Be A Nartist

I found this ad in a 1957 Mechanix Illustrated magazine. Those magazines were aimed at guys; guys who liked to do things, or at least read about doing them. Something you didn't often see in the pages of this type of journal was the softer stuff; how to be an artist was among the subjects you wouldn't find. It didn't stop the art school from advertising, though.

I noticed something over the years: When showing an artist, advertising invariably showed the artist drawing or painting a girl. Not just any girl, but a girl in a bathing suit. A pin-up girl, a sexy girl. This is as subtle as a brick upside the head: artists got to draw girls. Sometimes nude girls. That'd be enough to entice some guys to part with some money for the course.

When I went to art school I remember thinking that we'd be drawing from a live model, some cute chick, but the model they provided for us was a male dancer who was past his prime. He was quite wrinkled in the face, but his physique was still good for his age. I don't think they'd invite him to dance in the ballet again, though. Anyway, no nude girls for us. Just some tired-looking over-the-hill gay guy.

The Twentieth Century was the time of the artistic pin-up, from the Gibson Girl of the earliest years of the century to the calendar girls, drawn by commercial illustrators like Gil Elvgren or Peter Driben. Around the time this ad for the art school was published in Mechanix Illustrated the pin-up art was beginning to fade and wind down. The magazines were going like Playboy, with photo covers. Not like these really cute Driben covers from the late 1940s-early 1950s.

Click on pictures for full-size images.Paintings of girls in cheesecake poses acting coy and coquettish were replaced by photos of real-live girls. Or as real as an airbrush makeover by a photo retoucher could be. The painted pin-ups looked way more appealing to me. I knew they were idealized females; the Playboy models were idealized, also; their photos were doctored, but not so the readers would know. As far as the young men who read Playboy were concerned, women had no moles or warts, no scars or varicose veins. Not in those pictures, anyway.

An artist can put in or take out what he wants. The photographer works with what he has.

As far as being a commercial artist who gets to stand at an easel, posing pretty girls the way he wants them, that seems to be something from the past. He replaced his brushes with a camera, and his canvas for a computer monitor.

Ciao for now.