At First Blush

     Like most American boys of mid-century vintage my first exposure to images of the naked breast probably came through the pages of The National Geographic Magazine. This would have come before stumbling upon Art Treasures of the Louvre or even noticing the endless stream of figure drawings and paintings my mother brought home from the Art Students' League. Being the often emaciated chest of some far-flung and culturally unfathomable tribeswoman, these images were of some anatomical value, perhaps, but were less satisfying to the imagination than even the deftly rendered lingerie ads in the column breaks of the Daily News. When, a year or so later, I came to understand that a real artist drew naked ladies because that's what artists do, I would spend hours alternately copying the anatomically overwrought nudes of Michelangelo and da Vinci and the relentlessly perky and uplifting illustrations from the papers, often winding up with something along the lines of a muscle-bound, trans-gendered and be-tittied Batman.

 

   The true epiphany as to how fundamentally important the bosom was to the making of art dawned on me with the discovery of the legendary Land O' Lakes Indian Maiden Trick, wherein, with a bit of old-school cutting and pasting one could make real art out of a butter box. Possessed of a set of knees so transfigurative and peerless, the Indian Maiden could be fleshed out in a few minutes, becoming a pretty respectable if somewhat idealized depiction of the unveiled form, and was certainly more artful and anatomically correct than anything resulting from the famous Pep Boys Matchbook Trick.

   A few years later, walking home from school, I stumbled upon a battered trash can overflowing with Playboy magazines from the late 50's and early 60's. I stuffed as many as I could fit into my book-bag and snuck them into the house for further perusal. The pin-ups and photos in Playboy were still comparatively chaste in those days and focused primarily on the torso; indeed, most of the featured Bunnies wore toreador pants or pleated, cheerleader skirts while flaunting their assets. Maybe it was the soft focus or the photos' inherent lack of definitive line, but I could never seem to make a satisfactory copy from these shots. Turning a page one day I came upon the drawings of Alberto Vargas and that changed everything. I found that by carefully tracing the monthly Vargas Girl, transferring that to a piece of shirt cardboard and working it over with colored pencils, I was well on my way to creating a pretty good facsimile. 

   The first of these drawings I brought in to school and furtively shared with a few of my fellow Fifth Graders caused quite a sensation, nearly attracting the attention of Mr. McNought, a fiery Welshman who would certainly brook no smut in his classroom and was not above the use of corporal punishment. After school, though, while waiting for the downtown bus, a large group of boys who had heard rumors of this exciting new development clustered around for a peek, and it was only a matter of moments before I found myself taking orders at twenty-five cents a pop. For the rest of that year I could barely keep up with the demand for ersatz Vargas Girls and before long had abandoned the tracing bit altogether and found my skills at copying these in freehand – even venturing out with a few, sort of composite originals – had vastly improved.

  

In time I eventually sat before live models and was surprised to discover how almost immediately run-of-the-mill the whole naked lady experience turned out to be. Drawing the figure from life and getting it right was often pretty grueling and frustrating work, leaving little room for titillation, and where I might have been shocked, at first, to find that naked men engaged in this work as well, I grew to accept, over time, that no one who looked like a Vargas Girl or even the Butter Maiden was ever going to climb atop that dais.