Glamour and Risqué images with Japanese dolls: Millière, Sager, Meunier, Vargas
Images categorized as "glamour" or "risqué" or "pin-up" implictly target a male audience. They show a beautiful woman, often a slender girl with big breasts and very long legs, in a pose or context that implies she is sexually available. Usually there is a sense that the woman knows she is arousing the onlooker's desire, and enjoys that. Sometimes there is an element of humor, which depends on the woman's losing control of her own image--a skirt lifted by the wind, an animal which startles the woman (a dog which has wrapped its leash around her, a mouse which drives her to stand on a chair). Such images were popular and found a pretty consistent style from around 1910 up through the early 1960s.
A site with many images for the three artists below is pinup-art.de.
When an adult woman is depicted with a doll, she is likely to seem either childish or doll-like. A Japanese doll adds another element, evoking the geisha and the older Japanese system of licensed prostitution. The doll evokes a fantasy world in which lovemaking is an art and sexual pleasure a recognized item of consumption.
For more risqué items, see the 2005 additions.
Postcard, real photo, ca. 1900 (?)
This could be a studio photo, meant as a humorous subject, or a photo of a popular vaudeville number such as Fanny Brice specialized in, with a comic actress pretending to be a baby girl.
postcard, real photo, ca. 1900
A popular Edwardian actress who (according to one website) died in 1906, with a large Japanese boy doll. For many more pictures of the beautiful girl, see The Opera Glove Gallery!
postcard
John Rae
pub. Frederick Stokes , 190-?
This and the facing card show a woman "introducing" a Japanese doll to a pet. In this image, the doll is the only exotic element in the picture, and the effect is sentimental rather than sexual.
postcard, tinted real photo
Used in 1909 in the Netherlands
This may have been a personal card, a portrait to send to friends. The woman's hair and drapery seem to be done up to suggest a "geisha" or at least exotic theme, though in fact she wears the same hairstyle as the woman in the Rae picture..
postcard, Raphael Kirchner (Austrian, 1876-1917)
Kirchner was a famous innovator in the design of risqué postcards, and produced several Japanese-themed series, including one in which the "war" of sex was carried on by a soldier and a Japanese woman. None of the images however include dolls.
"L'idéal pantin" (The perfect doll) Maurice Millière Magazine illustration, La Vie Parisienne, 1918 Click for full-page image. |
Detail of doll. Note the shoes, apparently ruffled collar, and combination of girl's kimono with male hairstyle. The shoes reappear in other French risqué images (see below) |
| Accompanying verse:
La femme a besoin toujours d'un pantin! Lorsqu'elle a dix ans et n'est qu'une fillette, Elle a sa poupée; à vingt ans, coquette, Un fiancé subit son plaisir taquin; Son époux ensuite est sa marionette... Mais elle conserve un regret calin À celui qui fut sa victime muette Son souffre-douleur, son premier pantin! |
A woman always needs a doll.
When she's ten years old, a little girl, She has her dolly; at twenty, a coquette, A fiancé is the object of her teasing pleasure; Then her husband becomes her marionette. Yet she still feels a sly regret For that mute victim of long ago, Her whipping-boy, her first doll! |
"Son Petit Coeur" (Her little heart)
postcard, signed Charlet
Austria, 1870 - United States 1930 (dates from a French/Spanish site devoted to Sager)
Sager began to design postcards for Paris printers around 1900, and continued into the 1920s, but it was the decade 1910-20 that was probably his most important. He had a tremendous eye for fashion, and depicted or caricatured the hats, coats, and skirts of the era, as well as dance fads like the Tango. He also drew several series in which women in male costume, usually a military uniform, hold up huge waving flags of their nations.
He had a relentlessly "naughty" sense of humor, and produced endless variations on themes of doctors interested in "playing doctor," priests startled by a glimpse of female anatomy, or painters with their models. Though he drew plenty of cards showing heavily curved women, he identified a new physical type of woman, slender and girlish, which seems to look forward to the 1920s.
The Japanese dolls in these two images do not seem to evoke the exotic or Japan, but rather to be an expected kind of boudoir accessory or toy.
Rêve d'Amour
postcard, 1915?,
Xavier Sager, France
Part of a series of women (or perhaps the same woman) in a similar state of undress, presumably the inmates of a whorehouse. The Japanese doll, with its very un-Japanese silk stockings and yellow slippers, seems to be an accessory like the naughty clock or the fancy pillows. Is its face turned away so that it doesn't see the visitor, or in order to admire the beauties of the inmate?
See below for a comparison with a similar image by Suzanne Meunier
Doughboy doll
postcard, ca. 1918, Xavier Sager, France
Sager's WWI patriotism was expressed in several series showing full-sized, handsome soldiers of various nations being kissed, nursed, or embraced by Parisian women. He played in several images with the idea of tiny women surrounding a soldier, or tiny men surrounding a woman; an image similar to this one shows a male civilian as the "discarded" doll, and another shows the lady discarding a blonde dolly for a soldier doll.
The two postcards above represent two different series, the "National Hymns" (1907) and the World War I "Allies". Each series shows women in military uniform; the Japanese women of course have a generally Japanese look, though the high heels and décolletage are standard for these series.
To the right is another 1907 "flags of the nations" image, by a different artist. The irony of showing a "geisha" with the flag of a country recently victorious in war was exploited by a number of artists.
4. Suzanne Meunier was a productive artist in France in the 1920s, but I have not been able to locate a biography of her. Her postcards, magazine covers, and etchings, almost always depict a woman, often with very little setting. She seems to have painted some sentimental or fashion images, but to have specialized in nudes and provocatively sexual girls. Her women, while they are ideally beautiful, seem more individual and self-aware than Sager's.
The two Meunier paintings with Japanese dolls seem to include them as a thematic accessory, part of an oriental decor or theme. The dolls appear to be girl dolls, though it's hard to tell; although the poses and hair suggest actual Japanese dolls, the feet, dress, and slanting eyes do not seem to be based on an authentic doll model.
Cover
of Eros magazine
1926, Suzanne Meunier
(click for larger image: detail at right)
The lovely redhead's vaguely Chinese pajamas suggest an "oriental" context for the doll. Notice that the woman's body seems to float in front of the tiny two-legged table or stool on which she is "sitting."
Detail of the doll. Whereas in Sager's pictures and in the Meunier image below, the dolls' kimono explicitly carry out an overall color scheme without adding to it, here the doll's costume contrasts with the rest of the picture in color and in being patterned.
"Glass Boudoirs" Postcard, probably 1920s
The Sager girl's room is a mix of disparate elements--the "modern" slim vase of roses, the Japanese doll, the beribboned "romantic" pillows and cap, the sexy gilt clock. The girl's coy look and gesture seem to say "I just can't help myself" as she uses her hand to open her thighs invitingly.
Meunier's young woman's setting is entirely oriental, though not consistently Japanese. The Japanese-style arrangement of a flowering branch is in a rather Chinese-looking vase; the piece of furniture looks like a lacquered cabinet set on a Victorian carved base; the kimono is probably a satin European dressing-gown, and her stockings and shoes are European. Her hairdo is a modern bob, though it evokes an "oriental" hairstyle with flowers placed symmetrically over each ear. Finally, her thighs are parted and yet defended in a posture appropriate for yoga or meditation. The evocation of an exotic setting seems to fit this woman, who is much more self-possessed and in control than the Sager girl. Her look is inviting, but she also seems to be inspecting the onlooker, as if to evaluate whether he will fit her decor.
5. Alberto Vargas ("Varga")
Alberto Joaquin Vargas Y Chavez, 1896 -1982 (born Peru, flourished in U.S.)
Vargas was in extraordinarily productive pinup artist from the 1920s, when he was the official artist of the Ziegfeld Follies, through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when Esquire and Playboy featured his "girls" in their pages and on calendars. Although his women are physically idealized (he was a master of the airbrush, and seems to have loved big-busted women from the start), he was capable of making each one a portrait of an individual at a particular moment.
See San Francisco Art Exchange for a biography and information about his career. The images below are reduced in size and come from pinup-art.de.
The first image, at far left, is included to show Vargas's ability to use a doll in a mix of themes; the young woman sports an "old-fashioned girl" Mary Pickford-style hairdo, but her shoes and stockings, and the very short kimono which covers her presumably naked torso, ally her with the whores depicted by Sager and Meunier. However, she is not a whore--she is an actress. The Pierrot doll at her feet might be a prop for her act, or represent a rejected suitor, but at any rate he evokes the Commedia Dell'Arte, a romantic world of dress-up.
The lady with the telephone, like Meunier's Eros cover girl, seems to float over the stool she sits on, in a space in which she alone has three dimensions. The (cordless) telephone pressed to her breast is an erotic instrument, her fur seems to be embracing her pleasurably. The doll hides the third leg of the vanity table, confusing the space further. Along with the ivory elephant, the doll is an exotic complement to the general modernity of the decor: this is a woman for whom objects of all kinds are delightful consumables.
Evidently this image originally graced a 1920 calendar; it is signed in monumental script, Alberto Vargas, 1920. The red lacquer table, red printed pillow, flower arrangement, and even the gilt box are part of a vague Oriental setting in which the doll is the only identifiably authentic Japanese object. The blonde girl with her fur-trimmed peignoir, cigarette, and of course a shoe and a stocking, might seem like one more object for consumption; however, the book she has put down suggests that she does have an interior life: it is the collection of Baudelaire's poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal. Evidently the lady not only reads, but she reads French, and her "oriental" world is related to the melancholy eroticism of the poet. As with the the telephone above, the eroticism of language is evoked.
Enlargements of the two Vargas Japanese dolls. Vargas worked from real dolls, to judge from the feet, hair, and obi wrapping details. In both images, the dolls are part of a red-white-and-black color scheme, but they also allow a touch of explicit blue to the strong colors.
Note that the doll in the 1920 image actually hides the woman's crotch, leaving it "to the imagination."