Still Life by Gil Elvgren

Still Life by Gil Elvgren

Triple P was chatting to B in Germany on Skype earlier this evening. What a wonderful invention that is, in that it enables us to see her showing off her latest lingerie purchases.  Even in stop/start, slightly green blur-o-vision it can be quite an enticing experience.

Anyway, B, recalling our recent visit to Turkey, suggested that we might put some harem-themed pictures on this blog.  Not that we are short of themes but the more we thought about it the more we thought it was a splendid idea. The allure of the harem has held a fascination for Western artists for hundreds of years and their sometimes fevered imaginations have conjured up a whole host of exotic and erotic images based on a very loose idea of the reality of these places.  Mostly their minds register a few key facts:  single dominant male, multiple women sequesterd from the eyes of other men, therefore no need to overly protect their modesty with clothes, women as sexual playthings who need to channel this sexuality when not with the dominant male etc.  Add to this exotic architecture, textiles, furniture and clothing and it is an artist's dream come true!

Enchanting (c.1953)

So to start us off we have a pinting by pin-up artist supreme Gil Elvgren.  This painting was sometimes known under the title Harem although it is, really, nothing of the kind. It's actual title is Still Life (Mr Elvgren evidently had a sense of humour) and is a very atypical painting.  Although Elvgren painted nudes reasonably regularly they are not that large a part of his finished works.  The contract he had with the Brown & Bigelow calendar company allowed for a maximum of one nude a year (out of twenty four he was required to paint).  They had to meet contemporary standards of taste, of course, which meant no pubic hair. 

Reclining Oriental Nude in Studio (1947)

Elvgren did occasionally paint some very fine nudes for his own amusement, of course, and one of these Reclining Oriental Nude in Studio he hung in his studio, but there are very few of them.

Still Life, with it's graphic full frontal nudity, looks like an illustration rather than one of his fine art works.  It isn't really a harem painting either but belongs to the white slave captured by Arab tribesmen in the desert sub-genre.  This is an equally powerful Middle Eastern scenario of a sheikh and his captured western woman.  In fact the sheikh doesn't look that Arabic and his harem girls are more Madison Avenue than Moroccan.  The girl holding our naturally red-headed beauty is obviously, along with the inevitable Nubian guard, procliming the worth of their captive.  The sheik's favourite, however, is looking at her in a "what do you want her for when you've got me?" sort of way.  The sheihk seems delighted, however, with his pale-skinned prize, and can't take his eyes off that beautifully rendered ginger bush.  The flame-haired woman, who has obviously been just unveiled with some flourish, can't bear to look as she contemplates a fate worse than death.  At least she has managed to gold on to her high-heeled shoes!

There are some wonderful touches in this painting: from the beautifully done still lief itself to the sense of heat and light outside conveyed just by two perfectly chosen colours representing the sky and sand outside, visible through the tent flap.  But the focus is our captive beauty who, unlike the other figures, is carefully and tightly rendered, ensuring that her brightly lit body still manages to dominate a painting packed with blocks of strong colour.

Couple in a Pool by John LaGatta

Couple in a pool (c. 1950)

Looking at the pictures of Sandy Robertson, and her man in the pool from Penthouse, Triple P was reminded of a painting by John LaGatta which he has now located amongst the approximately 1 million picture files he has in his computer.  The woman floats on the surface of the water in a brief bikini whilst the man emerges from the depths like a watery predator for a snatched kiss.  It is a wonderfully delicate yet erotic picture from one of America's finest illustrators.

When it came to portraying the female body, LaGatta was an absolute master and women were very much his favourite subject.  Although he did some nudes, as most of his illustrations were for womens' magazines his figures were invariably dressed. 

However, he had the amazing ability to make even his dressed women look undressed.  He also managed to imbue an immense amount of sexual charge into his pictures of men and women.  The picture of the three women and the man, above, just oozes sex.

Even when he illustrated women on their own, he used such a sensuous line that looking at the pictures today you start to wonder if the women are having a relationship with each other, as in this cover picture for The Saturday Evening Post.

Illustration for The Saturday Evening Post (1930)

LaGatta was born in Naples, Italy in 1894 and after his family moved to New York studied art at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, having first started off in his father's jewellery business. 

Bathing Beauties (1933)

He first came to prominence during the period of the First World War going on to do illustrations for the likes of  Life, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan together with advertising work. 

Illustration for "No Scarlet Woman" American magazine 1940

In 1916 he joined the Amsden commercial studio and never looked back.  Unlike many later illustrators, who worked from photographs, LaGatta always used models who he carefully selected himself.

Golden Locks (1933)

LaGatta's family, although having aristocratic lineage, were very poor and later in life, as a successful illustrator, Lagatta very much appreciated the finer things in life.  At the beginning of World War 2, LaGatta moved to California and taught at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.  He died in 1977.

John LaGatta

LaGatta never did any explicit erotic works, although some of his advertising nudes were considered very racy at the time, but then he managed to get more sex appeal into his clothed couples than most so called erotic artists did in their naked ones.

The Women of Franklin Street: John Currin

The Women of Franklin Street (2010)

The existence of photographic erotica would, you might have thought, have spelt the end of erotic illustrations.  Nothing could be further from the truth,of course, as the abstraction available to an artist can be used to create an image that the all-seeing lens of the camera is too blunt an instrument to convey.  Ever since Delacroix, artists used the new medium of photography as reference for their work and, indeed, the first French postcards of academic nudes were supposed to provide photographic reference for those without access to artist's models.

Dogwood 1997

Certain artists have taken erotic photographs and reverse engineered them into graphic works.  Most notably, amongst fine artists, is probably John Currin (1962-) who produced a series of paintings based on Danish seventies pornographic pictures a few years ago.  Currin infuses his distorted female bodies with a mixture of early Renaissance paintings, fifties women's magazines, Playboy and Fragonard.

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and received his batchelor of fine arts degres from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his masters from Yale.

Tarzan Meets La of Opar by Frank Frazetta

This unusually explicit watercolour by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) comes across like a sort of X-rated Edmund Dulac painting.  The jewel-like colours, simple backdrop and strong line contrasts with Frazetta's more usual impressionistic oils. 

La, Queen and High Priestess of the Flaming God of Opar, a lost city and colony of Atlantis in the heart of the African jungle, first appears in the second of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels; The Return of Tarzan (1913).  Because of inbreeding and cross-breeding with apes Oparian women are physically perfect whilst their men are brutish beasts. La, falls in love with the physically perfect Trazan but he rejects her as he is in love with Jane.

Apart from a few bits of jewellery and a splendid serpentine crown, Frazetta's La obviously thinks that the best way to seduce Tarzan is to let him know exactly what she is offering.  And offer she does; invitingly presenting her superbly fluffy pussy towards Lord Greystoke; her divided mound clearly visible.

An unusually seductive piece of fantasy art from its great master.