Albert Vargas & The "Vargas Girls"
Kishor Gordhandas
31 July 2008, 23:40Today Alberto Vargas (1896-1982) is considered as the pre-eminent Pin-up artist of his era. No illustrator of the twentieth century is more associated with the creation of images of beautiful women than Vargas. Through a combination of his own brilliance and exceptional press agentry, Vargas has eclipsed both the great artists, George Petty, a household name and Gil Elvgren, the Blue Collar Pin-up master.
The Varga Girl is the eternal Pin-up: alluringly beautiful, yet simultaneously warm, innocent and approachable. During the 1940s, she enchanted and motivated thousands of American soldiers before the post-war age spelled her demise. However her appeal still endures today, and her unique place in American popular culture has made her a collector’s item. The Pin-up is a particularly American art form, an offshoot of the calendar girl, born when World War II soldiers tacked up on barrack walls images of girls back home, from their sweeties, Hollywood Starlets, to idealized lovelies drawn by the likes of Gil Elvgren, Earl MacPherson, Zoe Mozert, Earl Moran, George Petty and Alberto Vargas.
Alberto Vargas was born on February 9, 1896 in Arequipa, Peru, the country’s second largest city. His father, Max, was an internationally successful photographer with studios in Arequipa and La Paz, Bolivia. Alberto began drawing at the age of seven and travelled with his father to Europe, where he studied. When he wound up in New York city at the age of 19, Alberto saw modern young women smartly dressed and as gorgeous as the showgirls of Paris. Their silk-stockinged legs whisking sensually as they hurried to grab a bite of lunch. And he was forever in love.
His idealized image of a beautiful woman was rooted in Parisian ideals. On a trip as a youth to France with his father, Alberto became inspired by Raphael Kirchner, cover artist of La Vie Parisian. But the fashionable attired office girls he saw in downtown Manhattan encouraged him to combine notions of European romance with an all-American girl-next-door reality. First, Vargas toiled as a fashion illustrator and as a freelancer in the other forms of commercial illustration. His major break was doing a series of lobby paintings for stage impresario Florence Ziegfeld’s latest production – and a twelve year relationship began with the master showman. Vargas painted not only showgirls but also comedy stars such as Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields. During this period he met showgirl Anna Mae Clift, who became his wife and partner for life. He first met her in 1917. A native of Tennessee, she came to New York to be a showgirl, and posed for him without pay.
When Ziegfeld took his combination of glamour and comedy to Hollywood, Vargas came along, providing artwork and advertising materials for the film version of “Glorifying the American Girl”. While he continued to create Ziegfeld Follies artwork, Vargas began a relationship with Paramount Pictures. Throughout the rest of the 1920s and the 1930s, moving his home base to Hollywood, the illustrator created artwork for other studios as well, including Twentieth Century Fox, MGM and Warner Brothers.
By the end of 1930’s the demand for Vargas’ artwork came from an unexpected source. The daring, literate, men’s magazine Esquire was looking for a replacement for their superstar pin-up artist, George Petty. Petty’s contract was due to expire in 1941 and the robust artist was well aware of the fame of his “Petty Girls”. He wanted a raise. A big one. Vargas was the perfect choice to follow George Petty as Esquire’s regular pin-up and calendar-girl artist; but Petty was the super star. His sleekly airbrushed beauties having taken root in American popular culture. The “Petty Girl” was featured not only in Esquire, but in ads for cigarettes, beer, ladies’ undergarments and mattresses. Still Vargas’ unique melding of European sophistication with all-American beauty, set Vargas apart from his American born-and-bred competition. There was an ethereal quality about his women, a poetry to his delicate water colour style, that made his pin-ups at once erotic and romantic. A “Petty Girl” was cute – an Elvgren gal beautiful- but Vargas specialized in loveliness.
Alberto Vargas signed his first contract with Esquire Magazine on June 1940, and his first “Varga Girl” illustration was published in the October issue of the magazine. Just prior to publication of the first “Varga Girl” Esquire Publisher David Smart asked painter Alberto Vargas if it would be okay to drop the “s” in Vargas because he thought “Varga Girl” sounded better. Vargas did not want to jeopardize his new relationship with Smart because he needed income, and he did not think that the matter was all that important. He agreed to the seemingly small change – a decision he would later regret. As the first painting was being prepared for the engraver, orders were given to remove the “s” in Vargas, and a legend was created.
In 1941, the “Varga Girl Calendar” was priced at 25 cents and sold only by mail order, but to everyone’s surprise 320,000 copies were sold. In 1942, Esquire published special editions for distribution to US troops stationed overseas. By 1946, sales of the Calendar were almost three million! The fame of Esquire, Vargas, and the “Varga Girl” grew extensively during 1942, 1943 and 1944, and Vargas’ technical command continued to progress. In order to compete with George Petty, who was working with True Magazine in 1945, at the close of 1945, in a nine-month period, Vargas finished the entire 1946 Calendar and four Magazine Gatefolds. “Varga Girl” was quickly embraced by the male membership. With her generous curves and long, slender legs, she was more conventionally beautiful than the “Petty Girl”, who had large legs and small breasts.
The “Varga Girl” may not have inspired men to wander the globe, but she did send them to their local news-stands. The circulation jumped, and the magazine was flooded with letters celebrating the new feature. From 1942 until 1946, Vargas toiled, his popularity soaring with the keen response from servicemen – it was the soldiers and sailors and flyboys who gave Vargas his real boost. Like Petty, Vargas often used swimsuits, gowns, and negligees to (barely) costume his subjects. And at times he openly aped Petty – the standard “Petty Girl” telephone prop, complete with crayon-ish wire, can be seen in theApril 1941 calendar image. The 1947 Esquire Calendar had a new designation, “The Esquire Girl,” because of a conflict between Alberto Vargas and Esquire Publisher David Smart over the ownership of the name “Varga Girl”. The conflict resulted in a lawsuit, which Esquire won in 1950.
The end result of the lawsuit was that Vargas lost all rights to the “Varga Girl” name, and he had to sign his legal name, Vargas, when signing the artwork. Throughout the Esquire years, Vargas continued to work for Hollywood studios. Subjects whom he painted included Marlene Dietrich, Betty Grable, Vivian Leigh, Ava Gardner, Jane Russel, Marilyn Monroe and others. Now signing himself “Vargas”, the artist attempted to market himself with limited success – a smattering of Hollywood Artwork, a set of Vargas Playing Cards, some pin-ups for True Magazine, and a pocket-sized British publication called Men Only.
After his wife, Anna Mae, Vargas’ most popular model during the “Varga Girl” years was Jeanne Dean, a fifteen-year-old teenager who came to the first meeting with Alberto chaperoned by her mother. In addition to her figure, Dean brought with her a head of sensational red hair. Vargas began each painting with a series of small, very rough sketches. He would sketch directly onto 24” X 36” tracing paper. He would then refine the sketch. If he had serious doubts about anatomy, Vargas would call a model to verify what he had drawn. Models also helped him determine how light struck the body. After Vargas painted flesh and hair, he began work on details and props. His primary rule for costume and props was to always begin with the lightest shade of grey, even if that particular area was eventually to become black. He used variety of media in this process- Mongol Pencils, Conti Carre’s sanguine and brown chalks, and Kohinoor Sepia and Symphonie water colour tablets for lips and eyes. “As for brushes, I use nothing but the very best sable.” Vargas said. According to Reid Austin, Vargas biographer, he did not compromise with brushes and claimed that the water colour was the easiest medium to work with “if you take your time and do not panic.”
Varga’s style was so famous that even magazines other than Esquire wrote about his work. The New Yorker said that Vargas was “an artist who could make a girl look nude if she were rolled up in a rug.” One quality of the “Varga Girl” that makes her different from just about any other pin-up is a lack of direct eye contact. Just about every other pin-up looks directly into the eye of the beholder, while many “Varga Girls” gaze dreamily into space. As the fame of the “Varga Girl” grew, the artist began receiving an extraordinary amount of fan mail. Approximately 25 percent of the letters were from women wanting to know how to project a particular look or image.
As far back as the 1920s, Vargas prophesied what the proportions of the future ideal American woman would be. He painted an image that was taller, slimmer and stronger, compared with the ideal of the 1920s. The Varga Girl had a height of 5’ 7”, weight of 124 pounds and measurements of 37”- 24” and 36”. These familiar proportions are considered by many to be ideal today also. When Vargas left Esquire in a cloud of acrimony, the artist set out to publish his own calendar. His old bosses – who were publishing their own calendar of “Varga” images,- sued, claiming ownership of the artist’s name (The Varga Version)… and won.
In 1957, Playboy, the upstart competitor to Esquire, a sexier, less stuffy variation bootstrapped to success by former Esquire staffer Hugh Hefner, did a seven-page layout of Vargas Nudes, using images the artist had been creating in down times since the late 1930s.
Hefner’s new frankness, gatefolds of nude women, only photographs, not illustrations — spelled the death knell for the painted pin-up, which seemed quaint compared to photos of the genuine article. But Hefner, a cartoonist himself, loved painted pin-ups. And Hefner, found a place for Alberto Vargas. This high-profile venue not only paid Vargas,’ bills, it paved the way for elevating him into the best-known of the pin-up artists. And Vargas’ work appeared in Playboy for the next two decades.
Vargas’ marriage, although childless, was very strong, and it has been said that there is a little of his wife, Anna Mae, in every Varga Girl. Model Jeanne Dean recalled that their closeness was “like one person.” After 44 years of marriage, Anna Mae died in 1974, and Alberto plunged into a depression that lasted for five years. Alberto Vargas died in Westwood, California, on December 30, 1982.
Though the Esquire years ended acrimoniously— the magazine treating Vargas no better than George Petty— those were the golden years of Vargas’ work, the body of work for which he will be most remembered. Vargas did the near impossible: he was able to step in and fill the shoes of a popular culture super star like George Petty, only to eventually surpass him in the public’s eye. Only an artist with the technical skills and the poetic soul of Alberto Vargas could have done so. The San Francisco Art Exchange, more than any other institution, deserves credit for helping to sustain interest in Vargas’ work. In addition to exhibiting and selling Vargas’ originals from various periods of the artist’s life, the gallery has successfully marketed limited edition prints of the Esquire paintings. (The originals are housed in the Helen F. Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas.)
In his best works, Vargas’ artistic passion shines through. And when we come upon these works, we cannot escape the conclusion that Vargas was an artist of brilliant vision. The Pictures/Cards accompanying this article are evidence of that brilliance.
Comment
Leonardo Da Vinci And The Mona Lisa As Playing Cards A Great Photographer Came To India
please our studio information send (our working,eligiblity, etc.)
— pardeepkumar · Nov 12, 18:17 · #
In what 1947 True Magazine did an airbrush portrait of Linda darnell appear??
— Mike · Dec 10, 04:39 · #