WWII Pin-Up
WWII Pin-Up
Although the “pin-up” gets its name from the act of display it encourages, which might apply to any mass produced and widely distributed image, the term commonly identifies a more narrow category of pictures, from glossy portraits of Hollywood stars to Playboy’s monthly magazines. With an even tighter focus, “pinups” usually designate pictures of pretty girls wearing skimpy bathing suits, exotic lingerie, or sometimes even less, in “sexy” images that only the most puritanical viewer would now condemn as obscene. The term’s most evocative use recalls the drawn, painted, or photographed representations of idealized, all-American femininity produced in the decades surrounding World War II. While the pin-up has obvious precursors in French postcards from the turn of the twentieth century, and late variants like the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the form is exemplified by the odd balance of eroticism, innocence, healthiness, and patriotism found in commercial images of women produced between the 1920s and 1960s.
Viewed within a large frame, the pin-up is a species of the portrait, yanked down off the walls of exclusive galleries and museums and posted in ordinary gas stations and poolhalls. Generated by the development and proliferation of inexpensive processes of photography, lithography, and color printing, the pin-up contributed to more democratic, and perhaps inevitably more vulgar, understandings of celebrity, voyeurism, consumption, and eroticism, closing the gap in taste and appreciation between classical nudes and burlesque showgirls. Although pictures of prominent theatrical performers were common by the turn of the twentieth century, the pin-up thrived as a component of the film industry, as talented photographers like Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, and Ted Allen were exclusively employed by the Hollywood studios to idealize their most precious commodities, the movie stars. Much of the residual glamour of Hollywood’s golden age certainly derives from the striking black and white images these photographers produced of screen celebrities like Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford.
Preceding the Hollywood dream factory, commercial illustrators and graphic artists such as Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy had already glorified the American girl in the pages of popular illustrated magazines and helped define the modern ideal of femininity that would eventually coalesce as the jazz age’s flapper. From the 1920s onward, popular magazine, calendar, and advertising artists like Antonio Vargas, Gil Elvgren, Earl Moran, Zoe Mozert, and George Petty produced hundreds of “cheesecake” images of sleek, flawless, all-American femininity marked by the “tease” of blowing skirts and sheer fabric rather than by explicit nude display. ByWorld War II, the Vargas girl and Hollywood pin-ups like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth came to represent not only American femininity but the very values American soldiers were defending. As the French film critic Andre Bazin later recognized, “A wartime product created for the benefit of the American soldiers swarming to a long exile at the four corners of the world, the pin-up girl soon became an industrial product, subject to well-fixed norms and as stable in quality as peanut butter or chewing gum.” (The Pin Up Files)
After the war, the classic, scantily clad pin-up continued to thrive until an underground tradition was brought into the mainstream in 1955 by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, which provided an entire “Playboy philosophy” of robust, healthy heterosexuality to justify its monthly inclusion of a nude Playmate at the heart of each issue. Playboy redefined the pin-up by shifting the earlier period’s emphasis on long legs to an all-but-exclusive fascination with large breasts.
In the late 1940s Irving Klaw and his sister Paula, the owners of Movie Star News, a New York shop that sold Hollywood movie stills, began producing their own photographs of women in fetish gear and bondage poses to satisfy the requests of their more discriminating customers. Among Klaw’s models, a young woman with jet-black bangs named Betty (or Bettie) Page quickly became a customer favorite, and decades after she disappeared from sight, Page became a cult icon among comic book fans and collectors of 1950s kitsch, perhaps because she so effectively summarized the cultural contradictions of the post-war period: Page, like most pin-ups, was a pretty girl-next-door type, but she also wore stiletto heels and leather bondage gear. In retrospect, Betty Page seemed the ideal pin-up of a period that produced both the McCarthy witchhunts and the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality.
Although the pin-up has commonly been assumed to be a form depicting women for an audience of heterosexual males, the homosexual tradition of pin-ups has a lengthy history as well: in fact, one of the young artists who regularly contributed his drawings to Physique Pictorial, who called himself Tom of Finland, would eventually emerge as the gay Vargas, exaggerating the features of his muscular young men just as the earlier artist idealized his female figures (The History of Pin-Up Art). Celebrated in later decades, the photographs of the post-war period, like Betty Page’s bondage pictures, revise simple and nostalgic stereotypes of the era’s conservative values and sexual inhibitions. The legacy of the classic Hollywood pin-up survives in the work of contemporary celebrity photographers like Matthew Rolston, Annie Liebovitz, Bruce Weber, and Herb Ritts, whose subjects are as likely to be rock musicians or “supermodels” as movie stars. Posters of attractive women in bathing suits or underwear, from Farrah Fawcett or Madonna to the Spice Girls, have also never disappeared from adolescent bedroom walls. But the classic pin-up, save for athriving network of nostalgic collectors, seems to have certainly succumbed to, on the one hand, feminism’s largely effective redefinition of women as social subjects rather than simply sexual objects and, on the other hand, the increased availability of hard-core pornography, whose blatant meanings no longer encourage the slightly muted eroticism essential to the classic pin-up.
Works Cited:
Bazin, Andre. “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl.” What is Cinema? Vol. 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971.
“The Pinup in History.” Web. Jan. 26 2010. http://kentsteine.com/history.htm.
Gabor, Mark. The Pin-Up: A Modest History. New York, Universe Books, 1972.
Martignette, Charles G., and Louis K. Meisel. The Great American Pin-Up. Cologne, Germany, Taschen, 1996.
“The History of Pin-Up Art.” Web. 25 Jan. 2010. http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/pinupart/
This is the third blog I’ve used, after using Xanga and Myspace. I’ve been meaning to make a Tumblr account for awhile but this should suffice for now since I’ll have to work to keep this blog up to date. I have high hopes for my group’s project on the sixties. I’ve always been interested in sixties fashion so it should pose no troubles for me to expound on the subject. Overall, I believe this semester in English is going to be an exciting one and I can’t wait to learn what I can from it.