Seductive Pin-up Girls of American Artist Fritz Willis

Pin-up is an art style that emerged in the 1890s, although the term 'pin-up' was for the first time used in 1941. The practice of pinning posters up the walls was connected with the expansion of newspapers and journals, especially women's magazines advertising cosmetics. Gibson girl, invented by Charles Dana Gibson in the USA, was the ancestor of a pin-up girl, seductively looking from the pages of the Life magazine. Gibson girls and their pin-up sisters have distant Eastern cousins, Japanese beauties depicted by Utamaro, Shigenobu, Hokusai, and, of course, Keisai Eisen, who worked majorly in the bijinga (beauty) genre. Ukiyo-e masters shaped the cultural landscape as much as their European and American colleagues by showing the picture of an ideal woman. Pin-up beauties like Dita von Teese or Rose McGowan have their admirers today. Fritz Willlis (1907-1979) was one of the great pin-up artists. He managed to create his own distinctive approach working in a recognizable pin-up manner. 

Fig. 1. Ice Follies Souvenir Program Cover, 1963 (blogspot.com)

Fig. 2. Gibson Girl (Wikipedia.org)

Fig. 3. Left: Fritz Willis (blogspot.com); Right: Utamaro

100 Girls With The One Face

Willis was born in Oklahoma City and studied at the Vesper George Art School in Boston. Then he moved to Hollywood to work for Warner Brothers as a production designer. Willis' career as a pin-up artist began in 1946 when Esquire announced a new feature entitled the Esquire Gallery of Glamour and invited Willis to make the first illustration. Since that time, Willis had been contributing to Esquire. He produced illustrations for pin-up calendars together with Ben-Hur Baz, Joe De Mers, and J. Frederick Smith. In the works of Willis, there are more nudity and intimacy than in traditional pin-up pictures. While usually pin-up girls are depicted in awkward situations with this 'oops!' expression on their doll faces (e. g., when the wind lifts their skirts), Willis portrays them in bedrooms or the setting of his studio.  

Fig. 4. Esquire calendar for 1948, October (codex99.com)

Fig. 5. Reclining Nude Eating Grapes (nevsepic.com.ua)

Fig. 6. Calendar for October 1965 (nevsepic.com.ua)

Fig. 7. blogspot.com

Fig. 8. nevsepic.com.ua

Fig. 9. staticflickr.com

In Premium more on Willis' pin-up girls, a rare pin-up copulation piece, the Pygmalion-effect in the pin-up artist's work and numerous additional illustrations.

Click HERE for the defiant girls of the "Father of American Pin-Up", Rolf Armstrong

Sources: thepinupfiles.com; codex99.com; artnet.com; risunoc.com