The Bolles Girl in the Flesh!

 

From time to time I've published photos of models who posed for Enoch as well as photos he clipped from magazines that served as the basis for covers. To wit, the photo of Mary Carlyle that he turned into such a lovely cover for Breezy Stories. You can imagine my reaction when I ran across these amazing recreations of Bolles covers by Mala Mastroberte. Mala doesn't just pose for these, she controls every step in the creative process from start to finish, composing and shooting her magazine covers without any assistants.  She does the styling, the layout, props, wardrobe, shoes (!), makeup, hair, lighting and photography to bring the Bolles covergirl to life with amazing fidelity.  Mala has also created several of her own original covers that are inspired by Bolles' work and you can really tell she has a grasp on what makes Bolles unique.

I asked Mala how she first became interested in creating her own versions of old magazine and paperback covers. 

"I've been always interested in history, vintage clothing, antiques, old photographs, etc... I grew up in Poland, a country with a great history, but quite different than American or even Western Europe. When I first moved here 10 years ago, naturally I felt homesick and bit out of place in a country so much "younger" than my own. I started visiting every antique shop in sight, going to flea markets and then browsing the internet in search of anything with a past. That is how I discovered vintage magazines and began collecting them. Few years ago I started taking self portraits, at first just generally inspired by the pin-up genre. With time, once I accumulated more props and wigs, I was able to be more true to the beloved originals. I prefer the illustrated covers, for their fantasy quality. As a child I loved comic books and wanted to become a comic book character when I grow up. So this is, in a way, realizing my childhood dream."

"When I feel "inspired" I just set up my studio, take out my books or originals and shoot away. Sometimes I get the right pose in a few shots, sometimes it takes tens of photos (thank goodness for the digital cameras), but it is always lots of fun. So much so, that sometimes I do not even notice that hours have passed."

Mala has recreated a score of magazine and paperback covers spanning the 1930s to the 1960s.  You can view them all at on her Flickr site.  Of course I had to ask how she came to be so interested in the work of Enoch Bolles.
 
"Enoch Bolles, where do I begin! I do not think I have to convince you, or other fans that his illustrations are special. My favorive is his later period, once he established his original style. Even though I admired his pin-ups for a very long time, I did not dare to take them on until recently. Not only poses are particularly challenging but those recreations demand special and more skilled editing."

Dragon Girl-Part One

She's not a Bolles. Sorry. This tidbit of subterfuge has been in the works for quite a while. The vision of how Enoch might have interpreted the über-it-girl" of the millennium, Lisbeth Salander has been thrashing back and forth in my head and wouldn't leave me alone.  So I dusted off my paint kit, picked through a passel of pulps for inspiration, took a deep breath and put brush to canvas. 

And so here's the finished product, a pale imitation for certain. Ok, I'll give myself a little credit, she's a step or two above the standard Quintana knockoff of Bolles, and the "distressing" was spot-on if I say so myself (having spent so much time-and money-on stacks of ratty pulps has given me a certain experience in this regard).  Some of you picked up on it immediately and I bet others recognized the original inspiration for this cover, which was published in 1938 (there really was a Swedish detective writer named Stig Johansson from back in the 1940s). If the bug stays with me, there will be others to come based on three different Bolles covers for inspiration.  Can you guess which?  

Coming soon: a fabulous and contemporary photographic take on the Bolles girl.

Fodder For Future Posts

Sorry to have slowed the pace of posting recently but my day job has been imposing itself.  But I wanted to let you know that along with the art poster catalogs recently "discovered", I've also gotten some new magazines that I haven't had time yet to catalog.  So just to let you know that there will be more to come here's a photo of some of the cache. Thanks for your patience.

Would you like to see my etchings?

Above we have a couple examples of 1930s ephemera; catalogs of hand colors art posters by "well known American artists" which were "personally selected" by Joseph Bonita.  More about him later.  The contents of these catalogs were claimed  to be photo reproductions of  the original paintings and included a few unremarkable landscapes, but the rest were all of the pretty girl variety. Needless to say, none of the artists were well known, although one of the few signed paintings was by Paul Von Klieben, who years later designed the Ghost Town in Knott's Berry farm and was a resident artist there.  

No, it was another artist's work, this one unattributed, that got my interest.  Initially I assumed the photos were not taken directly from actual paintings but reused from engravings, as was the case with a series of blotters produced in the 1930s from Bolles magazine covers.  The images were reproduced off the covers--not the originals--and printed on blank or black backgrounds, Bolles signature was tooled out of the image in every case where it had appeared on the magazine cover.  I very much doubt whether he saw a nickel out of it.  But then in one of the catalogs I came across an image instantly recognizable as an unpublished Bolles, and that changed everything.  Somehow Bonica had gotten his hands on unique and original material, very likely directly from Bolles himself.  And so I took a closer look.  It turned out that some of the other Bolles paintings included in the catalog were still around, including a more finished version of the sketch.

  

Better yet, I recently picked up yet another of these catalogs and it didn't have just three or four pieces by Bolles in it, but nearly 20, and of these I know that four of the original paintings are still around.  Let's hope we can add a few more to the list of survivors, especially because the catalog includes several fabulous images that are among Bolles' very best, including two paintings that made my top 10 list of original Film Fun paintings I hoped would be yet found, including the iconic motorcycle girl, oddly titled as "Slyvia" in the catalog.  

Addendum:  A few years back I somehow managed to get in touch with Bonica's grandson.  I learned that in the 1940's Bonica had moved from print to film media and was hawking 16mm movies of burlesque dancers, and later a curious movie about the atom bomb.  His grandson had no knowledge about his connection to Bolles or his 1930s art catalogs. 

Blink and you'll miss her...

...and I almost did.  After a few days away I was back home, slogging through a backlog of emails that had piled up like snow in Buffalo.  Several were Google alerts for Enoch Bolles, one of which ended up linking to an image I'd uploaded to a flickr group months ago.  I hadn't been back to look since then so out of curiosity I opened the page to the group (Flappers and the Jazz Era) to check out thumbnails of recent entries.  Buried among them was an image that tickled a very small, but overdeveloped patch of neurons in my brain.  I enlarged the image and alarm bells starting ringing. There were tell-tale signs; long hands, fingers sinuously entwined; heart-shaped lips, the ends drawn tight like penny candy wrappers into a calm smile; rouged cheeks, a bit heavy for my taste; lovely pearls each so carefully rendered.  The bobbed hair style was spot-on but the treatment seemed too sculptural.  And then those peepers, beautiful yes but fringed by that mess of mascara which made them look like they'd draw blood if she blinked too hard. 

Still, I wasn't entirely certain but then my eyes were drawn to what looked like a small fingerprint in the corner and that's when my heart started pounding. I zoomed on in and "bing" and there it was.  Look closely and you'll see the initials EB modestly rendered next to her shoulder.  A new Bolles!  Published in 1925 amid his most active period of advertising illustration for all sorts of products and now we can add Winx to the list. What a great New Year present.  My thanks go to clotho98 who posted the image. Check out her flickr page for hundreds of other great vintage images.

So I'll leave you with a question that this entry has revived.  From 1924 to 1926 Bolles produced a huge body of advertising work, from trolley cards for a wide variety of products, to full color posters for films, to magazine illos like this one. There's plenty more around to be sure. But as far as I can tell, after 1926 his advertising work dropped to near nothing and I have no clue why.  In 1927 Snappy Stories stopped publication, leaving Bolles with Film Fun as his only regular assignment, so it wasn't as if he was overextended.  He must have taken on other work to fill the gaps, but where is it?

Addendum:  I want to give a shout-out to the Dawl for the fabulous seasonal update he gave this blog. Thanks!!

Santa's Baby

Beginning in 1928, the January issue of issue of Film Fun (which showed up on the newsstands a calendar month early) featured a Christmas theme.  Here we see the cover for 1931; Santa seems particularly cheery but then again, rarely has he been the recipient of such generous gifts. The streak of Christmas covers ended the following year but Bolles clearly liked this composition enough to use it in a far more raucous new year's celebration for the January, 1936 issue of Breezy Stories. This has to qualify in the top tier of covers top for the magazine, which is saying a lot because Breezy paid Enoch more than the average pulp and in return he put a lot of extra work into his covers.

So is there any wonder as to why the beau of the Bolles' girl is beaming?  The lucky guy, after Santa there were only one or two other times where the Bolles girl shared the spotlight on the cover with a member of the opposite sex.  And from the look on his face he seems quite grateful to take the supporting role.

The Summer of '42

Is it as cold where you are as it is here?  It seems like a large swath of the planet has recently been struck by bad weather.  And it's not even Winter yet!  To to warm things up I'm posting a really inventive cover for the August 1938 issue of Breezy Stories.  In fact it was his Bolles' final assignment for the magazine.  His fifteen year run of covers for Film Fun also ended the same month, due to his hospitalization for what his doctor described as overwork and undernourishment.  Yet it would be over a year before Bolles returned to commercial work and in the meantime the magazine industry was in the throes of a sea change.  Just two months before this Bolles girl waded into the newsstands, Action Comics #1 was published and the comic book began its ascendancy into the print media stratosphere, carried by the steely arms of Superman. The publisher was Harry Donenfeld, who had clawed his way up the business by publishing Spicy pulps, most all of which Bolles had done work for at one time or another.  In preparing this post I learned that as a young man Donenfeld worked for a clothing store his parents owned in Newark in the 1920s.  Bolles grew up in Newark and his family had strong business ties in the community, including a successful shoe manufacturing business.  One has to wonder if they first crossed paths there. 

By the end of 1939 Bolles was back on the job for Film Fun but his other markets had dried up. Breezy Stories was sold off and the new publisher scrimped by recycling old covers. Both Spicy Stories and Gay Parisienne had ceased publication, victims of declining sales, badgering by the decency leagues, and perhaps Donenfeld's preoccupation with his burgeoning comic book company.  In the meantime Bolles was back in top form and doing great work, having updated his girls for the 1940's with WW-II styled pinup poses and Rita Hayworth hairstyles.