I saw this panel from a 1993 Punisher comic drawn by the famed Marvel comics artist John Buschema and thought it had to be more than just coincidence. Take a look at the flipped cover from a 1934 Film Fun (I posted a long series on this painting several years back and and how I came to find the original). What do you think? Was "Big John" a Bolles fan?
Not to worry, our man Bolles has this one (un)covered. Nuff said!
It's fitting that our final entry in the One-Off series is likely the last painting Bolles did for a magazine. She appeared in 1943 on the inaugural issue of the problematically titled men's
magazine,Titter. Our reflective Bolles girl strongly resembles a cover he did for the December, 1941 issue of Film Fun. Curiously, however, these images were inspired by different photographs of different models. My guess is that our solo choir girl in the in the green opera gloves was done at the same time as the trio but didn't make the audition for Film Fun. So she was later repurposed for Titter. I'm even more sure the actual painting (if only it was still around!) faced left and was flipped for the magazine. The Film Fun painting was flipped for the cover and as you can see, the photo reference for the Titter cover-girl faces left. More interesting is that the photo bears only a cursory resemblance to the Bolles girl in the painting. As the late artist and collector, Francis Smith told me long ago, "Bolles was an interpreter". That he certainly was!
What a great cover! Don't you just love those shorts with the trendy cuffs? There's a story behind them. Long ago when Enoch's daughter saw this cover she told me she thought Enoch did the shorts in denim because at the time bluejeans were becoming a fashion trend. And of course our man Enoch would be all over that. The rolled stockings were a big deal at the time too. A couple years earlier Louise Brooks starred in a movie called, of all things, Rolled Stockings.
Our newest edition of the the One-Off series happens to be the very first of all Enoch's one-offs, and his third magazine cover. Puck was an odd duck, paddling back and forth from a partisan political rag to a sort of humor mag. For a brief stretch the covers featured what you might call proto-pinups, which were painted by the likes of Rolf Armstrong, Harry Horst Meyers, Neysa McMein and our man Bolles. Batting cleanup in this stellar lineup was the Viennese artist,Raphael Kirchner. Before moving from Paris to New York in 1914, Kirchner had established a thriving career as a society artist as well as providing illustrations for the likes of La Vie Parisienne. His work for Puck showcased a French inflected and ungartered eroticism that was absent from American illustrators. A masterful technician, he worked in a number of media and strongly influenced the work of Alberto Vargas, who took Kirchner's place as the artist for the Zeigfeld Follies after his untimely death in 1917.
Unlike the the girls of Kirchner and Vargas, who were content lounging in the boudoir, the Bolles girl was outdoors and on the go. Other artists, most notably Fisher and Gibson, were also painting the so-called New American Girl, but the Bolles girl was different. While the girls of Fisher or Gibson might be content with a game of croquet, the Bolles girl would rather pole dance off a buoy.
Years later Bolles revisited this theme. The buoy may have been updated, but our Bolles girl hadn't changed a bit. She still loved to boogie! .
