Here
are some of America's sweethearts, the American dream girls -
sultry, sexy, glamorous but chaste - the calendar and magazine
girls that permeated every aspect of life in the United States
and the free world from the 1930s to the 1960s. Although living
pin-up starlets and celebrities such as Betty Grable and Rita
Hayworth filled the movie magazines and film screens, it was the
hundreds of millions of printed pin-ups that decorated walls,
wallets, lockets and lockers that truly captured the spirit of
the American pin-up.
While the origins of the pin-up can be found in the works of Gibson
and Christy and in the early works of Armstrong and Vargas, it
was only in the 1940s during the Second World War and shortly
thereafter that the pin-up evolved into the girl we nostalgically
long for today.
Gil Elvgren was the finest and most imaginative artist in his
genre and heads the group of artists who were most effective in
portraying this ideal of femininity. He is joined here by his
friends and colleagues Earl Moran, George Petty, Art Frahm,
Peter Driben and others. An interesting note is that some of the
best and most famous of the pin-up artists were women, led
by Zoe Mozert.
All of the artists herein have captured the essence of this art
form by understanding what one of the earliest champions of the
pin-up, "King" Arthur, called " pose, clothes and
expression".
