Frolicking nymphs by Paul-Albert Laurens

The Sea Nymphs

At at time when the portrayal of nude women as such was not permissable in public display, simply ensuring that the subject had a classical or mythological theme magically transformed them into an acceptable subject.

Perhaps the best (or worst) example of this is the painting The Sea Nymphs by Paul-Albert Laurens.  Really there is nothing even faintly classical about this painting (no chained Prometheus in evidence, for example); it is simply two naked girls at the edge of the sea.  Not that this is a bad thing!

Catching the Waves

In fact Laurens must have thought it was a good enough thing to produce a very similar painting Catching the Waves.  The fact that this painting does not rejoice in a classical sounding title and that the young ladies are physicallly in much closer contact suggests that it was painted for a gentleman collector rather than for public display although, it has to be said, that the French were rather more relaxed about such subjects than the British.

Paul-Albert Laurens, self portrait with family (1923)

Paul-Albert Laurens (1870-1934) was the son of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921).  His younger brother, Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932) became a painter too.  Laurens, who was a friend of Andre Gide, later was professor of drawing at the Polytechnic School from 1919 until 1938.  Like a number of other Franch artists he did a lot of work on camouflage schemes during World War 1.

Danse Galante by Margit Gaál

This beautifully flowing lithograph was by the Hungarian (or possible Ukrainian) artist Margit Gaál.  Very little is known about her except that she was born in 1898.  This picture came from a limited edition of 100 signed lithographs published in Paris in 1920 called Songes Galantes.  This picture, Danse Galantes, was the last of the twelve pictures in the work.

It's not clear at first as to the sex of the standing figure, who has masculine clothes and short hair but the curves of the figure and the dainty feet suggest it is a girl; perhaps one of the tribades that were fashionable in Paris at this time.

Whatever, it is a striking composition full of energetic abandon.

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 Initiation by Bob Veze

We have had a request for this pictorial from Gallery magazine from May 1976 photographed by Bob Veze and as it fits our current girl/girl thread, here it is.

Gallery had been launched as a Playboy clone and copied just about everything from Hefner's magazine from the style of the cartoons to the layout of the words on the centrefold.  However, by 1976 they had got dragged into the pubic wars as well and started to ape Penthouse rather more than Playboy.  That meant bolder genital shots and girl/girl pictorials.

This pictorial featured a title page and then four double page spreads with smaller pictures inserted; a style, we have to say, that we not only don't like for aesthetic reasons (it really is a bit over-designed in that mid seventies cod art deco style) but because it is a pig to scan!

The story behind this is that new girls arriving at the particular college have to be initiated sexually by one of their sorority sisters in front of a male student.  The male student isn't shown in the pictorial but girl/girl pictorials were still relatively new in magazines at this time and they were all very concerned to indicate that these girls weren't lesbians. They didn't want to alienate their male readers!

Although there is a bit of kissing, oral nipple contact and pussy flashing here it's not that naughty really and is about at the same level as Penthouse and Genesis from this period.  That is, until the final spread where one young lady has her face right in the other's groin which was naughtier than anything Penthouse had done.  Photographer Bob Veze adopts the Penthouse style of floaty, romantic attire and natural light but not the soft-focus.

Bob Veze studied painting and graphic design at Kent State University, Ohio, and then studied film at the University of Souther California.  He worked for a number of advertising agencies doing photography and graphic design including a stint as graphics consultant for Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas.

From another girl/girl set for the short-lived Male magazine in July 1979

He started shooting glamour photographs, in tandem with his other work, in 1975 and worked for Gallery, Chic, Hustler, Genesis, Swank, Club and Penthouse over the next 25 years.

Temptress (aka Nita S Harbaugh) photographed by Vese in 1989

From 1981 until 1986 he produced and directed dozens of films for Electric Blue which was the highest rated programme on the Playboy Channel, although most of the content was originated in the UK where it was produced by the Paul Raymond organisation.

Naughty sailor girl for Hustler, January 1978

These days he is more involved in digital media whilst still doing a lot of commercial work.  At least, unlike many of his contemporaries, he doesn't try to hide the work he did on men's magazines in the past.

So, we like the photographs in The Initiation but the pictorial is rather ruined by the over fussy graphics and the annoying picture in picture effect.

Pairing Off by Art Capone

Here is another girl/girl set from the UK edition of Penthouse which never appeared in then US edition.  Appearing in UK Volume 10 Number 2 from May 1975 it was a comparatively short pictorial at just five pages.

It's a very different set to the girl/girl ones which had appeared in the US edition so far in that it is shot entirely inside rather than having the girls wandering around in the woods. 

Its soft focus but not aggressively so.  This is the first girl/girl set in a bathroom!  The accompanying text is really a very short story, complete with dialogue, rather than the usual third person description of the girls.

The two girls, named as Kerry and Laura (one of these is a rather resonant name for Agent Triple P; the story involves a bath too!) are portrayed as flatmates with Laura pursuing contact with an initially unwilling Kerry.

Overlapping images like this were common in the UK mens' magazines at the time, such as Men Only and Club International, but were not in US Penthouse.

The text shows Laura, inevitably, getting her way. Kerry shivered.  "I thought after it happened the last time we decided we wouldn't again?"  Laura was pressing her fingers into Kerry's bottom and trying to ben her legs and force the dark triangle of dark curly hair onto her mouth and her tongue.

In the non-bathroom shots we get a very early example of a Penthouse girl wearing stockings and suspenders; possible the first ever.

This shot is the very first example, too, of one of the girls actually touching the other's pubic hair.  Again, this set may have been deemed a bit strong for the US market at the time.  They had shown a man touching a girl's groin the previous year but, as we have seen before, they seemed to be a bit more circumspect in their girl/girl sets in the early seventies.

Art Capone, the photographer, sounds like a nom de plume but he is credited as having shot a few pictorials for Knave magazine in the mid seventies too. 

This set, with its bestockinged girls, less extreme soft focus and brighter lighting looks forward to the Penthouse approach in the late seventies and early eighties.

None of the previous Penthouse girl/girl sets had given us quite such an aggressive spread thigh shot  as this one. 

Sadly, we can't find out any information on the photographer or the models but we like this pictorial which is very much a forerunner of things to come.

Girls in garters

Here is another nice early twentieth century illustration of two ladies horsing round in garters.  It's an anonymous piece so we can't even guess the nationality of the artist but its likely to be French, given the period.

The word "garter" comes from the old french word gartier which itself originates from garet (probably a Celtic word), meaning the bend at the back of the leg.  This refers to the top of the calf where garters were tied; that being the slimmest part of the leg.  In modern French the word is Jarretière.

Garters would soon be replaced by suspender belts (garter belts in Amercia) for younger women and corsets with suspenders for older women until these too largely disappeared in the twenties.  As skirts got shorter in this period stockings got longer, invariably going over the knee to the thigh; hence the need for suspenders.

In this picture we can see two types of garter: the traditional tie ones which were used from ancient times and were always tied below the knee and the elasticated ones which could be placed above the knee and were produced from 1820, when Englishman Thomas Hancock invented elasticated material.

Artists by Henry Fuseli

This delicate eighteenth century drawing of a lady artist overcome with the charms of her model is by Henry Fuseli, (1741-1825) a Swiss artist who settled in Britain.  Most known for his rather fantastical paintings, particularly illustrations of Milton, Shakespeare and the Nibelung legends, he also produced a number of beautifully rendered erotic drawings.

Fuseli was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich in 1741. His father was also a painter but his education was classical rather than in art, as it was his family's intention that he entered the Church.  He had to leave Switzerland, having exposed a corrupt but influential official.  He travelled in Germany and then arrived in England at the age of 24.  Supporting himself by writing (he spoke and wrote fluently in German, French, Italian and English) he was encouraged to pursue art as a career by Sir Joshua Reynolds who had been impressed by some of his drawings.

From 1770 to 1778 he stayed in Italy studying the great masters and changed his name to the more Italianate Fuseli as a tribute.  He returned to Britain in 1779.  In 1788 he married Sophia Rawlins who had been one of his models (although, on the whole Fuseli eschewed models and drew figures in the classical manner).  They moved into a house at 37 Foley Street in Bloomsbury, London, not far from one of Agent Triple P's former offices (which, sadly, now sits over a Dominos Pizza parlour.

We will look at the rest of Fusili's life when we examine some more of his drawings another time.

Harem Scene by Achille Devéria

We have already looked at a couple of lesbian illustrations by French artist Achille Deveria.  This one, however, allows us to introduce a new theme, that of the harem.

If there was anything liable to excite the gentleman collector in the nineteenth century it would be the concept of the harem (from the Arab word haram meaning forbidden place).  A fascination with North Africa, the Near and Middle East was prevalent amongst travellers and artists.  The Turkish harem in Istanbul, the Seraglio, was of particular interest. 

Not only did the harem represent a single male having total sexual power over numerous women but it also had the added frisson of what all these women did in their idle spare time, when not servicing their master.  The answer, of course, in the  fervid imaginations of nineteenth century artists was largely sexual.  Depiction of these sorts of activities were not acceptable in publicly exhibited work at the time so artists confined themselves to portraying the inhabitants of the harem endlessly having massages or lolling around pools and baths, which gave a wonderful opportunity to depict numerous naked female bodies, of course.

In this picture the young lady is quite clearly getting intimate with the other's pussy and Devéria shows her pink labia clearly.  What makes the scene, however, is, firstly, the man observing from outside the window.  He has a very serious expression as if the performance is of serious academic interest. Secondly, and Devéria's masterstroke, is having the girl in the turban looking straight at the viewer as if, possibly, he is peeking in from another window.  A voyeuristic masterpiece!

More harem girls another time.

Two women enjoying tribadism

Much erotic art, because of its illicit nature, is, of course, anonymous.  Before printing of this material became widely available it was  produced for wealthy collectors as one-off commissions. Sometimes, often years or decades or even centuries later, certain art can be attributed to a known artist or illustrator but quite often the artist remains unknown.

This is the case with this very nice watercolour of two ladies enjoying a tribadism session. 

The use of the word tribadism has changed somewhat over the years.  Originally from the Greek tribo, meaning "to rub", it first became used in Roman times where a tribas was a woman (or a hermaphrodite) who penetrated another woman (in whatever way).  Generally, over the centuries, the term tribade was used to denote a lesbian with the first recorded mention of it being by Ben Jonson in 1601 in his series of poems called the  The Forest (which also contains the poem Song: To Celia which includes the famous opening line "Drink to me only with thine eyes."

From Poem X: Praeludium:

Go,  cramp dull Mars, light Venus, when he snorts,
Or, with thy tribade Trine, invent new sports;

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the word tribadism appeared, meaning the activity of a tribade.  At some point the definition narrowed (probably because of the increasing use of the words lesbian and lesbianism) back to the particular sexual act of genital rubbing itself.

In its wider definition this can mean rubbing against any part of the partners body or even an inanimate object.  It can also be practiced between a man and a woman (Triple P had a girlfriend, R, who liked to rub herself against his thigh) but is mainly now used in relation to two girls.  The French use the word frottage (which is certainly easier to pronounce!) again from the verb to rub in French (frotter).  Today, this much softer word now seems to be largely associated with male homosexual activity so it is best not to use it in unfamiliar company!

Triple P has witnessed two of his lady friends indulging in this activity (in Vancouver, naturally) and it seemed quite energetic and needing a reasonable sense of rthymn and co-ordination!

The ladies in this particular painting (which we are unable to date, even from style, but is probably nineteenth century) are in an unusual position for this activity.  It is however a more visual position from the artist's point of view as both vulva and a posterior are nicely visible.  Although the activity is enjoyably equally mutual, according to Triple P's observations, in this picture we get the feeling that the girl on the right is iin charge and the girl on the left is overwhelmed by her friend's activity.  An experienced girl and a new initiate, perhaps?

Whatever, a nicely delicate watercolour.

Two women on a bed by ME Philipp

Here is a nice, langourous little engraving by German artist Martin Erich Philipp.  Philipp was born in 1887 in Zwickau, in Saxony, which was also the birthplace of Robert Schumann, so Agent Triple P is writing this post to the accompaniment of his Symphony No. 3 “Rhenish” in E flat major, Op. 97; one of our very favourite Romantic symphonies.

Nude study

Philipp studied at the School of Applied Arts in Dresden from 1904 until 1908.  He then transferred to the Dresden Academy of Art where he studied until 1913.

Bookplate (1919)

He was most famous for his engravings and woodcuts and produced a number of mildly erotic bookplate designs as well as some other erotic illustrations.

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Akt auf dem Diwan (1912)

He did produce some paintings but mainly specialised in coloured prints especially still life studies of flowers and some very fine Japanese-inspired prints of birds.  

Seated girl in stockings (1920)

The picture at the top of this post was produced just before the First World War, either while he was still at the Dresden Academy or shortly afterwards.  It captures the pre-war atmosphere of the Decadents in just a few beautifully executed lines.

Martin Erich Philipp

We will return to Philipp and look at some of his other erotic engravings and drawings another day.

The Vice (1914)

Black and White and Delightful all Over by Siwar Ohlsson

Penthouse in the UK largely had the same pictorials as the US edition.  Indeed, as the magazine started in the UK, the US version often had pictorials, in the early days, which had already appeared in Britain. 

As regards girl/girl pictorials the UK edition had already reproduced Two Women, Woodstock Generation, Two's Company and Rites of Spring although they passed on Mirage.  

In December 1974, however, the UK edition ran a pictorial called What's Black and White and Delightful all Over? which never appeared in the US edition. 

Penthouse was often criticised for its lack of ethnic models, compared with Playboy who ran a strict quota system.  UK magazines at this time also featured quite a few black girls.  It may be that the editorial team in the US felt that this particular pictorial, by Swedish photographer Siwar Ohlsson, was too daring on the racial front.

It may just have been that the US edition was already running a love set that month called Bawdy Bathers by Jeff Dunas.

It may be that, perhaps, it was a little stronger than the girl/girl sets that had appeared in the US edition so far.

Whatever the reason, it is a shame to miss out on what is a rather nice pictorial so here it is from Volume 9 number 9.

The pictorial was shot in the Canary Islands.  The "white" in the title is, according to the text, 18 year old Swedish model Carina Sjogqvist. 

This breast kissing shot may have been the one that precluded the pictorial from the US edition as at this stage the lesbian overtones in the US pictorials were more in the text than in the actual visual representation.

The "black" in the title, again, according to the text, is a 23 year old model from the Seychelles called Lucienne Camille.

Lucienne/Sylvia

In fact, whilst her parents may have been from the Seychelles, Lucienne was actually born in Kent in 1940, meaning that she was 34 when this pictorial appeared.

Lucienne was a model, stripper and actress.  Whatever, she was the possessor of a seriously impressive body and a beautiful face.

Lucienne with the cast of Up Pompeii

 

As an actress she had a recurring role in Frankie Howard's TV comedy series Up Pompeii (1969) and a number of films (mainly in Italy) and TV appearances after that. Her final role being in long running British TV series, The Bill, in 1990.

Lucienne appeared in a number of men's magazines in the seventies including Mayfair, Men Only and Fiesta, originally under her real name of Sylvia Bayo; including a rare  boy/girl set in Private which we may feature another time.  She died in 2006 at the age of sixty-five.