Few popular artists have captured the American Dream as well as Alberto Vargas did in the 1940s. At a time when a spirited, resourceful nation was fighting the last "good war" in a noble defense of international liberty, Vargas evoked the youthful energy that propelled the country while simultaneously honoring the conservative traditions that steered it. His art was to canvas what the classic MGM musicals were to the silver screen: beautiful to look at, a little racy, and lots of fun.

The comparison of the Varga Girls (so they were called, with a deliberate dropping of the final S from his name) with Hollywood movies is apt, because Vargas himself gained early experience in Tinsel Town. He had been born in Peru in 1896, schooled in Switzerland as a teen, and employed in New York as a photo retoucher in his early 20s. Eager to paint and inspired by the famed illustrations of Gibson Girls in Life and Collier’s magazines, he got a job painting promotional posters for the Ziegfeld Follies. During this period of his life, which lasted till the end of the decade, he courted Anna Mae Clift, who frequently modeled for him and whom he married in 1930.

Hit hard by the Depression, in the mid-‘30s Vargas moved to Hollywood and painted portraits of starlets for all the studios. The commissions dwindled by 1940, so he returned to New York and took a job with Esquire magazine, which wanted him to paint full-page images that would appeal to the men’s audience. His first Varga Girl, appearing in October 1940, was an immediate sensation, and quickly Vargas created a 12-month calendar for Esquire. More delicate fantasy than hard, accurate reality, his women were airbrushed smooth with impossibly long legs, perfect torsos, and movie star hair and faces. Often they were barely clad in see-through silks, and even when dressed their tight clothes betrayed their amazing physiques; yet always the girls blended love with their lust, innocence with their sensuality, and even all-American patriotism with their boudoir fashions, making his works the favorite of soldiers everywhere. These were the imaginary girls back home worth fighting for.

Vargas left Esquire in 1946 and eventually went to work for Hugh Hefner’s young Playboy magazine. He continued there until his death in 1982 at the age of 86. In recent years his work has grown in stature and is considered by some as serious art, by others as mere pretty pin-ups. Either way, Alberto Vargas has made a lasting impression, both as a talented artist who glorified the female image and as a chronicler of a simpler, more subtle age.