Any red-blooded American male worth his weight in Dad’s hidden stack of Playboys can spot an Alberto Vargas painting, even if he doesn’t know Vargas’ name. Because with the artist’s paintings of nude women so realistic they may as well be photographs, who’s looking at signatures?
Though he did more than paint the naked ladies, the Peruvian-born Vargas remains inexorably linked with the groundbreaking magazine of Hugh Hefner (who provides the introduction), and helped define the very image of the publication. Arranged chronologically, Reid Stewart Austin’s ALBERTO VARGAS: WORKS FROM THE MAX VARGAS COLLECTION boasts dozens and dozens of full-color, full-page (and sometimes full-spread – that means two pages, you perv) reproductions of some of Vargas’ finest work, beginning in the 1920s, with scantily clad models and less clad Ziegfeld Follies Girls that had to be extremely explicit in their day, to his Hollywood work in the 1930s, where he did portraits of Shirley Temple and Marlene Dietrich.
The 1940s saw work with advertisers and an exclusive relationship with Esquire which quickly and bitterly degenerated into a protracted legal battle. And then there’s Playboy, to which he contributed a healthy pool of work before passing away in 1982, and it is from this pool where the last half of the book culls most.
To show his range, there are pieces like Scheherazade – a colorful depiction of the ARABIAN NIGHTS heroine – and a nipple-popping takeoff of Batgirl. But sex equaled butter on Vargas’ bread, and his Moderne Bride – a non-nude but lingerie’d work circa 1948 – has to be one of the sexiest pieces of art I’ve ever seen. This impressive coffee-table book provides an exciting (nudge, wink) overview of one of modern art’s best painters of the female form. –Rod Lott
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