When the crashing stock market tolled the death knell of the brash, baby-faced flapper, Peruvian-born Alberto Vargas had already spent a dozen years capturing on canvas the myriad charms of American beauties. His career began when a friend of Flo Ziegfeld spotted Vargas in the window of a New York typewriter shop, doing a portrait of a girl as a publicity stunt. During his decade-long association with the Great Showman, Vargas limned hundreds of fetchingly undraped young ladies for poster illustrations--a fine sampling of which appeared in the January 1964 issue of playboy. After Ziegfeld's death in 1932, Vargas headed for Hollywood, where he temporarily lent his talents to 20th Century-Fox. While there, he applied his ability to combine the feminine ideal with the charmingly real and produced distinctive studies of such film greats as Garbo (right); but as a man forever enchanted by beauty, he also continued to draw--and immortalize--such spritely unknowns as grace these pages. Perhaps reflecting the mood of the Depression, his girls of the Thirties are more subdued than his flappers. Caught in a charismatic haze, lounging in diaphanous gowns or silky step-ins, they've traded their ebullient Twenties enthusiasm for a quieter sophistication and a tantalizing hint of worldliness.
the forties
Black-listed by the film studios for joining fellow employees in a strike, Vargas returned to New York in the early Forties. He showed his work to Esquire--and, as Varga (the "s" was dropped by the editors), soon replaced Petty in the pages of that magazine. His outsized gatefolds and stunning calendar girls rapidly won him national prominence. Despite heavy editorial demands during World War Two--which called for a minimum of 36 paintings a year--his warm selflessness led him to design mascots for many Service units. And somehow in 1943 he found time to supervise the filming of Dubarry Was a Lady, in which the Varga calendar came to life. In keeping with the age of the sweater girl, Vargas' paintings now celebrated the charms of lovely creatures far more ample and robust than those of the Thirties--girls fittingly epitomized by his pensive study of Jane Russell (left).
the fifties
In the late Forties. Vargas' honeymoon with Enquire ended in divorce after bitter litigation. During the following decade, he found only sporadic work, primarily for advertising agencies--but his life was occasionally spiced by such pleasant free-lance assignments as his sultry portrait of Shelley Winters (below), used in a campaign to give her a sexier image. By the Sixties. Vargas had found a permanent home in Playboy's pages. Now living in California with his wife (a Ziegfeld model whom he sketched and later married in 1930), he continues to produce sensual beauties for each month's Playboy, a task that has yielded his best work and his greatest popularity in a half century of glorifying the American girl.
The sixties
