Gil Elvgren: All His Glamorous American Pin-ups

Gil's girls: The seminal pin-up artist Post-depression America was in desperate need of a defining iconography that would lift it out of the black and white doldrums, and it came in the form of Gil Elvgren's Technicolor fantasies of the American dream. His technique--which earned him a reputation as "The Norman Rockwell of cheesecake"--involved photographing models and then painting them into gorgeous hyper-reality, with longer legs, more flamboyant hair and gravity-defying busts, and in the process making them the perfect moral-boosting eye-candy for every homesick private.