Gaining Attitude

In the previous post I spent some time describing how the Bolles girl was anything but a one dimensional poster girl peddling glee. As approachable as many were, there were others who wanted nothing at all to do with the guy who had just shelled out his hard earned money for the magazine. Compared with any other pinup illustrator-then or now-Bolles was far more apt to depict his girls in emotions ranging from boredom to annoyance to outright contempt. Clearly, this version of the Bolles girl was not only well aware of her effect on readers but could care less. As you can see from the examples above which span from 1923 to 1941, the not so nice Bolles girl made regular appearances throughout his entire career.


To the right is the entire image for the 1923 Film Fun cover and as you'll notice, there's a lot more going on in the composition that we typically see from Bolles.Yet within a year these sorts of narrative elements would fade from the covers to leave the Bolles girl front and center, free of any visual competition. In some ways this was too bad, because as this examples shows, Bolles had no trouble handling more involved compositions.


But aside from all this, take a closer look at our jaded film star and consider just how racy her image must have appeared the day she hit the newsstands. Notice-as if you haven't already-that revealing swim suit, the rolled hose, those splayed ankles. Naughty girl! Nobody today would take offense at any of this, but back in Bolles' times these were just the sorts of provocations that resulted in Film Fun getting banned by entire countries. Just one more thing; could this be the earliest depiction of a stunt double?

Bowdacious!

No punny holiday celebrations today. In fact, no puns at all (well, maybe one or two). The theme today is that there isn't one, and so debuts a new series that will occasionally fill in for the usual topical applications. The goal will be simply to post a cover, one not chosen entirely by chance but with far less than the usual deliberation, take a closer look and see what the image reveals.

So how about today's Spicy Stories cover from 1935?! Far and away it's tops for that year and she stands, or rather sits, along Bolles' very best out of the entire run of Spicy. What about those enormous bows?!! That subdued metallic silver ribbon lacks the "coloric" punch Bolles connoisseurs are so accustomed to imbibing, yet this curiously monochromatic scheme has effective design elements that direct your attention to what matters. Consider the composition, which is unusual for Bolles. While many of his girls sat or knelt in the oft favored "L", that approach was discarded here (along with conventional clothing) for a head-on pose incorporating several visual tricks which thrust the girl right off the page into the reader's lap. Notice how the waves of ribbon draping the granite deco seat act to accentuate the horizontal plane (the pattern is repeated in her hair). The flat treatment of her torso (well...most of it) is contrasted by the more dimensional shadowing and highlights on her legs amplifies the effect. The shadow on her forehead gives the impression she's looking down on you from a superior vantage. Her expression implies the same. Is she disappointed? Annoyed? Peeved? A wasp ready to sting you for violating her territory? ("that's not your flower!") Or is she merely bored? Certainly, there's something on her mind though it would take a braver person than I to dare ask.

And this brings up another unique aspect of Bolles' work. Was there any other pinup artist of his era (granted, the term pinup originated in the early 40s) who depicted their girls with such confrontational intensity? Bolles produced a lot of covers with nary a hint of a smile. Some of his girls were bored, others pettish or merely unimpressed, and there were more than a few who confronted you with a cool, neutral gaze that conveyed an air of menace. I would venture that Bolles painted more mirthless pinups than any other artist. Throw out embarrassment as an emotional expression and you couldn't come up with a single straight faced Elvgren. Petty did haughty but after 1935 it was all smiles, and you had to wait until Playboy before you saw it from Vargas. It was Bolles who made the pinup more than just a vehicle of vapid cheeriness or abashment. But let's brave a closer look. Could that be the slightest curl of a smile on the edge of those luscious lips? Still not sure? We'll zoom in even closer when we probe the depths of Bolles' emotional range in future posts.

Ad hoc hack

Here's an illustration for a men's clothing company that I am dead certain was composed and painted by Bolles and equally sure was overpainted by another artist. Now, perhaps you aren't convinced it's a Bolles (and initially I wasn't) but there are some compositional giveaways and other clues. Most telling; take a look at this original sketch by him for the same company and I think you'll see why I came around. So the big question is why would you mess with a good illustration. One of my theories is that an editor used one of Bolles' unfinished sketches and had it embellished by another artist. Or perhaps it was a completed composition that an editor was unhappy with and instructed another artist to give it a more painterly look. Who knows, but what I am sure is that the overpainting isn't by Bolles. It's just too muddy and unassured in spots, particularly the weave pattern on the rattan chair. That's the very type of repetitive detail that Bolles would have nailed down to geometric precision. The woman's shawl is another problem. The folds in the wrinkles follow Bolles style but they are muddy in execution. I kind of like the detailing of the older gent's face but his hands are another matter.

....

So who can truly say why this ad was subjected to another artist's reworking. Back then, advertising exec's were vocal in their assertion that illustration should be considered on a par with fine art, or what they called"art-art". Accordingly, they were forever chasing the newest trend in fine art. Perhaps Bolles was a victim of this trend and his precise illustrative style fell out of favor. But let's hope today's example is the exception and not the rule.

Meet Armida, and How!

I had in mind an entirely different theme for today's post but it went up in smoke after coming a recent entry on the actress, Armida Vendrell featured in the fabulous and fabulously informative Starlet Showcase. The name rang a loud bell in my head. I recognized her as one of the cinema starlets occasionally featured on the cover of Film Fun, debuting in 1929 with the It Girl, Clara Bow and ending in 1932 with the utterly obscure, Margaret Poggi. The Poggi cover---which will be featured in an upcoming post--is a real poser; it was both a superb effort by Bolles yet a total departure from his typical style. But that story must wait, so back to Armida.

Aside from the cover painting there was not a lick about her inside the magazine, which was odd. As light on information as Film Fun was, the editors typically tucked in a short half-page feature on the cover girl, usually nothing more than a couple extra stock photos and a fake interview. So it was a real delight to get to read about Armida in the Starlet Showcase entry and better yet, see some great pics of her. Admittedly, Bolles likeness is a bit weak, and the same could be said for most of the other "specially posed by..." covers (See. I did it! I actually wrote something negative about our man Enoch). Compare for yourself with this terrific photo of Armida I expropriated from Starlet Showcase. It's a curiosity in itself because I'm nearly certain it was swiped for a pinup (Gene Pressler? Bradshaw Crandell? Maybe I'm thinking of Bolles, he did something similar in a 1938 Film Fun). Just to be clear, there was never any special posing; not with Armida, or Clara or Loretta or Alice. No famous, near famous or mere Hollywood hopeful sat for Bolles in his modest New York studio. He worked from publicity shots, which the Film Fun mail room received by the crate load. Except...there might be one lone exception. Long ago Enoch's daughter told me she had heard Lupe Velez actually did pose for him, and I am inclined to believe her as the cover Film Fun painting of Lupe is miles beyond any other. But it must be said that Armida's getup is another matter entirely. The designs are fabulous and knowing Bolles very likely historically correct. It's only too bad that in 1930, when this issue was published, Film Fun was skimping on printing and paper quality. This cover deserved better.

In a Bar... Far, Far Away

So there I was, sitting in a bar in the back streets of Nara, Japan. It's the reason this blog has been bereft of posts for the past several weeks. The trip was for work but all the while I kept my eyes peeled for any Bolles connections (hence the late night excursion). If you look long and hard enough I've found that eventually something will turn up. It was just a year or so back that while I was working in Stockholm I came across a Bolles image in the most unlikely of places, one of those just-so Steig Larsson type associations, and I was hoping there would be something of the same in Japan. I had tried to get in touch with a collector I knew in Tokyo who has three Bolles originals, but that didn't pan out. And my very last night in Japan I found myself in an well worn neighborhood pub in Nara--which happens to be 1,300 years old this year--called Ryoma, named after the famous reformist samurai, Ryoma Sakamoto, who lived just prior to the Meiji restoration. Initially a traditionalist who favored isolation and tradition, he read extensively and became a strong advocate of opening the borders of Japan and embracing modernization, so much so that he brandished pistols along with samurai swords (by a twist of fate a gun was used to assassinate him), but this story is not about Sakamoto, as seminal of a figure that he was. That's somebody else's blog. No this story is about Enoch Bolles.

After studying a poster of this image of Sakamoto my eyes drifted to an image hanging on another wall, this one a poster for poster for Kirin beer. Alas, the bar was dark and the photo I took of it didn't come out but I found the same image on the web. It really knocked me out, and the closer I looked the more of a Bolles vibe I got from it. Take a look for yourself. As with a Bolles, her hands are very prominent in the composition and are oh so carefully posed. There are the little details in the rendering of the kimono, the contrasting color in the sleeves and the hint of the flower pattern in the obi. The almost airbrushed quality of the color also reminds me of Bolles in his later years. Ok ok, I'll admit that I'm really pushing the idea of an association here but Film Fun was available in Japan until it was banned in 1936, and this poster was done in 1939. So who can truly say.

But let's move from speculation to fact. Here we see the only existing example of a Bolles cover with an Asian theme. It's not unlikely that this may be the only example of an Asian pinup by any cover artist to see print in the 1930s. If there were, none came anywhere close to this level of eroticism. As many of you know each cover of Tattle Tales featured a girl from an exotic corner of the world. Unfortunately Bolles' run of covers for Tattle Tales lasted barely a year. It makes me wish he was with the magazine long enough for a return trip to the Far East.

A Bolles Out of the Blue!

Do you feel this way? Does your heart start thumping when you read a story about someone uncovering a trove of old nitrite silent films in an attic, or discovering a new species of butterfly in the rain forest? To me these sorts of events are antidotes to the feeling that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Every now and again something unexpected turns up that surprises us and renews our curiosity. Well today's post is one of these events. It's been quite a stretch since the last time I've come across what for me is a "new" Bolles cover, and longer yet when his work pops up on a magazine I'd not expected him to have any connection to.

But here's a Bolles cover to Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, a sort of precursor to Time and Life (the 1930's iteration). It was part of the Leslie-Judge publishing company but I had never considered that Bolles would have done any covers for it. There's more, this issue appeared in 1914, and unless I'm missing other examples it is only the third magazine cover illustration magazine cover Bolles had done at that point. The cover was printed in only two or three colors, was intended to be photo-real. It's an incredible departure for Bolles, both in the topic and style in which it was done. I ran across it totally by accident, Bolles name was misspelled in the cover credit as Enoch Bowles. If perhaps you aren't yet convinced it is our Bolles and I can understand that given how different it looks, check out the EB initials in lower left corner. They are composed in exactly the style Bolles so often used in the mid-1920s. So let's hope there are more of these Bolles out of the blue show up, sooner rather than later.

Out of Uniform

I've been lagging on my promise to post some additional Bolles covers featuring more imaginative interpretations of sailor suits and so here they are. Working through Bolles' oeuvre you'll find a fair number of examples of sailors and other nautical themes. Bolles himself did some sailing and one of his earliest jobs was at the Philadelphia shipyards where he did illustrations of ships. In fact, one of the earliest surviving examples of his work is of a sailing ship. Bolles even built a boat in which he piloted his family down the Hackensack river.

What is most special about these two covers is the display of Bolles at his best fashion sense. I will admit to some lack of objectivity in asserting that Bolles may have been the first true pinup artist, but I will defend to the end my contention that he far and away had the best fashion sense of any pinup artist, good-girl artist, or whatever label suits your fancy. Bolles knew his stuff and he honed his skills and fashion sensibilities producing illustrations of clothes for both women and men. We'll take a closer look at Bolles' little known career in fashion illustration in an upcoming post.