Is there any doubt here? Rihanna as a Bolles girl? In the past I've been guilty about making some dubious connections between Bolles and the work of others but this is just too darned close. Don't you agree? Alright I will concede Rihanna's dressed a bit differently (salad?), and I don't think espadrilles quite suit her. But that pose is no accident. So it's only too bad this connection will be lost on 99.999% of all Esquire readers. What's more ironic is that I seriously doubt the art director of this shoot has a sense of the major historical role the magazine played in the development of pinup, first with the work of George Petty and then Alberto Vargas.
Oh but what if it would have been Bolles who replaced Petty. The transition began in 1940 when Petty told Esquire he wanted a break. David Smart, the magazine's co-founder and all-around jerk, used it as an opportunity to quietly shop around for a cheaper replacement. Everyone from Alex Raymond to Zoe Mozert was considered before Smart hired Vargas on the cheap (Vargas later sued to get out of his contract), and then pulled that rude stunt with his name. The late Reid Austin, who wrote the definitive biographies on both Petty and Vargas, and was Vargas' art editor at Playboy once asked me why Bolles didn't make a play for the job at Esquire. There was just about no way Bolles couldn't have known what was going on at Esquire, but there's no record of him interviewing or even expressing any interest. Bolles was in and out of the hospital during this time so it's possible he simply missed the boat. Too bad.
P.S., Thanks to Mala Mastroberte for alerting me to this. You can see her take on Bolles here and other pinup art here.
4 comments:
I'm sorry, I do not agree. Bolles as a lot of photographers, painters and so on work with specific problems. How to put a lady in a page ? There is not so much options and a sitting woman with legs close to body is an example. Bolles worked with cliche and a lady with a canon is so cliché...
I agree the pose has become a cliche', but I have yet to find a girl on a canon that predates Bolles, and within six months of his several other cover artists followed with bairly altered versions. The same was true for his girl on a fire pole, and there are other examples.
I think Bolles was responsible for creating many of what are are now set-pieces/cliches'. More than any of his contemporaries, he used the "L" pose to enlarge the scale and crowd his girl within the confines of the page. Rihanna's hands aren't in the same position or pose but her claw-like hand pose sure reminds me of other Bolles examples, and the intersection of chin and shoulder is yet another Bolles touch. The fact is Bolles was the most prolific of all the first generation of Pinup artists (550+ magazine covers) and maybe the second or third most prolific of all magazine cover artists from the golden age of illustration, even more than Norman Rockwell, whose career spanned a half century.
There is another problem: as you say, Bolles work is being so much used that I suspect people use his pose without remembering where it came from. As an artist myself, I am very surprised to discover after working on an image or a sequence that I used without purpose something I saw years before.
Ah, very true, and I have a quote by Bolles somewhere in which he voices the same sentiment. What I think shows up in a lot of pinup today is echoes of Bolles influence on artists who followed. And of course, Bolles was himself influenced by his teachers and artists before him.
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