The Pin-Up

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The Pin-Up

Although the "pin-up" gets its name from the act of display it encourages, which might apply to any mass produced and widely distributed image, the term commonly identifies a more narrow category of pictures, from glossy portraits of Hollywood stars to Playboy's monthly "centerfolds." With an even tighter focus, "pinups" usually designate pictures of pretty girls wearing skimpy bathing suits, exotic lingerie, or sometimes even less, in "sexy" images that only the most puritanical viewer would now condemn as obscene. The term's most evocative use recalls the drawn, painted, or photographed representations of idealized, all-American femininity produced in the decades surrounding World War II. While the pin-up has obvious precursors in naughty French postcards from the turn of the twentieth century, and late variants like the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the form is exemplified by the odd balance of eroticism, innocence, healthiness, and patriotism found in commercial images of women produced between the 1920s and 1960s.

Viewed within a large frame, the pin-up is a species of the portrait, yanked down off the walls of exclusive galleries and museums and posted in ordinary gas stations and poolhalls. Generated by the development and proliferation of inexpensive processes of photography, lithography, and color printing, the pin-up contributed to more democratic, and perhaps inevitably more vulgar, understandings of celebrity, voyeurism, consumption, and eroticism, closing the gap in taste and appreciation between classical nudes and burlesque showgirls. Early professional photographers like Nadar in France and Napoleon Sarony in New York specialized in the celebrity portrait, redefining the concept of fame through the mass production and distribution of commercial publicity stills. Although pictures of prominent theatrical performers were common by the turn of the twentieth century, the pin-up thrived as a component of the film industry, as talented photographers like Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, and Ted Allen were exclusively employed by the Hollywood studios to idealize their most precious commodities, the movie stars. Much of the residual glamour of Hollywood's golden age certainly derives from the striking black and white images these photographers produced of screen celebrities like Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford.

Preceding the Hollywood dream factory, commercial illustrators and graphic artists such as Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy had already glorified the American girl in the pages of popular illustrated magazines like Life and Collier's : the cleanly etched "Gibson Girl"—first appearing in 1887—and her younger sisters helped define the modern ideal of femininity that would eventually coalesce as the jazz age's flapper. From the 1920s onward, popular magazine, calendar, and advertising artists like Antonio Vargas, Gil Elvgren, Earl Moran, Zoe Mozert, and George Petty produced hundreds of "cheesecake" images of sleek, flawless, all-American femininity marked by the "tease" of blowing skirts and sheer fabric rather than by explicit nude display. By World War II, the Vargas girl and Hollywood pin-ups like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth came to represent not only American femininity but the very values American soldiers were defending. The erotic titillation of pin-ups was thus effectively linked to patriotic sentiment and memories of the homefront, especially through the five million prints of Grable's famous bathing-suit pose (photographed by Frank Powolny in 1943) distributed to American soldiers around the globe. As the French film critic Andre Bazin later recognized, "A wartime product created for the benefit of the American soldiers swarming to a long exile at the four corners of the world, the pin-up girl soon became an industrial product, subject to well-fixed norms and as stable in quality as peanut butter or chewing gum."

After the war, the classic, scantily clad pin-up continued to thrive until an underground tradition was brought into the mainstream in 1955 by Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine, which provided an entire "Playboy philosophy" of robust, healthy heterosexuality to justify its monthly inclusion of a nude Playmate at the heart of each issue. Playboy redefined the pin-up by shifting the earlier period's emphasis on long legs to an all-but-exclusive fascination with large breasts. Eventually, with the appearance of pubic hair and further investigations of all the classic pin-up had (barely) concealed, Playboy and other "men's magazines" left little to the once-necessary erotic imagination. The concept of "tease" which had crucially defined the voyeur's relation to earlier pin-ups now seemed rather prim. At the very least, the presumably long-standing function of the pin-up as an aid to self-arousal could no longer be denied. Finally, against the widespread competition of explicit pornography in the mainstream market by the 1970s, Playboy held its relatively demure ground, maintaining an airbrushed glamour ignored by the more gynecological perspectives provided in subsequent magazines like Bob Guccione's Penthouse and Larry Flynt's Hustler.

Playboy, by publishing an early nude photograph of Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, had collapsed the distinction between "inno-cent" sexiness in mainstream "leg art" and a more surreptitious tradition of straightforward sexual imagery. But for specialized tastes, alternatives to the Vargas girl and Hefner's Playmates were also available. Although fetishistic photographs had been produced in Europe at an early stage in the medium's development, in the United States a mail-order market for "kinky" images only developed much later. In the late 1940s Irving Klaw and his sister Paula, the owners of Movie Star News, a New York shop that sold Hollywood movie stills, began producing their own photographs of women in fetish gear and bondage poses to satisfy the requests of their more discriminating customers. Among Klaw's models, a young woman with jet-black bangs named Betty (or Bettie) Page quickly became a customer favorite, and decades after she disappeared from sight, Page became a cult icon among comic book fans and collectors of 1950s kitsch, perhaps because she so effectively summarized the cultural contradictions of the post-war period: Page, like most pin-ups, was a pretty girl-next-door type, but she also wore stiletto heels and leather bondage gear. In retrospect, Betty Page seemed the ideal pin-up of a period that produced both the McCarthy witchhunts and the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality.

Another specialized market for pin-ups was also first addressed in Europe, where the photographs of nude boys taken by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden in the Sicilian village of Taormina around the turn of the twentieth century circulated among homosexual collectors. In the United States, a number of studios mirroring Klaw's Movie Star News marketed their images to homosexual consumers. Because the period demanded secrecy and obfuscation, pin-ups of nude or loin-clothed young men were commonly sold to "physique" or "muscle-building" enthusiasts, but the erotic component of images produced by "beefcake" pioneers like Bruce of Los Angeles (Bruce Harry Bellas), Chicago's Kris Studios, and most notably Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, through its regular catalog Physique Pictorial, was never very hidden. Although the pin-up has commonly been assumed to be a form depicting women for an audience of heterosexual males, the homosexual tradition of pin-ups has a lengthy history as well: in fact, one of the young artists who regularly contributed his drawings to Physique Pictorial, who called himself Tom of Finland, would eventually emerge as the gay Vargas, exaggerating the features of his muscular young men just as the earlier artist idealized his female figures. Recuperated and celebrated in later decades, the "physique" photographs of the post-war period, like Betty Page's bondage pictures, revise simple and nostalgic stereotypes of the era's conservative values and sexual inhibitions.

The legacy of the classic Hollywood pin-up survives in the work of contemporary celebrity photographers like Matthew Rolston, Annie Liebovitz, Bruce Weber, and Herb Ritts, whose subjects are as likely to be rock musicians or "supermodels" as movie stars. Posters of attractive women in bathing suits or underwear, from Farrah Fawcett or Madonna to the Spice Girls, have also never disappeared from adolescent bedroom walls. But the classic pin-up, save for a thriving network of nostalgic collectors, seems to have certainly succumbed to, on the one hand, feminism's largely effective redefinition of women as social subjects rather than simply sexual objects and, on the other hand, the increased availability of hard-core pornography, whose blatant meanings no longer encourage the slightly muted eroticism essential to the classic pin-up.

—Corey K. Creekmur