Twenty-five years after his death, Gil Elvgren’s pinups still sizzle.
A graduate of Chicago’s American Academy of Art, Gillette Alexander Elvgren painted everything from Coca-Cola ads to magazine illustrations–but he’s best know for his calendar girls.
Even if you don’t know Elvgren’s name, you’ve most likely seen his sassy models with their arched eyebrows, conspiratorial smiles and wind-blown skirts.
For decades, Hollywood set designers have used Elvgren images in such films as “Run Silent, Run Deep,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” as visual shorthand for homesick World War II soldiers.
Now, in the year of his posthumous 91st birthday, Elvgren’s paintings have surpassed the works of famed Playboy artist Alberto Vargas and Esquire’s George Petty in stature and value after decades of relative obscurity, according to pinup historian Greg Theakston. “In my opinion, he’s the top of the three. Petty and Vargas only drew figures,” Theakston says. “Elvgren created an entire scene. His color sense was immaculate. He was the best of the batch.”
Today, Elvgren’s appeal continues to grow.
“I’ve had more calls for Elvgren than any other artists — even more than Norman Rockwell,” says Craig Smith, licensing manager for Brown & Bigelow, the St. Paul company that commissioned Elvgren’s work for its calendars from 1945 to 1972.
“About 75 percent of my inquiry calls are for Elvgren, Smith says. “There’s a substantial demand for it.” Last March, the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida hosted an exhibit featuring some of Elvgren’s paintings. Tony Jones, president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is in negotiations to host an Elvgren homecoming show in 2006.
“I think it’s time somebody did an exhibition,” Jones said. “He’s one in that group of illustrators whose enormous body of work has been seen by everybody, without their names being widely known.”
But, for Elvgren, that’s changing.
A huge nostalgia in boom in the 1990s, thanks in part to renewed interest in pinup model Bettie Page, helped put a fresh spotlight on illustrated erotica.
Unlike Vargas and Petty, who had monthly magazine audiences, Elvgren’s cheesecake models appeared mostly in the Brown & Bigelow calendars. Though he was respected during his lifetime, he never enjoyed the level of fame and reverence enjoyed by Vargas. It wasn’t until 1996, when Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel wrote “The Great American Pin-Up” ($19.99, Taschen) that this started to shift.
“Elvgren was a shining light,” among the other artists in the book, says author and art dealer Meisel. “Elvgren was the one everyone gravitated to.”
Author Max Allan Collins (“Road to Perdition”) followed two years later with “Elvgren: His Life & Art” (now out of print), co-written with Elvgren’s youngest son, Drake Elvgren. In 1999, Martignette and Meisel devoted an entire book to the artist with “Gil Elvgren: All His Glamorous American Pin-Ups” ($19.99, Taschen). A tidal wave of books, calendars and licensed merchandise has since been unleashed on the public.
Dian Hanson became Taschen’s “sexy book editor” (her actual title) after the publication of the Elvgren books. For years, she says, fetish and fashion magazines had been swiping Elvgren compositions.
“He was the master of the forbidden peek. You got a sense that you were catching something that you weren’t supposed to . . . almost as if the girl was conspiring with the wind to have her skirt blow up,” Hanson says.
`Supposed to titillate’
“It’s cute; it’s not meant to bash you over the head with sexuality. It’s supposed to titillate you,” says historian Theakston. “The difference between porn and what Gil did was the tease. Tease always leaves you wanting more, and pornography delivers the full deal. I’d rather have tease anytime.”
Drake Elvgren remembers his dad as a shy man, “definitely not a hugger,” a sportsman and staunch conservative.
“He could have gotten along with anybody, as long as you weren’t a liberal,” he says, laughing.
In 1933, the 19-year-old Elvgren eloped with his high school sweetheart, Janet Cummins, and moved to Chicago to attend art school.
“Elvgren was really spawned out of Chicago,” says author Martignette. “Chicago really has been a nucleus for high-quality illustration.”
Graduating a few years later, Elvgren started working for mainstream magazines, and by 1942, was raising three children in the northern suburb of Winnetka. Three years later, he began a lucrative relationship with calendar produces Brown & Bigelow, to which he sold his pinups directly. Using live models and black-and-white reference photographs, Elvgren painted more than 400 images for the St. Paul company.
“Dad used to tell me, `You find me a cute face, I can fix the rest.’ He wanted a cute girl-next-door, the approachable girl — cute was more important than beautiful. He painted pretty much what he saw,” Drake says.
His “fixes” usually took the form of an elongated torso, pinched waist or a more pronounced bust line. One of his favorite models was Barbara Hale of “Perry Mason,” who posed for him in person. He favored high cheekbones and rosy complexions, adopting a conformity that, at the same time, retained the model’s natural beauty.
But Elvgren’s bread and butter were gimmicks. He even employed his children.
“He came to the breakfast table one morning and said, `I need a dozen skirt gimmicks this year. I’ll give you five bucks for each one you come up with,'” Drake remembers. “It was very difficult for doing this for all those years. I remember that I thought up one with a go-cart. That one’s mine.”
Though Elvgren was serious about his work, “I don’t think he had a lot of self-respect for his abilities,” Drake says.
He explains: “I think maybe he thought he sold himself short, that he left a more important area [of art] untouched,” Drake says. “Finally, near the end, he was a lot better than he gave himself credit for.”
But the sunset years of his career weren’t particularly rewarding for Elvgren. In the late 1960s, full-color nude photo spreads in men’s magazines had pushed pinups into the realm of novelty. By 1980, the year of his death, the magazine illustration market had all but dried up.
“I knew it was going to happen,” Drake says. “My dad died broke because the pinup business went away.”
No residuals
Elvgren sold nearly all of his pinup paintings directly to Brown & Bigelow, so his three children get no residuals.
A handful of collectors, including Meisel and Martignette, own the lion’s share of Elvgren’s work, which now demands handsome auction prices.
Earlier work can go for $25,000, Meisel says, “but a beautifully painted image can go from $60,000 to $100,000. Privately, I’ve gone as high as $300,000, believe it or not.”
“I think there are about 150 paintings that are missing and unaccounted for,” Martignette says.
“A lot of Elvgrens are in the Chicago area; they show up from time to time when someone goes through an attic. Any ordinary person could go to a thrift store, antique mall or flea market and find one. It’s not unheard of.”
Right now, the only public places Drake knows of to see his dad’s work are the World of Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, and Louis K. Meisel’s Gallery in New York.
Eventually, he’d like to see his dad’s respectability twinned with public accessibility.
“There are so many Elvgrens [in private hands],” Drake says.
“It bothers me; I wish they would get in museums somewhere so people can see them.”
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HOW TO SPOT AN ELVGREN GIRL
With their long legs and slim waistlines, artist Gil Elvgren conceded his girls “could not likely exist in nature,” according to biographer Max Allan Collins. “Nevertheless,” Elvgren said, “Nearly any calendar artist will lengthen the legs and pinch in the waist.”
Cute, not beautiful. Approachable; the girl next door.
Arched eyebrows. Expressive and mischievous.
Apple cheeks. Elvgren often accentuated the roundness of his models’ cheeks. He didn’t spare the rouge.
Teeth. Bright, shining smiles. Elvgren’s son says he can spot his dad’s paintings by the lack of lines defining individual teeth.
Elongated torso, legs and neck. Slim but not unrealistic waistline.
Movement. Composition and swooping brush strokes give Elvgren’s paintings a distinctive sense of motion.
Master of the forbidden peek. Accidental garter exposure–teasing, but not graphic–is an Elvgren hallmark.
Every picture tells a story. Like Norman Rockwell, Elvgren created a setting and a little plot for each painting. Pinups usually took him five days to complete.
Elvgren photographed his models–often composing entire scenes–to use for reference while creating his paintings.
“Most of my creative work is in front of the camera,” he told an interviewer in 1951. In one 8-hour photo session, the artist would take enough shots for several pinups.
Models earned about $100 a day in the 1960s.
Elvgren on beauty: “I’d rather work from a model who isn’t the most beautiful girl in the world, because if she looks too beautiful, then I have too much of a tendency to copy from the photograph.”
On models: “I need a natural, good model. The ideal model poses instinctively — sometimes even better than the artist can pose her.”
Pretty civilians is the term the artist used for the kinds of models he favored. One, Janet Rae, was the daughter of a close family friend. Another, Mariann Pilot, was a girlfriend of his son Drake.
Celebrities with the `look’: Gil Elvgren’s models included Barbara Hale of “Perry Mason” and “Airport” fame; aspiring Chicago actress Myrna Hansen; actress Lola Albright, who played the girlfriend of TV’s “Peter Gunn”; and actress Kim Novak.
— Robert K. Elder
