Show Girls

Since 1979, more than one hundred original 1940s pinups painted by Alberto Vargas for Esquire magazine have been stored in cabinets at the University of Kansas. The women in Vargas’ paintings — backs arched, legs extended in provocative poses, faces beaming wholesome smiles — are harmless by today’s standards. Still, something about these images has kept the collection from enjoying a full-scale exhibition until now.

“I don’t think it has to do with naked ladies,” says Stephen Goddard, professor of printmaking history and curator of the Spencer Museum exhibit Alberto Vargas: The Esquire Pinups, opening this weekend. “I think it has to do with magazines and illustration.” Vargas painted naked ladies for calendars and the backs of playing cards, not for museum walls.

Maria Elena Buszek worked with Goddard while doing her post-graduate work at KU. She became interested in pinups when she realized that, while she saw the so-called Varga Girls as powerful because of the unapologetic pleasure they seemed to take from their sexuality, an older generation of feminists saw in them what writer Andrea Dworkin called “Blonde Sambos.” Buszek’s research found that for young women of today, who grew up as she did with Joan Jett and the women of Charlie’s Angels for role models, “the homefront woman was both Rosie the Riveter and the Varga Girl — confident and curious about both her professional and sexual prowess.”

In Buszek’s mind, this exhibition asks viewers to re-evaluate Esquire‘s pinups “with the same interpretive freedom that they grant objects and images they associate with the fine arts.”

Not everyone needs convincing. The number of Varga-Girl tattoos people have sported through the years is staggering, and people who remember World War II know the paintings’ patriotic value was never even up for debate: Women in lacy undergarments hold letters from abroad and advertise G.I. bonds as shamelessly as they expose their upper thighs.

“This is a wonderful time capsule,” Goddard says of the exhibition. “A lot of people want to see these paintings just for nostalgic purposes.”