Bidding Adieu to Intimate Apparel

We end our week of appreciation for intimate apparel as interpreted by Enoch Bolles with this lovely painting from Snappy Stories. I believe the year is 1926 but am not certain. In this case I actually do have a physical copy of this in my collection, but only the cover. For reasons evident to Bolles fans, a lot of Snappy subscribers would carefully clip the covers and then toss the contents, presumably after at least giving them the once over. The covers however, got the over and over but yet when I find them they are nearly always still in pristine condition.

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The covers Bolles did for Snappy Stories were a departure as they had more involved compositions and narrative themes absent in most all his other magazine work. Typically the painting would depict a key event from one of the featured stories within the pages of the magazine, or perhaps it was the other way around. It was often the case that pulp writers were shown the cover selected by the art editor and instructed to craft a story after it. It gives a whole new meaning to the "tale" wagging the dog.

Spreading Some Holiday Cheer

I'm just offering a little holiday eye candy today, all the covers I've picked out have similar poses. Bolles did a lot of Christmas themed paintings along and others with winter settings, and you'll be seeing more of these in the coming days. I'm also working on a post about a Bolles painting that I've been on the trail of for the past two years and thought lost, only to get news two days ago that it mysteriously resurfaced. The story is so convoluted that it will take me a while to piece it together for you.

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On our right we have a charming example of Bolles in his mid-20s period. Despite how relaxed his painting is he still invests it with telling details. I especially like the greenery that adds a diagonal sweep to what would otherwise be a rather static composition. See how he deals with this problem with this Film Fun cover from 1930 which is supposed to be Nancy Carroll. About all Bolles got right was the hair color but he did do a few of these "specially posed" covers that were pretty good likenesses and I have a really great portrait he did of her a year later. My guess is that the editors thought these would sell magazines, but it really works against Bolles' strengths. With the possible exception of the Lupe Velez Film Fun cover (which is the best of the lot) I'm sure Bolles used photos, but his daughter told me that she had heard that Lupe actually posed for him. A few years ago the original to the Nancy Carroll painting was sold on eBay and I sure wish I could get a good scan of it. Speaking of scans I've left the first two covers unaltered but have included yet another similar example below from 1929 that I've cleaned up. Let me know what you think. Last I finally have gotten my Google analytics up and working so now I'll be able to see if anybody's reading these other than me.

To Restore or Not to Restore?

For your perusal: a low-rez scan of a rather tattered magazine cover that I've applied my meager Photoshop skills to reviving. Aside from removing some of the more obvious stains I've warmed up the pallette, perhaps beyond what it looked like as it would have fresh on the newsstand. It wouldn't have been hard to completely bleach out the background of any spots but I decided enough was enough.

And that's the question I have for you. Would you rather see original covers in all their original stained and torn glory, or cleaned up to digital perfection? I admit that I can't keep from fixing up the most egregious damage but at some point I begin to wonder if something is lost. There are comic book sites where the scans of 50 year old pages are bleached not only of their age, but of their origins.

On the other hand, take a look at my pal TJ's handiwork below. The scan of dingy issue is as close as I'll ever come to owning it but what TJ has done makes me feel I am seeing the image as it may have appeared on canvas. Stolen Sweets was among the magazine Bolles worked for that used cheap printing methods and sometimes only printed in three colors. As far as I know there are no surviving paintings from this title so TJ's efforts are as close as we are going to get.

An artist of many talents

When I first began looking into the career of Enoch Bolles the official party line about him went something like this: An artist who specialized in scandalous and somewhat cartoony pinups. This and other similar descriptions of Bolles effectively stamped him as a semi-talented cartoonist who specialized in pretty girls and nothing else. But the reality of this was an entirely different matter. The unknown truth was that at the same time Bolles was turning out his charming covers for Film Fun and other magazines at the rate of three to five a month he had a parallel career as a talented illustrator in high demand who worked for the top advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson and Barron Collier's Consolidated Streetcar Railway Advertising Company, that was responsible for publishing many of Bolles Trolley cards. The products he illustrated for these and other clients spanned the gamut from bread to swimsuits to Zippo lighters. He did advertising work for major products and companies including Sun-Maid Raisins, Fleischman's yeast, Palm Beach suits, Best Foods and Fox Films (I've only recently discovered his work for the talkies). Unfortunately most of this work was done anonymously, despite the fact that many top artists not only signed their advertising art but additionally, loaned their names to add to the status of the product. Think Leyendecker-Arrow Shirts, Maxfield Parrish-General Electric, Rockwell Kent-Bituminous Coal Institute.


Bolles was not a party among this stellar group
but even lesser names were featured in ad campaigns. Bolles was never one to foist his name but in all likelihood he had already become to some extent tainted by his own particular specialization, namely illustrating very pretty girls who were a lot sexier than those of his peers and competitors. In that sense he
had become a victim of his own talents. But if you look at the two examples I posted you'll see an artist of far greater range and emotional subtlety (also: the lettering in these ads was done freehand by him).




A copy of Snappy Magazine from 1924.
The magazine had been banned in several
cities and the entire state of Kansas.
Bolles initialed but never his entire name to
nearly everycover of Snappy he painted.