Artist - Gil Elvgren

Gil Elvgren (1914-1980) was the most important pin-up and glamour artist of the twentieth century. During his professional career, which began in the mid 1930s and lasted more than forty years, he established himself as the clear favorite of pin-up collectors and fans worldwide. Although most of his work was created for commercial use, it has been increasingly recognized as "real" art by many private collectors, dealers, galleries and museums. And indeed, though Elvgren has been considered as mainly a pin-up artist this last half-century, in reality he deserves recognition as a classical American illustrator whose career encompassed many different fields of commercial art. He was always a master in portraying feminine beauty, but his output was by no means confined to the calendar pinup industry.

Thus, part of Elvgren's fame is undoubtedly due to his now legendary series of pin-ups painted over a period of thirty years for Brown and Bigelow, calendar publishers of St. Paul, Minnesota.

However, his twenty-five-year stint on advertising work for Coca-Cola helped to establish him as one of the great illustrators in this field as well. While the Coca-Cola artwork included some typical "Elvgren Girl" pinups, most of it depicted typical American families, children and teenagers ordinary people doing everyday things. During World War II and the Korean War, Elvgren even painted military scenes for Coca Cola. Like his famous Brown and Bigelow pinups, the Coca-Cola images eventually became acknowledged icons of American life.

Gil Elvgren a man who had spent much of his life enriching the lives of others succumbed to cancer on February 29, 1980, at the age of sixty-five. In his studio, on Featherbed Lane in Siesta Key, Drake found his father's last Brown and Bigelow pin-up an unfinished and yet still brilliant painting, reproduced and published here for the first time. Elvgren the man has been missed for almost two decades, but his art and legacy live on. Celebrating and enjoying what he created will remain the best compliment and greatest honor we can now bestow on them. And, without question, art historians of the twenty-first century will recognize Gil Elvgren as a major and important contributor to twentieth-century American art.