Vargas

Pinup art. The phrase has become quaint, like "cheesecake" and "sweater girl"--souvenirs of World War Two, that strange time of mingled innocence and atrocity. "Skin magazines" have retired the pinup girl; insofar as she survives, she belongs to the photographer. After all, the lens doesn't lie: The girl was really there, in her partial or total undress. Yet there is a sensuality and poignancy to drawn and painted images of women that the unblinking, unthinking camera cannot match. Each line, each curve and highlight has passed through the eyes and hands of the painter.

The model has been caressed, stroke by stroke, into being. The photograph is a capture that can be brutal and unfeeling; the graphic artist slowly conjures up his subject, and the excitement of his close, not to say avid, attention rubs off on the viewer.

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chavez, who signed himself Alberto Vargas, was born in Peru, and a certain Latin gallantry flavors his glamourization of lean yet soft-bodied beauties. Vargas' famous rival in pinup art, George Petty, turned out mannequins: His girls have no internal organs, no fertility, no vulnerability. Vargas' art began in the Twenties with his illustrations for the Ziegfeld Follies, which sheath the female form in feathers and fantasy. The early Vargas Girl depicted on page 124 sports wings as well as a Louise Brooks hairdo. Vargas persuaded some of his showgirl models to pose in more nudity than could be accommodated in the public press, and he married one of them, Anna Mae Clift. She and Vargas remained married until she died in 1975. His harem was on paper.

In the Thirties Vargas painted movie posters, and in the Forties his work began to appear in Esquire. Vargas' women wear high heels and are frequently talking on the telephone. Who are they talking with? Not to their tax accountants, to judge from the expressions on their faces. The telephone as erotic instrument--the sanitary distance it imposes while permitting a mouth-to-ear intimacy--is one of the essential discoveries of pinup art. Another is the arousal factor of partial clothing.

Total nudity is a confrontation; semi-undress is a flirtation. A Vargas Girl almost never has bare feet, and when she does, we view her with quite a different set of feelings: She becomes a kind of goddess, and breathes the chilly air of Mount Olympus. More typically, the Vargas Girl breathes the perfumed air of her own boudoir, where we discover her in a state of advanced dishabille.

Some of his tousled blondes seem to have been "roughed up," like a film noir sweetheart of Bogart's or Cagney's. The tough blonde, from Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe, is a perhaps specifically American ideal--the woman who can "take care of herself." This care can assume the form of a masturbatory ecstasy that leaves her breasts in her own competent hands, or of gold-digging that has produced a serious diamond necklace, or of toting a gun. Vargas (concluded on page 235) Vargas (continued from page 128) spoke of his creations as "dream girls," and part of their dreamy unreality is their solitude on the page, their evident independence. Whatever they need us for, it is not to take care of them--to house them or to be a father to their babies. They are women in their moment of invitation; the confusing, wearying party of life is in the future.

Vargas began with the lean flapper ideal: lithe types with small bosoms and narrow hips. The ever-so-slight silken fall of the up-tipped handful of breast is where his early art is most honestly erotic--there, and in the almost touchingly angular fannies of his hard-dancing chorus girls. The phenomenal mammary bloom of the cushioned Fifties and Sixties, and the hip flare to balance it, overtook the Vargas Girl, but she became something of a caricature in the process. She became less vulnerable and less anatomically plausible. Some of his Twenties and Thirties legs, in semi-sheer stockings whose tops mark the boundary of forbidden territory, are marvels of loving rendering, displaying every elongated tendon and muscle.

Not that the consumers of pinup art are primarily after anatomy lessons. What they are after are glimpses of a kind of heaven, the realm of sexual fulfillment. As late as the mid-Sixties, this realm--home territory, after all, for the human animal in its progenitive function--could be glimpsed only through peepholes, through suggestive images. The movies were the great suggesters, the global masters of erotic implication and symbolism; the masses came staggering out of love-steeped melodramas into the hard light of Main Street. Cheesecake was a socially acceptable code for the sexual realities. It covered everything from Hedy Lamarr's lifted eyebrow to Betty Grable's pertly bathing-suited derriere, which made her the most popular of World War Two pinups. In that time of heroic national virtue, in a puritan country that regarded sex as naughty if not evil, cheesecake kept the hormones placated and public awareness of sexual deprivation in the military appeased. It came as a shock to discover, in James Jones' From Here to Eternity, that the GIs' reality was not Betty Grable's backside on the barracks wall but a sweaty Honolulu whorehouse. The art of cheesecake was to make the part suggest the whole. When the whole body could be displayed in Playboy or at Woodstock, suggestiveness lost its power and that art lost its place on the front lines of realism.

For a time, cheesecake was as far as you openly could go in representing women in their role (not their only role, heaven knows) as sexual provocatrices. Whether the Vargas Girl was more aphrodisiac than the Venus de Milo or Titian's Venus or Manet's Olympia or, for that matter, Michelangelo's David is moot. One person's aphrodisiac is another person's turnoff. The Vargas Girl, for me as an adolescent, was less exciting than newsreels of women mud-wrestling in Texas or movies of Doris Day belting out a ballad at the top of her marvelous lungs. That open mouth, that starry gaze. The sexual instinct will speak whatever language is needed to make itself heard. But as for the female body in the public rotogravure, the Vargas Girl was what we had, and there is no reason not to see her, as Vargas did, as an homage to the eternal feminine.

"They are women in their moment of invitation; the confusing, wearying party of life is in the future."