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Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls, or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)

Do you purse up your lips having your picture taken? Then you imitate the American pin up models! In 1930−40-s this event in popular culture bred hundreds of joyful, careless pinup girls; an ideal girl (a perfect size 90/60/90) wearing stockings and mini, always nearby — just a dream of a long-haul trucker, a soldier or a common single man. Army of painters was replicating such image. Marilyn Monroe posed for the most famous of them.
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)

Woman of modern time

Provocative motive with a shadow of sexuality: the wind unexpectedly lifts a skirt of a leggy beauty suspected nothing. A small doggy sinks its teeth in its mistress’s skirt half stripping her. She slightly flushes and smiles. The icon of glamour in the USA of the mid last century looked exactly this way. The like picture is not surprising even for a schoolboy nowadays, though, more than 80 years ago the exciting art easily found its place on car fenders, fridge doors in bachelors’s houses or on the walls of garages.
French painter Jules Cheret was the first who began painting flirtatious girls on posters. At the same time, at the end of the XIX century, the campaign on women rights defense was launched. An independent and self-sustained Gibson Girl became a symbol of beauty for some twenty years. Her images decorated dishes, bedclothes, umbrellas and ash trays. Charles Dana Gibson, an American graphic artist, created the image of a thin, tall, independent young lady, with the hair up (even Roosevelt’s daughter made the same hairdo) with saucer eyes, full breasted, with a swan neck, roundish thigh and wasp waist underlined with a corset. The author pleased the female audience endued his models both with ephemerality and power to dominate males, depicted next to them deliberately small and comic, ready to satisfy any passing fancies of their beauties. Women in turn could examine them under magnifying glasses and even gracefully tread on them with their delicately shaped hawkish high heels.
Gibson Girl had been exciting the brains of the Americans till the World War I. In 20−30-s of the XXth century, the focus of the female image positioning shifted to some extent and an anemic feminist was substituted by a more sexual "baby".

Pinup and flip dream

Fashion for pinup girls (pinup stands for something fastened to a wall) sprung out due to Brown & Bigelow calendar publishers, who decided to illustrate each month of a year with pictures of pretty girls. The idea brought huge revenues to its authors. In the early XX century photographers could offer only black and white photos, so painters with their bright colors came to rescue them.

According to Kirk Gibson, an actor, "virtue is unphotogenic", so impudent skirts, low necklines and lace stockings with suspenders had substituted puritan dresses.
Gil Elvgren, an illustrator and glorifier of an American woman, became a real legend of the pinup movement and he was one of the first who created thousands of images fitting every taste: from cowboy girls to sex appeal housewives. Hundreds of cheerful and pretty girls in knee socks came under his brush, some kind of Lolitas with matured fleshes, which he painted from beginning actresses and models. Under the Contract B&B paid Gil Elvgren 1,000 US dollars for a pinup picture.
No cellulite! Gil Elvgren anticipated Photoshop, retouching the figures of his models with his brush and paints, turning their faults into model perfections. To make sure simply compare the actual photos of the models posed for the painter and final glamorous outputs of their collaborations.
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Coca-Cola became a pioneer in pinups in its advertisements, asking the authors to paint a model in t

Coca-Cola became a pioneer in pinups in its advertisements, asking the authors to paint a model in the colorful picture with a bottle of Coca-Cola. The result was not long in comin: the sales exploded immediately. Lucky Strike Tobacco Company followed Coca-Cola and ordered pictures from the painter Knut Manson, who was involved in advertisement illustration with his own style; in each of his pictures he draw a pencil sketch of the same girl in different positions.

Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)

Support a soldier

In autumn, 1933, Esquire, an American men’s magazine, placed on its cover Petty Girl with a disproportionate small head and long legs. Such disproportion did not embarrass the readers in the slightest; all edition was sold out in some days. So, the magazine became the first in the world printed pinup edition.
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Agitation posters in the pin-up style were created in the War Germany; their heroes were not blue-eyed girls but Goring and even Hitler.

At the beginning of the World War II politicians presented each other pinup calendars and the Aryan military authorities provided soldiers with so long-awaited images to offer them motivation of returning home as winners and to conquer a heart of one of such brave girls.
Pin up: "pinned up" sexy girls,  or the way how American painters canonized female beauty (part 1)
Al Buell is a popular creator of the patriotic pinup pictures of girls with the star-spangled banner in the background. His works are not the articles of popular consumption but they pretend to be considered as fully valued paintings.
Alberto Vargas is the best well-known Peruvian painter cited by many photographers of today; he depi

Alberto Vargas is the best well-known Peruvian painter cited by many photographers of today; he depicted elegant girls with perfect shapes, thin fingers and bright manicure in the light background. His works are sold out for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Vargas created his half nude pictures with water colors and aerograph.

To be continued