was a wonderful thing for pin-up art and all its appreciators and collectors. This book really documents that dispersion -- of being able to see the original materials for the first time and make a book that treated it like fine art."

The topic of this post inspired by an e-mail from Carlos B.