{"product_id":"vintage-1993-94-pin-up-trading-card-box-set-vargas-pin-up-girls-ii-the-petty-girl-hollywood-pinups-factory-sealed","title":"Vintage 1993-94 Pin-Up Trading Card Box Set 🎨 Vargas Pin-Up Girls II, The Petty Girl, Hollywood Pinups, Factory Sealed","description":"\u003ch2\u003e🎨 Who Invented the Pin-Up Girl? Vargas, Petty and Hollywood Pinups Sealed Trading Card Boxes, Three Masters Together\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e Vargas cards 2 1\/2\" x 3 1\/2\", Petty cards 2 1\/2\" x 3 1\/2\", Hollywood Pinups cards 2 1\/2\" x 3 1\/2\" ~ All three factory-sealed, never opened.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese three boxes belong on one shelf, because the artists inside them spent their working lives stepping on each other's heels. You get Pin-Up Girls II, 1940s' Illustrations by Vargas, from 1993. You get The Petty Girl, Classic Pinup Art by George Petty, from 1994. And you get Hollywood Pinups, Movie Legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood, also 1994, the box with Earl Moran's paintings of a young Marilyn packed inside. All three came from one small publisher, 21st Century Archives of Royal Oak, Michigan, and all three carry the words of the same man. Each box is drawn from my stack of sealed boxes and is still in its shrink wrap.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🎨 Petty Got There First\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRead the back of The Petty Girl box and you'll see they don't pull a punch: \"Without George Petty's Petty Girl, there would have been no Varga Girl or Playboy Playmate, for the entire concept of a pinup in a magazine was his. Prior to the Petty Girl, there had been the girl on the magazine cover, but never the girl in the magazine.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGeorge Brown Petty IV was a south Louisiana boy, born in 1894 in Abbeville, the seat of Vermilion Parish. His family moved up to Chicago just before the turn of the century, where his father did well as a photographer, and young George spent his free time in that studio retouching photographs and learning the airbrush. I get a kick out of that: the fellow who'd put the pin-up inside the magazine learned his tools in his dad's photo shop. He trained at the Academie Julian in Paris until 1916, had his own Chicago studio by 1926 with accounts like Marshall Field's and Atlas Beer, and then came the first issue of Esquire in October 1933. Petty was in it, and he's credited with more or less inventing the gatefold, the fold-out page that let his girl run full length across an extra panel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter that she got around. One of his April 1941 Esquire girls became the nose art on the B-17 Memphis Belle. Two of his images ended up on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hollywood put the man himself on screen in the 1950 musical comedy The Petty Girl, with Robert Cummings playing him, and it was Tippi Hedren's first film. His daughter Marjorie modeled for Nash's \"Flying Lady\" hood ornament. And in the late 1950s somebody at IBM programmed a SAGE air-defense computer to draw a pin-up on its screen, apparently traced from a Petty Girl on a 1956 Esquire calendar. It gets called one of the first pieces of figurative computer art ever made.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e✍️ Then Vargas Took the Chair and Lost His Own Name\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1940 Petty split with Esquire's publisher, David Smart, and the pin-up pages went to another photographer's son. Joaquín Alberto Vargas y Chávez was born in Arequipa, Peru in 1896, the son of photographer Max T. Vargas. He trained in Zurich and Geneva, came to the United States around 1916, and found work painting for the Ziegfeld Follies and the Hollywood studios. Over the next six years at Esquire he turned out roughly 180 paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow look at the signature. Every card in the Vargas box is signed \"Varga,\" with no s. That was Esquire's spelling for the pin-up line from 1940, changed, the court record says, \"by agreement of the parties.\" The story goes that Esquire pushed it through so it could claim \"Varga\" as its own trademark. What's certain is how it ended: he sued over being left off the credit line, the courts sided with Esquire, and he spent years locked out of the name that made him famous. Playboy started commissioning him in 1959, 152 more paintings over sixteen years, and he even painted the cover for The Cars' Candy-O in 1979. He died in 1982 at 86. The box edge still prints \"© 1944, 1993 The Hearst Corporation,\" Esquire's 1944 copyright carried along by the company that bought the magazine in 1986. And the story goes that much of the hand-painted nose art on American and Allied aircraft drew straight from these Esquire pages, a Varga Girl riding into battle over the Pacific or Europe as a small piece of home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e💋 Moran and the Girl Who Became Marilyn\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHollywood Pinups is the box that brings them all into one room. The back names \"artists such as Vargas, Petty, Elvgren, Moran, Mozert, Armstrong, and others,\" and the published checklist comes to nineteen illustrators. Garbo, Dietrich, Grable and Hayworth are all called out by name. The promise on the front, \"Special Marilyn Card Randomly Inserted, Collect All Five!\", is real Hollywood pre-history. Every factory-sealed box was packed with one of five insert cards, M1 through M5, all Earl Moran paintings of Marilyn from 1946 to 1950. After Moran moved to Hollywood in 1946, the Blue Book modeling agency started sending him a young model named Norma Jeane Dougherty, and she posed for him for years, one of his favorite subjects by his own account. Long before anybody knew the name Marilyn Monroe, she was standing in a calendar artist's studio.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere's the twist: the real hometown of this art wasn't Hollywood at all, it was St. Paul, Minnesota. Two rival calendar houses fought it out there, Brown \u0026amp; Bigelow, founded in 1896, and the Louis F. Dow Company. Rolf Armstrong, Gil Elvgren and Moran all painted for Brown \u0026amp; Bigelow. The story goes that when Elvgren left Dow for a better contract, a spurned Dow had another artist, Vaughan Bass, quietly repaint the backgrounds and costumes on the canvases he left behind, keeping his poses and faces, so they could sell the same pictures under new titles without paying him another dime.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🖋️ One Man's Words on All Three\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReid Stewart Austin is the thread. He spent about twenty years as a Playboy art director working directly with Vargas, co-wrote Vargas's 1978 biography with him, and later wrote Varga: The Esquire Years and a book on Petty with a foreword by Hugh Hefner and an introduction by Petty's daughter Marjorie. He wrote every card back in the Vargas box and the Petty box, and the Hollywood box thanks him \"for his pen and passion.\" When Petty, Vargas and Moran turn up side by side here, the man telling you about them worked with this art for a living.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🎁 Three Sealed Boxes, Three Little Mysteries\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the fun part. Nobody has opened these. The Vargas box continues the numbering of the first series, cards 51 through 100, and its back says each set holds one of 50 different Prizm cards. The Petty box tells you to look for the one-of-five Ridgid Tool special cards randomly inserted in the sets, and those are Petty's own girls from the 1952 shop calendar he painted for the Ohio pipe-wrench maker. Its card #49 had never been published anywhere before this set. And the Hollywood box is holding one of five Marilyns. Which one? Open it and find out, or leave it sealed and keep wondering. That's still a real thrill in my book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🏛️ Where They Go\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e21st Century Archives put these out right in the middle of the early-'90s non-sport card boom, when most of the flood was comics, movies and TV. That's part of why I like them: a quiet run of old pin-up art, done properly, in the thick of all that noise. Line the three boxes up on a shelf in a den or a studio and you've got the whole family tree, from the man who put the girl in the magazine, to the man who took his chair, to the painter who had Norma Jeane in his studio. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Curated Gift Sets","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68147877511400,"sku":null,"price":38.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/hero_855308ce-90cb-49f7-8319-4a7410fbfd48.jpg?v=1794165706","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1993-94-pin-up-trading-card-box-set-vargas-pin-up-girls-ii-the-petty-girl-hollywood-pinups-factory-sealed","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}