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Glamour Girls
Photography by
Michael Thad Carter
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Kate Moss and her waiflike, vacant-stare contemporaries don’t have a thing on Elvgren girls. Doe-eyed, confidently curvaceous, and often bearing mischievous come-hither grins, the women painted by renowned American illustrator and pin-up virtuoso Gil Elvgren from the 1930s through the 1970s are usually performing mundane domestic tasks, advertising particular brands, posing in a more natural setting, or—in a number of instances—having their skirts mysteriously blown up to garter-revealing heights.
That’s not to say that Elvgren’s paintings are trite or in any way boring. Known as the Norman Rockwell of pin-ups, Elvgren created, and perpetuated on a massive scale, a type of hyper-femininity that could be perfectly juxtaposed against America’s rather dismal national mood after the Depression, as well as during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. What GI wouldn’t find comfort in the sensuous warmth and simplicity of the domestic vignettes and advertisements populated by the women who sat for Elvgren?
Louis K. Meisel and Charles G. Martignette’s Gil Elvgren: The Complete Pin-Ups is a comprehensive compilation of the late artist’s work and includes a few previously unpublished images, among them one from 1957 titled Golden Beauty. Elvgren, known to some from his 30-year career with calendar publisher Brown and Bigelow, also had a longtime relationship with Coca-Cola, which guaranteed placement of his work on billboards across the country and the ensuing notoriety. Additionally, he contributed to campaigns for General Electric, Schlitz Beer, and Orange Crush. It was Brown and Bigelow, however, that gave him the means—increasing his pay after a few years to $2,500 per painting for two dozen per year—to move his family to a larger house in the suburbs of Chicago, where he set up a work studio. He achieved a level of fame that many artists would kill for. The painter Norman Rockwell, who struck up a friendship with Elvgren after they met at a Brown and Bigelow convention in 1947, envied Elvgren’s being paid to paint gorgeous women.
Elvgren’s story is, in many ways, as all-American as the women he immortalized on canvas. His parents owned a paint and wallpaper shop in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. After discovering his passion at an early age, he took art classes at the Minneapolis Art Institute. “He was determined and very focused and knew exactly what he wanted to do: be a great painter,” writes Martignette in the biographical sketch at the beginning of the book. He married a young woman named Janet Cummins and moved to Chicago to pursue his dream, enrolling at the American Academy of Art and cramming three and a half years of coursework into two years.
Although his pictures of women garner all the attention, Elvgren’s very first commission in 1936 was a shot of a handsome young man for the cover of a fashion catalog. The gentleman, looking rather pleased, is wearing a double-breasted jacket and white slacks. Most of Elvgren’s creations were on 30” by 24” canvas, he worked with 32 colors on his palette, and he rarely did preliminary sketches or drawings. His work was featured in McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping, but he was too busy to accommodate every offer that came his way. Some of the women he painted pose as cowgirls, others wear frilly dresses, ball gowns, or lingerie, and a few wear nothing at all. Where did Elvgren get his inspiration? Many of his ideas were the result of brainstorming sessions over dinner each night with his family.
Ten years in the making, Gil Elvgren: The Complete Pin-Ups covers about 98 percent of the artist’s pin-ups and glamour shots; he produced more than 500 paintings from the mid-1930s through 1972. Elvgren’s skills shine through in the nuances of each picture, from the lighting and composition to the background and color choices. In most cases, the authors photographed the original paintings or well-preserved copies. Even if you’re not a fan of this old-style glamour, you have to admire the artistic skills involved and the particular aesthetic that Elvgren evinced—one that has been admired and emulated all over the world. Like any artist, Elvgren took creative license, once telling an interviewer who asked about his technique that he “built up the bust, lengthened the legs, pinched in the waist, gave the body warmer and more attractive curves . . . made the mouth fuller and more sensuous and the eyes a bit larger.” Some things never change.
Gil Elvgren: The Complete Pin-Ups, by Louis K. Meisel and Charles G. Martignette, Taschen, 2008. 272 pp. $14.99.