The Vargas Girl

More Commercial Artists than you can shake a No. 6 brush at have set themselves the task of lauding the American female at the drawing board – to the everlasting delight of the American male. Men's tastes change, however – in architecture, theatre, the gin-to-vermouth ratio of a Martini, and especially in women. The be-bustled serenity of Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl, everybody's sweetheart during pre-World War I days, bowed to John Held, Jr.'s baby-faced, dynamite-hipped, rouge-kneed flapper, so popular during the Jazz Age that live young ladies patterned themselves after Held's drawings in both looks and demeanor. In the Thirties, George Petty bequeathed to U.S. art lovers his pert-busted, longstemmed Petty Girl and (we understand) invented the telephone. The Forties belong to Alberto Vargas and his Vargas Girl – and we'll concede him the Fifties, too, if pressed. Actually, however, artist Alberto Vargas has been dedicated to the delineation of American beauty for two generations.

The Vargas Girl has not always looked the same, and herein lies her secret of longevity. When she first appeared a full 40 years ago, she had some of the pristine elegance of the Gibson Girl; in the Roaring Twenties, she bared her breasts (fashionably small: 32B) with all the roguishness, if not the wit, of one of Held's angels; in the Thirties and Forties, she took on some of the airbrushed slickness popularized by Petty. But in her final form – seen for the first time in the original, full-color figure studies on these five pages – the Vargas Girl possesses something more than the sum of her perky parts: she is Anatomical Perfection, put together in a way certain to set the most unfeeling amongst us aquiver and amumbling in our Martinis.

The creator of all this pleasing pulchritude is a mustached Latin who, though he is past 60 today, looks much the same as the 20-year-old who arrived in New York City in 1916, fresh from school in Switzerland. Alberto was on his way back to his native Peru to work in his father's photographic business and was only supposed to be stopping over in the U.S. between boats. But as he walked through Manhattan at noontime, the streets filled with the girls of the city – office workers, clerks, secretaries – all hurrying somewhere for lunch. "Girls, girls, girls," Vargas still remembers happily, "I had never seen so many beautiful girls." Alberto, for some reason, never quite managed to make that boat to Peru.

Instead, he set himself to sketching the beautiful girls of New York. He had always liked to draw and the editors of the city's papers liked what he drew and purchased some of his work. Thereupon, Alberto Vargas declared himself a full-fledged artist and to prove it, hired himself a full-fledged agent. One of the agent's other customers was the Corona Typewriter Building on 42nd Street, and it was the agent's solemn duty to arrange fascinating window displays to rivet the attention of passers-by. Why not a mock artist's garret in the window? For that purpose the agent ransacked Vargas' small studio, filling the Corona window with easel, brushes, paints and canvases. Something more was needed, however: the artist and his model. Vargas' first assignment from his new agent was to put on the traditional beret and knee-length artist's smock, and paint – right in the window – a girl attired fetchingly in a Spanish shawl. Traffic came to a standstill outside the Corona Building and among the passers-by that afternoon was showman Florenz Ziegfeld, who became intrigued by the idea of an artist stopping traffic mid-day in Manhattan. He left his card with a note asking Vargas to come and see him.

Ziegfeld commissioned Vargas to paint a series of posters of his fabulous showgirls and the artist learned a great deal about real feminine beauty from the famous producer. "One afternoon not long after I started working for him, Ziegfeld had over 500 girls standing in the wings of the theatre," Vargas recalls, "each one wearing a number. They paraded before him, five or six at a time, and he just sat there, nodding once in a while to his secretary to, 'Take that one's number.' When he was all through, he'd chosen no more than five or six and I couldn't understand it, because as far as I was concerned, many of the girls he had passed by were more attractive than those he'd picked."

Vargas asked Ziegfeld about that and was told: "The girls I have chosen here this afternoon have an inner spark – a beauty that comes from beneath the surface. I can change the rest – with makeup and hair styling and costumes, but the inner beauty – this the girl must have herself." The words made a considerable impression on the young artist and Vargas determined to try and capture the same inner spark in his painting.

He worked with Ziegfeld until the showman's death in 1932, then accepted an offer from Hollywood to paint portraits of the stars for the old Fox Studio. Vargas followed Petty into the pages of Esquire in the early Forties. The granddaddy of the men's magazines dropped the s from the Vargas signature and put his work on giant gate-folds, calendars and cards. Work for other magazines followed, advertising illustrations and then a return to Hollywood and more movie work.

The Peruvian prefers to capture his American beauties in the wholly nude and add clothing later, as required. He insists this is the only way of getting the anatomy just right. Despite this pleasant approach to his work, the Vargas Girl has never been allowed to appear in public in the altogether until now – a tight fitting evening gown, a brief bathing suit or a gossamer negligee always having been added after the fact. These are the first, full-color nudes by Vargas ever published and they are among a number of figure studies being prepared by the artist for a forthcoming book on art and the Vargas Girl.

Alberto Vargas has painted beautiful women for the past 40 years and he has specific ideas about the Girl of the Future, too. On his drawing board, the Eve of tomorrow is dressed in a golden vine; she holds an apple of temptation for some future Adam, and a lariat for roping him in. At a time when many a prophet is predicting a grim Orwellian future for the human race, we find the Vargas forecast both cheerful and cheering.

Alberto Vargas sketching The Vargas Girl.

During the Roaring Twenties, Vargas painted this portrait of Nita Naldi, sultry vamp of the silent screen. He is currently back in Hollywood applying a brush to a fresh crop of budding stars.

A bare-bosomed lobby poster Vargas did for Ziegfeld was a sign of the times during heyday of the Follies.

The Vargas Girl, circa 1918, was a far cry from The Vargas Girl of today. This early pen-and-ink drawing, titled The Indiscreet Leaves, was considered pretty daring four decades ago.

Vargas looks ahead: aware of man's changing tastes in woman, the personable Peruvian has painted the pinnacles of pulchritude past and present, offers herewith a peek at the Girl of the Future.