Venus in handcuffs: Jane Birkin

We recently found these splendid pictures of Jane Birkin handcuffed to a bed and felt that they were worth posting.  Jane Mallory Birkin was born in Marylebone, London on 14th December 1946 but she was educated on Triple P's favourite place in Britain, the Isle of Wight.

From 1965 until 1968 she was married to James Bond composer John Barry but in 1968, following small parts in the films Blow-Up (1965)  and Wonderwall (1968) she auditioned for a role in the French film Slogan (1968). She won the lead role even though she didn't speak French.

Her co-star in Slogan was Serge Gainsbourg with whom she started a relationship that ended in 1980, although, she never really got over him and her grief at his death in 1991, effectively ended her subsequent relationship with film director Jacques Doillon.

These days Jane Birkin is much better known in her adopted home of France than in Great Britain. It could be argued that, outside France, she has never really been famous for anything other than being famous. Who, these days, has actually seen let alone enjoyed, her breakthrough film Blow-Up (1966): a now very dated period piece?

She has made quite a few films, mostly forgettable and, as a singer has recorded over twenty equally forgettable albums. No, her fame, for most people, is largely based on her rather dreadful performance in Serge Gainsbourg's self-indulgent and pretentious record Je t'aime... moi non plus.

Originally this, so-called, erotic single had been written by Gainsbourg for his then girlfriend Brigitte Bardot but after Bardot married Gunther Sachs she asked Gainsbourg not to release the version they recorded together.

Instead he recorded it with new girlfriend Jane Birkin, who had just split from John Barry. In fact Bardot's version is better and sexier than Birkin's but it was the Birkin version that was released, got itself banned in many countries and, therefore, whose success was assured.

Some of these pictures first appeared in Lui magazine (for whom she posed several times) in December 1974 but have also appeared in Oui.

Some year's later Birkin and Bardot shared a bed in Roger Vadim's film Don Juan (1973), which was famous mainly for being Bardot's last film.  In fact, the stills from the film are more famous and more effective than the rather dull and faintly bewildering production they came from.

Still, this is not to deny Birkin's gorgeousness in her prime as these pictures show. The combination of the iron bed, the stockings and the handcuffs is quite potent. Agent Triple P had a bed just like this for his first year in college and soon discovered that at least one young lady enjoyed being tied to it with the knotted rope that served as a fire escape from our rooms!

This particular girl liked to be tied up and locked in Triple P's rooms whilst he was sent off in search of chocolate. The trick was to keep the girl guessing as to how long it would be before he returned. Somwhere between twenty minutes and half an hour usually ensured the right amount of simmering time.

By Pompeo Posar for Playboy 1970

Once, we had tied her to the foot of the bed so that she was on our red lino floor rather than on the matress. Unfortunately, after acquiring the requisite chocolate we ran into an old school friend and his parents. They invited Triple P to tea and we didn't feel able to tell them that we couldn't go because we had a girl tied to our bed. By the time Triple P returned to his room, quite some time later, said girl had made a puddle on the lino. We didn't bother to untie her.

These pictures, with the simple black background, are by Pompeo Posar and come from an earlier set which appeared in Playboy in November 1970.

Splendid!

Centrefold Venus of the Month 10: Denise Johns

This month is the 45th anniversary of the first edition of Penthouse; which was first published in the UK in March 1965. This is the very first Penthouse Pet of the Month from that first edition: eighteen year old Denise Johns from Camden, photographed by publisher Bob Guccione himself.

Denise on her pictorial's title page

Guccione had overstretched himself on the first edition so much that he couldn’t afford a photographer. There was only one thing for it: he would have to take the photographs himself.

He had never taken any photographs before but believed that his experience as a painter would stand him in good stead. Nevertheless, he had to take a one day photographic course before he shot this pictorial.

Desperate for a model for his first edition, Guccione hung around outside a secretarial employment agency in the Kings Road in Chelsea asking likely looking girls if they would agree to be photographed for his new magazine.

Denise has a really lovely bust

After being rejected by a number of girls, who quite clearly thought that he was a pervert, he persuaded Denise to agree. Guccione was in a hurry, he was running out of money so when Denise turned up to be photographed in Guccione’s own flat, on a Rolleiflex borrowed from a friend, the session was over in 45 minutes.

Whilst this may have been good news for Guccione it was slightly bad luck for poor Denise as she was being paid on an hourly rate.

So for the privilege of being Penthouse’s very first Pet of the Month she received the princely sum of...4 pounds and 5 shillings. Worth every penny we would say: all one thousand and twenty of them!  In fact, while it sounds like a tiny amount, in 1965 a secretary was paid £5 a week!

Unable to afford fancy lighting, Guccione used the available light from his apartment window; thus developing a style he would use for many years and in complete contrast to Playboy’s huge team of technicians.

Cute but naughty

Note the red flowers in the background of Denise's centrefold. These would feature a lot in subsequent Penthouse pictorials (not the same flowers, obviously!)

Denise also featured in the fold-out flyer that Guccione had printed to attract subscribers before the first magazine was published.

Denise holds centre stage in the original promotional leaflet along with a number of other girls destined to be Penthouse Pets

He got into trouble for sending these "obscene" pictures to random people on a mailing list he had bought but the subsequent controversy didn't damage him at all!

Please, sir!

In fact the first edition of 120,000 copies sold out in five days. The first edition now sells on eBay for up to £80 a copy.

Gravity does delightful things to Denise's bust

The trendy graphics only lasted the one edition

In the first few issues the centrefold wasn’t the last image in the pictorial, there was another page afterwards. So here is our last look at Denise in, possibly, the sexiest shot of the lot. If any picture put down a marker to Playboy that there was a new approach in town then this was it: nothing girl next door about Denise here.

Red Flowers!

A year on Penthouse collected their first year's worth of Pets into one pictorial and we got this extra superbly tactile picture of lovely Denise and her lovely bust!

Redheaded Venus of the Week 3: Venus binding her hair by John William Godward

Venus binding her hair (1897)

This week's redheaded Venus is a rare nude by the last great Victorian Classicist, John William Godward (1861-1922). Many of Godward's pictures are instantly recognisable as they are now popular as prints and postcards but, like most Nineteenth Century Classical artists, he was ignored through much of the Twentieth Century. Godward's obscurity was compounded by the fact that he was rather reclusive, did not write or make declamations about himself and was seen, at best, as an imitator of "better" painters like Lord Leighton or Alma-Tadema. Even now, very little is known about his life and there is only one known photograph of him, as an infant.

The artist (right) with his mother, Sarah, and brother and sister Alfred and Mary.

Godward was born at home in Battersea on 9th August, 1861. His father worked in life insurance and Godward followed him into that profession. When Godward was young the family moved to Wimbledon (where Agent Triple P lived for a time as well-only about 500 yards from the Godwards' home!) and that was where he went to school. Living not far away was the architect William Hoff Wontner (1814-1881) and it seems that when Godward failed to take to life insurance his family felt that perhaps architecture might be a suitable profession instead. Whilst staying on at the insurance company Godward probably studied rendering and graining under Wontener between 1879 and 1881. Certainly this training would account for Godward's later amazing facility to paint marble, for which he would often use a feather rather than a brush. The earliest known painting by Godward, a portrait of his grandmother, appears about this time.

Godward's family probably never envisaged that he would want to become a painter but when Wontner died in 1881 his eldest son William Clarke Wontner, who was becoming a successful portrait painter at this time, may have taken over teaching Godward. Godward may well have then sudied at an art school in his free evenings: possibly The Clapham School of Art. When Wontner moved to a studio in St John's Wood, however, Godward would have come into very close proximity to the likes of JW Waterhouse, Sir Frank Dicksee and Edward Poynter; all well known Classical painters. Certainly his first exhibited work, The Yellow Turban (now lost), which appeared at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition in 1887 suggests an Orientalist theme, which was certainly an interest of Wontner's. However by this time he was already starting to do the Classically themed pictures for which he would become famous.

Unlike many other Classical painters, Godward's women actually look like they were born in the Mediterranean (the Venus, above, is a rare exception) and don't have the "English rose in a toga" look of so many of his contemporaries. One influence on the look of the women in his subsequent paintings was an introduction, through Whistler, of the famous artists' models, the Pettigrew sisters: Harriet, Lilian and Rose. They were gypsy girls from the West Country and were the most famous models in London at the time; sitting for Whistler, Poynter, Millais and Sargent.

Godward joined an artists studio in Gilston Road named the Bolton Studios where he was probably influenced by Henry Ryland who, when he left the Bolton studios, then shared a studio with Classical painter Herbert Draper. Unusually, nearly 40% of the artists at the Bolton Studios were women painters. The studio, as a result, developed a somewhat racy reputation; with rumours that some of the lady painters were earning a living in ways that weren't relating to their painting!

1 St Leonard's Studio is the low building on the right. We had our first Chinese on the roof terrace!

By this time Godward was becoming a reasonably well-known artist and established his own studio, for the first time, in 1889. This was at 1 St Leonard's Studio, Smith Street in Chelsea, where he painted many of his great early Classical pictures including The Betrothed; the first of his pictures to be put into a permanent collection. It was donated to the Guildhall Art Museum in 1916 where it reamins to this day. Agent Triple P has a meeting nearby tomorrow so may go along to have a look at it.

The Betrothed (1892) Another redhead

Agent Triple P actually went to a Fouth of July party at 1 St Leonard's Studio over twenty years ago and ended up with a rather luscious Chinese-American lady. Oddly, although we did talk about art, Triple P had no idea of the Godward connection at that point! The sleeping area was on a gallery overlooking the studio itself, an idea we have always quite fancied.

We will return to Godward in another post but to return to the redhead in question she was Godward's entry for the 1897 Royal Academy Summer exhibition; so ten year after his first exhibit there. She was one of Godward's largest paintings to date (90"x44") and an obvious attempt to emulate the grand Classical painters of the time. In truth, like most of Godward's nudes, she is not as successful as his clothed figures but she was given the place of honour in gallery VII at the exhibition.

Several of Godward's Summer Exhibition paintings at this time are generally agreed to have been unsuccesful. His previous year's entry was a similarly epic sized nude: Campaspe (1896) (Alexander the Great's mistress) which, whilst popular at the time has beenn heavily criticised since. Yet Godward persisted with these often clumsy epic paintings as he was desperate to become a Royal Academician, which would have offset the doubts as to the suitability of painting as a career to his disapproving father. These large Academic, in every sense of the word, paintings were intended to be Godward's key to being accepted at Burlington House. Unfortunately, Godward's withdrawn manner and lack of social skills meant, however, that he never got enough support in the Academy to achieve this.

Godward is one of Triple P's favourite artists but is still under-rated, even at a time whem Alma-Tadema and Leighton have been largely rehabilitated. Godward eventually came to a tragic end
which we will explore the next time we look at some of his more succesful female figures.

Pastel Venus: Reclining Nude by Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Reclining Nude (c. 1891) by Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Almost exactly a year ago, Agent Triple P was wandering around the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC accompanied by the lovely M. They came across this small pastel, tucked a way in a rather dark corner. Triple P grabbed a quick photograph so he could research the picture later. Fortunately, unlike the UK, Americans do not seem to have a problem with you taking photographs in their museums. Understandably, with some exhibits, they do not want the use of flash but you always get the feeling in British museums that the ban on photography is more to do with potential lost postcard revenue than protecting the art works.

The picture in situ

Thomas Wilmer Dewing was born in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts in 1851. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and later moved to New York. In 1897 he was one of the Ten American Painters who resigned from the Society of American Artists in protest at what they considered increasing commercialisation of that group's exhibitions. Ironically, the Society had itself broken away from the National Academey of Design twenty years previously. The group, who became just known as simply The Ten, painted their impressionist pictures for twenty years before the deaths of the members broke it up.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Dewing was very much a tonalist, an American movement whose most well known exponent was Whistler, who used the characteristic limited palette and misty style on figures, usually female, in cool interiors. He died in 1938.

Augustus Saint-Gauden's Diana (second version)

This nude is unusual in Dewing's catalogue in that it wasn't a study but was commisioned by architect and art collector Stanford White. After the unveiling of Augustus Saint-Gauden's Diana, which was designed as a weather vane for the White designed Madison Square Garden, people complained that it might corrupt passers by. It provoked yet another discussion in America about the nude and art. Possibly the cause of the ruckus was the sheer size of Saint-Gauden's original which stood over eighteen feet high. He and White later decided that it was too big for the building and so he designed a smaller (13 feet) version which replaced the first version. The large version was destroyed in a fire, after it had been moved to Chicago, but the smaller version is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (it was taken down when White's building was demolished in 1925) where Triple P saw it last year.

Too big a nude for New York (1st version)

Faced with the controversy over the Diana weathervane White, who was a friend of both Saint-Gauden and Dewing started to assemble a collection of all the nudes he could find in order to "shock all the straight laced persons in town" and it was at this point (probably 1891 when the statue was finished) that he commissioned the picture from Dewing.

A more conventional nude by Dewing

The soft and sensuous treatment of the figure is obviously designed for a private collection as it would have been far too shocking for American taste at the time. The girl's sinuous body catches the light on a completely abstracted background and is delicately rendered but her face, in shadow, is merely suggested. If White wanted a picture that was all about the body then Dewing certainly delivered!