Home : Time Off For Play : Recreation, Distractions & Diversions :

Pin-Up Art

Safe, Virtuous, Sexy And Unabashedly American

These images are part of a type of illustration art that first appeared toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The "pin-up" image was defined in, The Great American Pin-up, as:

... one that shows a full length view of it's subject and characteristically has an element of a theme or some kind of story. The woman in the pin-up is usually dressed in a form-revealing outfit ... Sometimes, a pin-up may be shown as a nude ...

During the late nineteenth century, magazine and periodical publishers discovered that people were more likely to read what they offered if they were accompanied by an illustration. The publishers also discovered that the cover art was important in capturing the customers attention and their money (many publishers still recognize this today).

Publishers recognized that they had to have "captivating" subjects on their covers to compete. They hired artists to paint these pictures. In order to secure a loyal following and secure new subscribers, the publisher had the artists prepare illustrations of the beautiful, sexy woman pin-up. It served both male and female consumers. The men could fantasize being with the sexy pin-up and the women could fantasize being a sexy pin-up.

When the major mainstream magazines supported pin-up art for front-page publication their popularity grew. As a consequence the images began to appear on art cards, calendars, advertising, pulp magazines and even military aircraft. By the mid-seventies publishers were turning to fashion and commercial photographers to fulfill their requirements. This was especially true with the calendar publishers. The calendars featured "super models" and fascinating locations and are considered to be a primary example of the current trend in the arts evolution.

A pin-up can represent whatever we love, want to love, or want to have. Any printed image that can be hung on a wall could conceivably be regarded as a pin-up, and in common usage the term extends even further — to pin-up images, for example, on playing cards, key chains, drinking glasses, cigarette lighters, and other objects that never reach the wall. In World War II, pin-ups frequently adorned the sides of tanks and aircraft as mascots or good-luck talismans. Thus, despite the literal meaning of the term, it is clear that the essence of a pin-up is not so much its physical form as its quality of image, the image most commonly being that of a person — particularly a sexually alluring woman.

The classic pin-up genre — cheesecake — fulfills our definition perfectly. Cheesecake (which Webster defines as "photography displaying especially female comeliness and shapeliness") is said to have gotten its name when, in September 1915, a newspaper photographer, George Miller, noticed a visiting Russian diva, Elvira Amaazar, just as she was debarking from her ship in New York. Miller asked the opera signer to hike up her skirt a little for the sake of his picture. Later, the photographer's editor, something of a gourmet, is supposed to have exclaimed, "Why, this is better than cheesecake!" The story, apocryphal or not, dates from an era that saw the birth of an international mode in illustration that still teases the eye, the libido , and the wallet of most men. It continues to thrive in the worlds of entertainment, publishing, and advertising and is used to sell almost everything, from ball bearings to ideas.

The cheesecake image is based on notions of teasing and allure — and frequently humor as well. But other styles of pin-ups have been used in association with a vast array of emotions, attitudes, pursuits, subjects, mediums: violence, satire, romance, eroticism, purity, fetishism, dance, drama, burlesque, aspiring stardom, sports, cartoons, comic strips, advertisements, domesticity, nature, nationalism, pacifism. Yet overall, erotic fantasy is the key to understanding all styles of the pin-up.

Many categories of image border on the pin-up: nude or erotic original art, comic strips, candid photography, technological illustrations and advertising. Although the pin-up depends for its success on a sexually evocative image, it should not be confused, for instance, with original nude or erotic art. The pin-up is a printed form, intended for general distribution to a large audience. An erotic painting or drawing may be, and often is, reproduced.

Many pin-ups do originate as drawings or paintings — for example, the Gibson, Petty and Varga girls and innumerable calendar subjects. These images are pin-ups simply because they are intended to be pin-ups — to be mass produced for the purpose of arousing sexual fantasy.

The classic cheesecake pin-up shows a curvy woman, sumptuous breasts exposed (or nearly exposed), posing coquettishly in a predictable, stylized setting — a bedroom, perhaps, or a studio, beach, or theatrical environment. There are in cheesecake endless variations of setting, pose, and anatomical emphasis. Cheesecake is the type of pin-up found most frequently in girlie magazines.

But Is It Art?

There's no reason not to be comprehensive about what we permit ourselves to consider as art. If you include illustration and design in art, then this falls in that category. It's simply a matter of how one perceives it and wishes to interpret it. And, isn't that what art is? To ponder the question is, itself, part of the experience. Consider the works of Vargas are probably worth from $10,000 to $75,000 each, those by Petty from $10,000 to $20,000, and the others $5,000 to $10,000 each. This is a very, very hot and strong sector of American art.

Rolf Armstrong

The father of the American pin-up, Armstrong came to fame in the 1920s. Rolf Armstrong was born in Seattle in 1899. He moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri.

After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.

During the 1920s and 1930s, his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines. Many stars posed for his portraits, including Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, and even Boris Karloff.

Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a cirulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best selling calendar artist at Brown and Bigelow.

In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line. Rolf Armstrong died on February 22, 1960, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Joyce Ballantyne

She was born in Norfolk, Nebraska just after World War I. She attended the University of Nebraska for two years, then transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago to study commercial art. After two years at the Art Institute, Ballantyne joined King Studios, where she painted Rand McNally maps and illustrated books for Cameo Press. She then moved to the Stevens-Gould Studio, where she remained for more than a decade. While at the studio, she became part of a group of artists that included Gil Elvgren, Al Moore, and Al Buell.

In 1945 Ballantyne began painting pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow, having been recommended by Gil Elvgren. While there, she designed direct mail pin-up brochures for the company, and was eventually given the honor of creating an Artist's Sketch Pad twelve page calendar. In 1954, Ballantyne painted twelve pin-ups for a calendar published by Shaw-Barton. Upon the calendar's release in 1955, demand was so great that the company reprinted it many times.

Ballantyne then went on to paint one of the most famous advertising images ever, when Coppertone suntan lotion asked her to create a billboard image. That image, of a pigtailed girl with her bathing suit being tugged down by a small dog, has become an American icon. Joyce Ballantyne eventually moved into the realm of portraits and fine art, painting the portraits of scores of entertainment and sports personalities as well as luminaries from the business, social, and academic worlds. Subjects included comedian Jonathan Winters, Robert Smalley of Hertz, and Major General John Leonard Hines, ret.

Jump to page:  [ 1 ]  [ 2 ]  [ 3 ]

Pin-Up Dreams: The Glamour Art of Rolf Armstrong The only comprehensive reference of Armstrong's pin-up art, this full-color illustrated book contains over 300 reproductions of the best of his dream-girl images from his 50-year career.

---

top of page

back a page