Elvgren: His Life & Art
Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish may be the best-known American illustrators, but, say this lavish album's authors, had Gil Elvgren "not fallen into creating `pretty girl' calendar and advertising art, he might have earned a reputation to rival Rockwell's." Fortunately, many may think, he did fall. This glowing volume offers an authoritative biography of Elvgren, analysis of his career, and lush reproduction of his work, which, in the '40s and '50s, was everywhere--on Coca-Cola trays and ads, as Brown & Bigelow pinups, and in the auto parts retailer NAPA's calendars. "Elvgren, like Rockwell, is Americana," the authors maintain, "but it is Americana mixed lightly with erotica--an irresistible cocktail." Many of the reproductions are juxtaposed with the photographs of carefully posed models that Elvgren used as templates for his art. Seeing the real and the ideal, photo and painting, together discloses Elvgren's exceptional capability for subtly altering already pretty models' features to produce images of astonishingly bright attractiveness, at once wholesome and sexy. Elvgren was a master, as this book demonstrates.Mike Tribby