Seaside Venuses by Pearl Frush

Here is a rare nude from Pearl Frush, one of America's top female pin-up artists.  It was probably painted around 1940.

Peal Frush was born in Iowa but her family moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi when she was small. She travelled to New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia to study art.  Her main training came at the Chicago Art Institute, however.  

She opened her first studio in Chicago in the early forties and by the fifties was a top female pin-up artist working for calendar companies such as Gerlach-Barlow and Brown & Bigelow.  This picture is from Gerlach-Barlow's Aquatour series calendar from 1947; a best seller in its time.

She worked mainly in watercolour and gouache and her paintings have a very polished quality.  Not surprisingly many of her girls were to be found at the beach in their swimsuits.  

Her backgrounds were often painted as deliberately out of focus, not just to emphasise the figure but also to fool the eye in to thinking that they were possibly photographs.

Outside of her painting Frush was a sporty sort of woman enjoying tennis, sailing swimming and canoeing.  It's not surprising therefore that her pin-ups exude a sort of healthy, outdoorsy quality. 

Although she did do some boudoir style work it is these sorts of images for which she was best known.

Unlike Elvgren's hopelessly impractical girls who can't undertake the most basic of activities without flashing their underwear Frush's women look perfectly capable of changing the tyre on their cars on their own if they had a puncture on the way to the beach.

Her girls are perfectly wholesome and exude none of the slutty gold-digger sexiness of Vargas' girls.

They really were, in a pre-Playboy world, the epitome of the girl next door; provided the girl next door to you was really pretty and had killer legs.

Pin-up Venuses by J Frederick Smith

From Sappho The Art of Loving Women

Over on our Seduction of Venus blog we have just posted some photographs of girls kissing by J Frederick Smith.  These are from his book Sappho The Art of Loving Women (1975) which Agent Triple P acquired in one of those discount, remaindered book shops many years ago.  They weren't the first photographs we had seen of women interacting with each other erotically but they remain some of the most tender and romantic we have seen.

Interestingly, Smith turned to photography comparatively late in life and his early pictorial work was as an illustrator; becoming one of the top pin-up artists of the post-war period.  We can't think of another artist who moved on from illustration to becoming a top-class photographer in this way.  

Smith was born in Pasadena in 1917 and by the age of three had posed and drawn his first naked girl; who was also three.  As a teenager he won a three year Walt Disney scholarship to study fine art and design.  He moved to  Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1938 and opened his own studio doing freelance commercial work.   Even at this point he was including glamorous women in his advertising illustrations.

After a break for army service during World War 2 he returned to work as an illustrator, providing pictures for many magazine stories.   

It was his relationship with Esquire, however, that gave him the most recognition.  Esquire (founded in 1933) included Smith as one of the top pin up artists chosen to provide illustrations for their Gallery of Glamor series in 1946. 

Cleopatra

Baroness Mary Vetsera from the Mayerling tale

Mary Vetsera again.  We are not sure about the authenticity of her lingerie and, in reality, she had a rather podgy face not the sculpted beauty of Smith's version

Empress Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian (he of the dreaded Institutes)

He not only produced these pictures and the pin-up centrefolds for the magazine but often produced longer, themed pictorials illustrating, for example, famous women from history; all of whom seemed to be falling out of their clothes.

Springtime (1946)

Given the modest nature of Esquire's pin up girls (and Smith's were more modest than some of his contemporaries, such as Gil Elvgren) he nevertheless managed to get an erotic charge into them by revealing unexpected parts of his girls anatomy like these two effective upskirt pictures, which manage to make an erogenous zone out of the underneath of the girls' thighs.

His girls are very classic, they don't look particularly nineteen forties although his style changed over the decades and whilst he moved on to photography he carried on doing illustrations as well into the eighties.

Three from the 1947 Esquire Calendar

May from Esquire's 1948 calendar

Needless to say his illustrations soon started to appear in Esquire's famous calendars as well as the magazine itself.

In 1952 his agents, American Artists, signed a deal with the Chicago-based Brown & Bigelow Calendar firm.  Several Esquire artists teamed up to provide pictures for their 1953 ballyhoo calendar.  Smith provided three gouache paintings for this, two of which can be seen above.  We have to say that the girl with the record player is Agent Triple P's favourite of all those that appear here.

Smith was particularly good at pictures involving groups of figures, as we shall see in some of his illustrations for women's magazines in a future post, but these two examples of girls on the beach and changing demonstrate his eye for composition.

In the next few days we will look at some of his equally elegant photographs.

Showgirl Venuses 1: Folies Bergere by Alain Aslan

Agent Triple P appreciates a good showgirl, those be-sequinned, feather-plumed examples of statuesque loveliness that decorate the stages of Paris, Las Vegas and elsewhere, bringing glamour and style (as well as the ability to support often very big headresses) to brighten our lives.

What better way to start this series than with two examples by French artist Alain Aslan for the Folies Bergère.  This famous Parisian music hall was founded in 1869 with a design based on the Alhambra in London.  Unlike the Alhambra, which was demolished in 1936 to make way for the famous Odeon Leicester Square cinema, the Folies Bergère still exists and still puts on shows.

Its future, however, was not looking so bright back in 1974 when former Folies showgirl Hélène Martini took over the direction of the place and ensured its continuation to the present day.  The fact that these posters have Martini's name on them helps us to date them.  We believe that at least one, if not both, are from 1977.

Alain Aslan (b 1930) is probably France's greatest pin-up artist famous not only for his paintings for Lui and Oui magazines but also his sculptures of French national icons.  Currently living and working in Quebec, Canada, we will look at his work more extensively in the future.

One interesting conceit of these pictures is that whilst the feathers immediately say "Showgirl" they are, in fact, just an abstracted background design and not part of her costume.

Calendar Venus: Eve from 1938

Quite often we are struck by an image for its immediate impact despite not knowing anything of its origins and this is the case with "Eve" here.  We know it dates from 1938 and a little research has shown that it originated from the Joseph C Hoover and Sons print publishers company of Philadelphia (a fine city where Triple P spent an enjoyable week a couple of years ago).  The name on the piece, VP Wright, under the copyright notice, would not be the artist but the employee of the company who registered the image for copyright purposes.

Joseph Hoover was actually a native American and started out as a picture framer in Philadelphia in 1856. Soon he was producing prints, initially for other publishers. In 1885 he set up a complete printing plant and by the end of the century was producing nearly three quarters of a million prints a year.  By the thirties they were producing calendars including ones featuring pin ups such as this.

Eve is an elegant composition with the pose, chair, abstracted background and colouring typical of late Art Deco.  The use of chiaroscuro is unusual in pin-up pictures of the time but here is used beautifully to define the woman's form. 

An altogether splendid image!

Hallowe'en Venus by Bill Layne

Here is a knowing young witch-lady for Hallowe'en, for all those that celebrate it.  The artist, Bill Layne (1911-2005), spent many years working on backgrounds for Disney films including such classics as Sleeping Beauty, Mary Poppins and Jungle Book.

He also did work for calendar publishers Brown & Bigelow (who supplied most of Playboy's initial centrefold photos) and this picture appeared as the October picture in the 1966 Esquire Calendar.

Apart  from his Disney and pin-up art a lot of his paintings appeared on childrens jigsaw puzzles, particularly in the nineteen fifties.

More ladies by Leone Frollo

We have shown a few pictures by Italian artist Leone Frollo over on our Seduction of Venus blog.  This week we watched the Tinto Brass directed film Così fan tutte (1992) (we will feature it in Films of the Week over on our Adventures of Triple P blog shortly) which is, like most of his films a hymn to womens' posteriors.

Whilst watching it we were reminded of Frollo's approach to erotic art which shows a similar fascination for the female rear.

This is a fascination, we have to admit, which Triple P shares and it is interesting to note that our particular friend B (who provides quite a lot of input and suggestions for this site) ventured to us, in Istanbul recently, that she was surprised that there weren't more bottoms here!

Like Signor Brass and Signor Frollo (presumably) Agent Triple P has spent a lot of time interacting with Italian girls over the years (not so much now, sadly) and admits to finding their posteriors particularly splendid (Ilaria, Paola, Beatrice, Tiziana, Carola, Maria Fernanda and some, sadly, whose names we have forgotten).

Is it an Italian thing?  Is it the pasta?  Is it the way that they walk?  Who knows?  We now need more Italian ladies on this site; especially shown from the rear!

Happy Hallowe'en: Witch Venus by Gil Elvgren

The celebration of All Hallows Eve in the UK has increased enormously over the last decade.  When Agent Triple P was a child it was not marked at all.  Indeed Triple P remembers being invited to a Hallowe'en party in Banff in Canda in 1994 and still finding it odd as a peculiarly North American thing.  After all, we have Guy Fawkes night in the UK.  Sadly, the latter is falling out of fashion in the UK due to health and safety concerns over the public letting off large amounts of explosives willy nilly (alright, we know that gunpowder is not technically an explosive) and politically correct notions that burning effigies of Catholics is perhaps not acceptable. 

Anyway, we will be in an Arabian country this evening so we are sure that there will be no Hallowe'en antics at our hotel and certainly no costumes as fetching as S's belly dancing one from that first Hallow'en party in 1994.  So we will just leave you with this nice Gil Elvgren witch and note that she isn't  a real witch as her broomstick is suspended on wires!

Pin Up Venuses: Sailor girls by Gil Elvgren

Sitting Pretty (1953)

There haven't been any updates from Agent Triple P of late as he is undertaking his annual trip to Cowes for Cowes Week. Internet access is patchy (to say the least) from a yacht so we won't risk long postings. However, we will be posting a few suitably nautical young ladies over the next few days.

Firstly, here are a fine brace on the same theme from Gil Elvgren.