Time and Again

It's a fact of life that illustrators busy with looming deadlines sometimes resort to "borrowing" from the work of their peers, be it general inspiration, a certain detail, a pose or the whole piece.  Bolles himself was routinely swiped by other artists of his time and still is today, but I have yet to find a solid example where he swiped from another artist.  Granted, he often worked from photos and in some cases changed nary a thing, but he must have had some personal code about lifting ideas from artists, or at least other artists. 

 

Take a closer look above at this original from 1925--the only surviving painting I'm aware of among the 23 covers he completed for Judge magazine--and you immediately notice that time-telling detail.  And then we fast forward to 1937 and we see another Bolles girl checking if she's late for an appointment.  Bolles would revisit a number of themes  throughout his career. There was a time when I pondered just how he could possibly keep track of it all, considering he painted at least 663 magazine covers (and counting). He certainly could have benefitted from some system to keep from overgrazing the same territory, if nothing else.  But it doesn't appear he kept a ledger of his work and he certainly didn't keep many of his paintings around in his studio, although these two are still around.  My own theory is that it was all in his head. Bolles had an amazing memory, which included a rather freakish ability to recall (or perhaps calculate) the last time a date and day coincided in the calendar (and if you're curious, the last time December 3 fell on a Tuesday was just last year, but prior to that you'd have to go back to 2002).

 

But I digress. The fun thing about these examples is that you get to see Bolles' reinterpreting an idea in the context of the era and through his evolving style.  And if you want a closer look the Judge painting is going up for sale this weekend at Freeman's auction house.  And with that I'll bid her adieu.

Judge for yourself

I haven't posted many of Bolles covers from Judge, the periodical that launched his magazine career back in 1914.  Here we see one of his most his most energetic compositions, published in 1924.  Enoch crowds more ladies on the page here than he has in all but one other example (do you know?) among his other 560 (and still counting) magazine covers.  After this, he would go on to paint only a few more covers for Judge and my guess is that Bolles, like the majority of artists and writers who contributed to the magazine, ended up getting stiffed more than once and finally said enough is enough. 

Among magazine editors the staff at Judge had a notorious reputation for delaying payment.  Theodor "Suess" Geisel was thrilled to get his first regular gig with Judge but within two months they had not only reduced his pay, but would then resorted to an odd form of IOU' vouchers that Geisel could redeem for products or services of companies that advertised in Judge (not that he had much of a choice,Judge consistently lagged in selling ad space) but not money. The editors even dared to skip paying James Montgomery Flagg until he showed up unannounced at the editors office and threw a pique until the cheque was cut (more than likely he demanded cash).  Bolles milder temperament was not conducive to such tactics and by 1924 he had diversified, not only painting covers on a regular basis for Film Fun, Snappy Stories and other periodicals, but also producing art for the advertising and film industries.  Norman Anthony, the art editor at Judge, would likely have been thrilled if Bolles had just put one dancehall on this cover but to his delight and ours, Enoch packed the house.

Bolles in Esquire

Boingboing generously linked the recent post in which I had proposed a connection between Bolles and a cover of Esquire channeled via Rihanna, and wow has this site gotten the extra hits. The typical daily average is around 200 but visits peaked over 1,200. The downside was all the comments on Boingboing were adamant that the Bolles cover had nothing, NOTHING at all to do with the Esquire cover, and others wagged a scolding finger about posting filthy, FILTHY cheesecake. Well, we Bolles fans are of a different mind, and connection or not the more significant point was Esquire's largely forgotten
contribution to the history of pinup, which spun a thread running back decades to the origins of genre, and how Enoch Bolles is a part of that original fabric.

In the previous post I mentioned the intriguing 'what-if' possibility of Bolles becoming Petty's replacement at Esquire. Aside from his growing health problems I think the fact he worked exclusively in oil militated against his chances. Petty's sleek airbrushed girls were unique and readers were raving about them (though many also complained about Petty's tendency to graft two different body sizes together at the waist).  It would have been foolish for David Smart to hire a replacement whose work had a wildly different appearance. Vargas not only provided a sense of stylistic continuity but he amped up Petty's streamline look even further. Curiously their techniques were completely different; Petty's unique method to airbrushing involved laying on solid colors as if they were color plate separations. By comparison Bolles was a traditionalist and the idea of using an airbrush would have been
unconscionable.

That's not to say he didn't have his own debut of sorts in Esquire.  In the December, 1937 issue the ad you see above appeared in its pages, featuring what came to be known as the Windy girl.  Look closely and you'll see the painting was attributed to "Enoc Boles".  The spelling is so derelict it makes you wonder whether the type setter was coached by David Smart, the co-founder of Esquire who later anglicized Alberto's sir-name as Varga.  Smart somehow neglected to mentioned he owned the trademark for it.  In Bolles' case the misspelling didn't matter so much because it was subsequently stripped out of the ad, never to appear again.  Over the years the Windy girl image got updated now and then but eventually fell out of favor for other advertising campaigns.  However, in 1993 the original image was back, embossed on a commemorative lighter--and retitled as the Varga girl!  Being curious, to say the least, I inquired about it to the archivist at Zippo and the story went that the company founder, George Blaisdell was an admirer of Vargas but couldn't afford to hire him to bring Windy to life.  Keep in mind the year was 1937.  Vargas was strapped financially and would soon for Los Angeles to work in the movie industry as an illustrator and set designer, a career decision that didn't turn out well for him. Things had changed so little by 1941 that Esquire hired Vargas for a rate less than Bolles was getting for his Film Fun covers.  So money wasn't the issue, it was George Petty.  A Windy girl by Petty would have been the obvious first choice for Blaisdell, but Petty's rates were far above Zippo's budget, and  our man Bolles stepped in.  There was another factor in Bolles' favor.  Unlike Petty, who was repelled by the image of a woman with a cigarette (his Old Gold ads all had the men holding the smokes), Bolles had no reticence at all.  In fact he had depicted a girl smoking all the way back in 1914 on his second published magazine, a wildly popular image for Judge magazine which I think may have been the first magazine cover ever showing a woman with a lit cigarette (if you know of earlier examples please let me know).  The image jump started his career and cigarettes would become a common prop for Bolles girls through the decades.

 Bolles' cover for Judge was

so popular it was reprinted

as a poster.

To Zippo's credit the web-site now gives Bolles proper credit for creating the Windy girl and no longer refers to her as a Varga (threats from the Vargas estate may have had something to do with that).  I also learned from the Zippo archivist that for years Blaisdell proudly displayed the original Bolles painting in his office, but sadly it has gone missing.   Bolles thought enough of Windy to have carefully saved the proof of the image, which I found in stashed in a box in his grandson's basement.  Now if that painting would just turn up!

Last Call!

Drat! Or should I say draft? Midnight yesterday was the last call for beer day. This is a cover I've been waiting for an opportunity to share for so long I simply couldn't throw it back in the cooler for another year. A bit of history: long ago I spotted a smudgy thumbnail of this 1922 issue of Judge on eBay and it immediately set my Bolles radar pinging. I had no choice but to get it. After the issue showed up in the mail my intuition was confirmed. The telltale EB was faintly initialed in the shadow of the glass (notice the tiny conceit of how the descender of the "B" extends ever so slightly out of the shadow). What a thrill. This has to be the most atypical cover of any Bolles ever did.

...

So what clued me in? First, even at low resolution I could tell it was a quality illustration, but then Judge had a bullpen full of top rate illustrators including the likes of Flagg, Held, and Lagatta. What set this image off were the lighlights. Bolles did a lot of commercial art and reflective materials (glass, porcelain) often had strong highlights with the light source located directly in the midline. Second, the shadow had some Bolles touches too it, amorphic with a warm to cold register. Or maybe I just lucked out.

...

At any rate I think the cover is a hoot, and you have to wonder how long it took Enoch to paint all those little bubbles. And of all things, the cover was swiped by another artist (Bolles hated that) nearly a decade later, on another cover of Judge no less (hard to believe prohibition lasted that long). Who knows if the "model" was a glass of root beer or the real thing. Although Enoch might have an occasional beer I very much doubt if he took his oils and canvas to the nearest speakeasy to solicit an appropriate model.

Cheers!

November 12, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's birthday

Sorry about the poor resolution but I wanted to get this image up today, and there was no way I could have dug up the issue and rescanned it in time. So here we see Bolles championing the right of women to vote, or at least he agreed to take on this assignment. Actually, for his time Bolles was very progressive as to the role of women in society. Among other things he encouraged his daughters to participate in sports, pursue higher education and follow their interests wherever they led them. From my biased perspective I think is evident in his work. Yes, he was a pin-up artist and his covers are laden with clichés and slathered with sex-appeal; some of the standard ingredients of objectification. But I think there is something more that comes through. Among other things his art is more gracious and affable compared with that of other pin-up artists of his time and since. And his girls certainly were more competent than the competition; they skied, climbed, flew and skydived while the others merely primped and preened.

Judge Magazine, 1924

Perhaps Bolles' best cover for Judge, the magazine where he got his start in 1914. For a while the publishers of Judge also owned Film Fun, which truly launched Bolles into the public eye, but they sold it to stave off bankruptcy (which eventually happened, anyway). George Delacorte Jr. bought Film Fun, hired Norman Anthony to rework it in a more humorous vein and it was Anthony who probably hired Bolles to become the magazine's exclusive cover artist for the next 20 years. Film Fun, by the way, did well for Delacorte, earning an average 100 grand in profit annually.