Waldemar von Kozak

Robert Mcginnis

Robert McGinnis (born February 3, 1926)is an American artist and illustrator. McGinnis is known for his illustrations of more than 1,200 paperback book covers, and over 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffanys (his first film poster assignment), Barbarella, and several James Bond and Matt Helm films.

…

Wikipedia

Ted Withers

Ted (Edward) Withers was born in Wellington, New Zealand and after studying at Wellington College enrolled at the Royal Academy in London. later Withers studied at the South Kensington School of Art and the Slade School of Art. Further training was undertaken at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris. Withers was awarded three decorations for his service during World War One where he was stationed in Samoa, Egypt, France, and Germany.

Withers moved with his wife and two children to America in 1924 and worked a series of jobs in Hollywood including celebrity portraits, special effects, and art direction at MGM studios. After a period of time producing fine arts for his own enjoyment Withers took up painting pin-ups and produced numerous calendar girls for Brown & Bigelow during the 1950s. Brown & Bigelow were one of the biggest producers of calendars in the mid twentieth century and at one time were responsible for putting calendars in an estimated 50 million homes.

A distinctive feature of Withers pin up work was the inclusion of half rendered penciled figures alongside his finished portraits.

 In November 1950, at his first Brown & Bigelow cocktail party, Withers was talking with Norman Rockwell when Rolf Armstrong and Gil Elvgren arrived. These two pin-up greats were introduced to Withers, who was bowled over when Armstrong praised him as “one of America’s greatest, most versatile painters” and Elvgren, who had a keen interest in photography, added “one of the best photographers in the country”.

In a letter to Brown & Bigelow, Withers once described the view from his Hollywood apartment: “At night I look out on a carpet of jewels composed of neon and street lights, and here I work and am grateful that way over the eastern horizon, you nice people multiply my effort and enable me to live very well indeed”.

Withers continued producing pinups until 1961 and passed away in 1964.

source

 

 

Art Frahm

Art Frahm (1907–1981) was an American painter of campy pin-up girls and advertising. Frahm lived in Chicago, and was active from the 1940s to 1960s. He was commercially successful.

Frahm had adequate technical competence for his medium, with a style somewhat reminiscent of Norman Rockwell‘s, though more cartoony. He was mostly influenced by commercial artist Haddon Sundblom, with whom Frahm may have worked as an assistant early in his career. Frahm’s forte was depicting beautiful young white women, taking in rendering their legs and figures. Frahm’s depictions of the women’s faces are less successful, often tending towards plastic doll-like expressions. Minor problems with perspective and unrealistic depiction of subsidiary figures and objects are common in Frahm’s work. Some of his artistic touches were deliberately unrealistic and artistically daring—for instance, his coloring of a city street lemon-yellow in an otherwise realist painting.

Today, Frahm is best known for his “ladies in distress” pictures involving beautiful young women whose panties mysteriously fall to the ground in a variety of public situations, causing maximum embarrassment to his pin-up girls^[1] and often causing them to spill their bag of groceries. In one of Frahm’s noted idiosyncratic touches, celery is often depicted. The falling-panties art has a small cult following as mid-20th century kitsch, or even as fetish art. The works have been described with irony by James Lileks and Frahm’s art works are available on the Internet.^[2] The falling-panties paintings were imitated by other pin-up artists, such as Jay Scott Pike and Al Brulé.

In addition to pin-ups, Frahm created a series of humorous hobo-themed calendar illustrations. Another set of paintings celebrated traffic safety, complete with smiling, chubby crossing guards and schoolchildren (one such painting appears as a calendar print in the background of a bar scene in the movie Hud). His advertising art included works for Coca-Cola and Coppertone.

wikipedia