Beauty is sometimes thought to be skin-deep, but glamour is not even that: It's applied to the surface of the body in the forms of makeup, coiffure and clothing. It's a kind of sexual glow or haze, an aura that surrounds an expensive and well-crafted presentation of the self as a sex object. Rarely has anyone understood and presented glamour as perfectly as the pinup artist Rolf Armstrong, whose calendars, posters and product packaging were popular from the teens to the '50s of the 20th century.
Though the text of "Pin-Up Dreams: The Glamour Art of Rolf Armstrong," by Janet Dobson and Michael Wooldridge, is fairly pedestrian biography, the images are absorbing, especially the many photographs of models posing in Armstrong's studio paired with the resulting painting. This allows us to see a pretty girl--for example, Armstrong's longtime muse, the aptly named Jewel Flowers--translated into a perfect target of desire. Though most of the models are clothed, the presentation of the breasts is always key: Armstrong's art provides glowing altarpieces of the cult of breast.
But perhaps the most important feature is something a bit more elusive: In every single image we get the sense that the model is enjoying, indeed reveling in, her sexual self-presentation. In our post-feminist era, that may be politically problematic, but it remains devastating in its erotic effectiveness.
