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George Petty Classic Pin-Up Gallery

This gallery could be many-hundred-strong. George Petty's pin-up girls dominated during the mid-thirties to mid-forties embracing, of course, the second world war. It was images based on his creations that adorned many an American bomber plane and his work decorated lockers by the thousand during those torturous years, bringing a smile and thoughts of better days to come.

It's interesting that Petty's work shows nothing short of an obsession with that then newfangled device - the telephone.

(click an image to view larger)

As an artist, I notice how Petty's work seems to bridge generations in our appreciation of the female form.
Most visual arts, to the end of the Victorian era were smaller in the breast and bigger in the hip thigh and calf. These girls would have been very slender and extremely curvaceous to their viewers. You can see this trend continue toward larger breasts and ever-more slender frames in the work of Alberto Vargas who's imagery was, for the most part, published from a period toward the end of Petty's rein up to the 1960's.

Back to George Petty here, and in support of my case, the two images below are an original Petty work on the left, and the same image digitally reworked to conform a little more closely to today's excepted line - Click the image and see what you think ...