Alberto Vargas

Biography

From 1943 to 1946 the United States Post Office was in litigation with Esquire magazine. The Post Office wanted the magazine stripped of its cheap second-class mailing permit, and what irritated the officials most were the cartoons and Alberto Vargas’s girls. The case went to the Supreme Court, the court found that these pictures did not offend public morals, and the magazine won, though it dropped the cartoons just to be safe.

Vargas was nearly fifty, and only in his fourth year of drawing for Esquire.

Joaquín Alberto Vargas y Chávez was born on 9 February 1896 in Arequipa, Peru, the son of the noted photographer Max Vargas. Before the First World War he studied art in Europe, in Zurich and Geneva. There he came across the French magazine La Vie Parisienne with a cover by Raphael Kirchner, and, in Vargas’s own words, it influenced him greatly. In 1916, at twenty, he moved to the United States.

In New York he worked as an artist for the Ziegfeld Follies revue and for many Hollywood studios. Florenz Ziegfeld hung his portrait of Olive Thomas in the theatre, and she is counted among the first “Vargas Girls”. His best-known film poster was made for “The Sin of Nora Moran” (1933): a nearly naked Zita Johann in a pose of despair, bearing little resemblance to the real actress. The poster is often listed among the finest film posters ever made. To my mind, the whole of Vargas is in that lack of likeness: models always sat for him, yet what came out on the sheet was an ideal figure.

It was the 1940s and Esquire that made him famous. Between 1940 and 1946 he painted 180 pictures for the magazine, and the “Vargas Girls” became the classic pin-up of the war years. They, along with the drawings of George Petty, were copied for the nose art of American and Allied aircraft in the Second World War. Then came a dispute with the magazine over the right to the name “Varga”, and the court ruled against the artist. Money was short until 1959, when Playboy began printing his work. Over the next sixteen years he made 152 paintings for that magazine, and once again the pictures were called “Vargas Girls”. Major exhibitions were held all over the world. In 1956–1958 he sat on the jury of the Miss Universe contest. Vargas usually painted in watercolour combined with the airbrush, and an airbrush magazine still presents an annual award in his name. His hand can be recognised by the slender fingers and toes, the nails nearly always painted red.

The women he portrayed included Billie Burke, Nita Naldi, Marilyn Miller, Paulette Goddard, Ruth Etting and Bessie Love, and later Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, Irish McCalla and Bernadette Peters.

In 1974 his wife Anna Mae, his model and business manager, died, and Vargas stopped painting. Interest in him was revived by his autobiography, published in 1978, and he made a few more works: the cover of the album “Candy-O” (1979) for the rock band The Cars and the covers of two records by Bernadette Peters (1980 and 1981).

Alberto Vargas died on 30 December 1982 in Los Angeles, at the age of 86. Many of his works from Esquire are held by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas: the magazine gave them to the museum in 1980 together with a large body of other works.