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!

Centrefold Venus of the Month: Review

Genesis, November 1973

We still get comments on previous Centrefolds of the Month and have had a lot of comments on old posts this month, so we thought it would be interesting (to us at least) to look at the source of the 29 Centrefolds of the month we have had so far; perhaps to inform the decisions we will take on what to have for the next half dozen or so.  We offer a selection of November centrefold girls we haven't shown before as decoration.

Playboy, November 1958

Actually, we have already decided on this month's entry (time is running out, though!) and some for the next few months but still have some leeway for other months into 2012.

Penthouse, November 1969

We confess to having three types of Centrefold of the Month posts.  Firstly, there is a major post on a young lady who we particularly appreciate.  Into this category we can put Carol Augustine, for example.

Knave, November 1983

 

Secondly, we have those ladies who have gone on to be rather more than just centrefold models and have a more interesting story attached to them.  A good example of this is Britt (Christina) Lindberg.

Mayfair, November 1990

 

Finally, we have those ladies who are chosen precisely because they may have had limited, or even only one, appearances in mens' magazines (such as Tamara Santerra) and so it is possible to just feature their centrefold pictorial without having to do lots of research on them and find other pictures.  If you see one of these it means that Triple P has had a particularly busy month! 

Fiesta, November 1985

Of course there will be all sorts of overlap where we get a centrefold we appreciate who also has an interesting story (such as Henriette Allais).  We have avoided the production of a Venn diagram!

Chic, November 1981

We have had a quick look at two factors, however: which magazine the girl's centrefold comes from and from which decade it appeared in.

Looking at the magazine source first, we can see that Penthouse has provided the majority of our featured centrefolds to date so, perhaps, we need to widen our selection a little bit in the coming months.  Twenty out of twenty-nine centrefolds come from Penthouse and Playboy.

As regards date well over half of our centrefolds have come from the nineteen seventies with around 25% from the sixties.  None from the nineties or tens yet.  We tend to be influenced, of course, by those we remember from the magazines at the time and also the fact that, in many ways, the seventies were the high point of mens magazines in many ways. 

Men Only, November 1984

Nevertheless, we should feature more from the eighties, which were nearly as good and where we also had a large number of magazines from that decade.  These were partly our own purchases but also were gifts from what would now be termed a bi-curious girlfriend whose choice in lingerie seemed very influenced by the boudoir look of the eighties. 

Hustler, November 1979

When we did our first Centrefold of the Month posts we did not, as we did later, include every picture from their original pictorial or add pictures we discovered from other sources, so we are going back and remedying this gradually.

Club, November 1977

Once this is done they will all be nicely indexed down the right hand side of the page.  Those entries that are now "complete" will have an identifying number next to them.

Playboy, November 2005

Although they are usually the most time-consuming posts we now do (the recent one on the Collinson twins took five weeks to assemble) they also continue to be, along with our Pubic Wars posts, the most popular on the blog so it is only right that the old ones are brought up to the same quality level as the new ones.

Venus Passing: Anneka Di Lorenzo

Triple P was sad to hear of the death of one of his favourite Penthouse Pets from the seventies Anneka Di Lorenzo.  Although she died in January this year the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has only recently (late last month) launched an appeal for information about her death.

Anneka Vasta

The fifty-eight year old, now known as Anneka Vasta, was found drowned on a beach with a broken neck and back close to Camp Pendleton in San Diego.  Investigators had trouble identifying her as her body was so youthful they initially thought that she was a teenager.  Her car was found on top of some sixty foot cliffs a mile away, parked after she had driven down from Los Angeles where she lived. The authorities do not have enough evidence to tell whether it was suicide (there were cuts on her wrists consistent with a half-hearted suicide attempt) or foul play.

She had been mentally fragile for some years, according to her sister, but her family do not believe she would actually have committed suicide and are worried that someone preyed on the friendly and trusting woman.

Anneka doing publicity work for Caligula in 1980

 

Anneka was born Marjorie Lee Thoreson in St Paul, Minnesota on August 25th 1952. She left school at the age of 14 and moved to California. She changed her name to Anneka Di Lorenzo and did a number of odd jobs becoming a nude dancer at a club. She saw Bob Guccione on TV and sent him some pictures of herself. He signed her up to be Penthouse Pet of the Month for September 1973 in a shoot photographed by Guccione himself in London. She became Pet of the Year for 1975 and was very visible in his film, Caligula (1979). She had small parts in other films too. Later she sued Guccione for $4 million for sexual harrasment and was awarded $4,060,000 damages but she only recived the $60,000 as Guccione appealed and won. She moved to Florida and married Philip Vasta.  They divorced and she moved back to California. She leaves a daughter in her twenties.

We will do a proper appreciation of her in the future, probably as Centrefold of the Month, which won't be until next September.

The NCIS case on Anneka Vasta remains open.  A sad end for such a beauty.

Centrefold of the Month and Pubic Wars Updates

Yvonne Ekman

Like Sibelius we are an inveterate revisor of previous work so are currently re-visiting some of our earlier Centrefold Venuses of the month.  These days, for our Centrefold of the Month feature, we always include every picture from the lady's pictorial but we didn't do this at the start.  We will be remedying this gradually.

The first revised and extended post is for August 1967 Penthouse Pet and former Miss Denmark Yvonne Ekman.

Kathy McKinnon from Oui August 1975

Likewise, we have extensively revised one of our Pubic Wars posts for 1975; dividing what was one post into two (the second part will appear shortly).  We will also be indexing all of our Pubic Wars posts (as they are the most popular on the blog) in the sidebar.

Venus from the Rear: Venus in tights

This picture, from a lingerie pictorial in the February 1992 edition, is one of our favourite Playboy images of all time.  In fact, the photograph, by Byron Newman, would probably make our list of top 50 pictures of women full stop.

It is a rare example of a picture that makes tights sexy but why else we respond to it so positively we are not sure.  It is cleverly composed, with the girl's legs and rear centred over the block of blue and yet the vertical black right hand area balancing the clear area to the left of the girl.  The stacked, vintage suitcases anchor the bottom of the composition whilst the girl's rear, trunk and head fill the top third, the two parts being linked by the slender legs and arm.  It has a limited four colour palette with just the vivid red on the lips bringing in a dash of a bright fifth colour.  The lips themselves mark the point where the edge of the black crosses the bottom of the top third of the picture.  The shoes are the very definition of fuck me stilettos (as our friend SA used to call her favourite pair) but the genius is the scalloped edges of the dark part of her tights covering her rear.

Jenny: equally attractive from the front.  From September 1990's World Cup pictorial

The model is Hong Kong born Jenny Szeto who had first appeared in Playboy for a pictorial themed on the World Cup in September 1990.  Playboy flew Byron Newman and eleven girls to Italy for their pictorial.  Where the Americans got the idea that Hong Kong was a football power we don't know!  Jenny was originally a physicist before giving it up to be a model.

A slightly more revealing shot was used by Playboy in their 1992 calendar, where Jenny was Miss December.

She is our first Hong Kong Venus!  Utterly irresistible!

Inspirational Venus: Ana Lima

Druuna

 

In our recent piece on the Italian comic book artist Serpieri we ventured that this picture (above) of his heroine Druuna was a fine example of the Italian female rear.  One of our knowledgeable readers, however, pointed out that Serpieri himself had said that he had based Druuna on a Brazilian Playboy Playmate.

Ana Lima

After some research we realised that she wasn't a Brazilian playmate from the US Playboy magazine but was a Playmate of the Month from Playboy Brazil which made the research a little more involved.

Nevertheless we tracked her down and here is Ana Lima in all her South American glory from Playboy Brazil's April 1989 issue.

Comparing the photograph and Serpieri's interpretation of it we can see just how much he has exaggerated her rear.  Not by too much, however, Miss Lima's rear is quite impressive enough in real life.

Agent Triple P has never been to Brazil (although that may change in January) and, other than the large number of Brazilian women working in wine bars and restaurants in London has had little interaction with them.

We did once go to to a Brazilian model's birthday party in Milan during Fashion Week.  We were taken there by our aristocratic Italian colleague M and his brother and we recall being outnumbered by models at this particular party by about seven to one.  Disappointingly, despite the event taking place in an excellent restaurant, the girls literally just poked at salads, chain smoked and drank Champagne.  Most of them were Brazilian and very few spoke any English or even Italian.

Agent Triple P can't stand a woman who doesn't eat properly, let alone one who chain smokes so despite the apparent interest of one of them (whose name, we are afraid, quite escapes us) we rather passed on our chance to explore her Brazilian charms more.  Instead we retired back to the Hotel Principe di Savoia with an Italian marketing girl who called herself "Bay-a-tray-chay" which we thought was a remarkably exotic sounding name until she wrote it down for us and we realised it was just "Beatrice".  Our Italian was still at a rather basic stage at this point!

It must be rather strange for Miss Lima to be the model for a comic book character who is often depicted getting tied up and explicitly ravished (the American versions of the comic books are often heavily censored).

We wonder whether she made any money out of being the inspiration for Serpieri's character.  Almost certainly not!

Any way we will leave you with a few more of Miss Lima from her Playboy appearance.

We were talking to some Brazilian people today and there were a number of striking looking Brazilian women amongst them, so we think we might have some more Brazilian Venuses soon!