Top Five Posts of 2013

We are continually updating the Pubic Wars posts with more pictures as we find them.  This young lady from Club's November 1978 issues will be posted in the top ranking post soon

A it is the end of the year it is, inevitably, time for a retrospective list.  So here are the most viewed posts of those put up in 2013.  We had more than two million visits in 2013 and passed 300 followers.  We are always happy to take requests if we are able and made several posts as a result, usually, of a picture on one of our Pubic Wars series posts.

1. Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 10 1978 Part 4

Posted June. 27, 030 views.

This edition of our long-running Pubic Wars series explored several firsts in men's magazines as they pushed the boundaries of what could be shown.  Nearly 7,000 views a month for this one.

2.  Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 10 1978 Part 1

Posted February. 25,185 views.

In this episode we looked at the way pictorial explicitness in men's magazines in the US started to go in different directions in 1978.

3.  Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 10 1978 Part 2

Posted April.  22,930 views.

Not quite scoring as highly as the first quarter of 1978 post but then it was posted three months later so it is actually getting more views per month.

4.  Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 10 1978 Part 3

Posted May. 22,003 Views

It's four out of four for 1978 Pubic Wars Posts.  This one is set to overtake Part 2 very soon.

5.  Centrefold Venus of the Month 42: Hilary Stephens/Caroline Crowther, November 1977

Posted January. 18, 136 Views.

UK television personality Leslie Crowther's daughter posed for Mayfair under the name of Hilary Stephens and displayed a sumptuous posterior.  The only post that wasn't a Pubic Wars one in the top five.  We plan to post a lot more centrefolds in 2014.

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Happy Christmas...

Irina Voronina, Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 2001

...to all our readers. We very much appreciate those who follow this blog and comment on our posts!

More lovely ladies in 2014!

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Japanese Venuses: Ten Types of Female Nude by Ishikawa Toraji

Tinkle of the bell (1934)

These sumptuous nudes were the work of Ishikawa Toraji (1975-1964).  They are from a set of ten nude prints called Ten types of female nude published in 1934, when he was nearly sixty.  They combine the aesthetics and woodblock printing technique of the classical period with a more European approach to anatomy.  Here, a ripe young woman teases her dog with a bell.

Dance (1934)

Nine out of ten of the pictures feature women in domestic environments but this one is rather different as it features a dancer or, actually, a stripper.  It is clear from the way the figure is lit that she is on stage.

Blue parrot (1934)

In this one there is a mixture of a traditional screen with nineteen thirties furniture and the exotica of a tiger skin.

At the bath (1934)

The prints, although far from explicit, were sensuous enough that the series was banned by the Japanese authorities.  Here a young lady dries herself in a traditional bath, probably in a hot spring resort (onsen)

Morning (1934)

In complete contrast here we have a woman in a very modern bathroom.  These bathroom pictures are reminiscent of those done by French nineteenth century artists who were, in turn, very influenced by Japanese prints.

Reading (1934)

Several of the women in this series have European, short, hair styles and these girls were known as moga (modern girl) in Japan at the time.  Toraji visited both the US and Europe (he studied in France) from 1902 until 1903 so would have been exposed to a lot of western art, which had only started to be seen in Japan in the eighteen eighties.

Bored (1934)

Another reading girl and another animal, in this case a cat, in this one.  The naturalistic physical shape of the women in this set of prints is obviously influenced by contemporary European representations of the nude and is far from the Japanese idealised form of earlier years.

Black cat (1934)

Another cat here, in this tactile-looking print.  Toraji became very involved in the development of art education in Japan.  In 1943 he became head of the Pacific Art School

Relaxing (1934)

A pair of very modern black stockings and more contemporary furniture feature in this print.  She is reminiscent of one of Toulouse Lautrec's prostitutes. These pictures emerged during the shin hanga (new prints) period of Japanese art from about 1915 until 1940.  It was driven, to a large extent, by foreign interest in Japanese prints and there were big exhibitions of shin hanga prints in Toledo in 1930 and 1936.  After this, deteriorating relationships with the western powers saw this external market die away.

Springtime of life (1934)

Finally, we have a young lady admiring herself in the mirror.  So, a splendid set of prints melding traditional Japanese woodcut technique with a European infused aesthetic.

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Centrefold Venus of the Month 48: Pamela, Hustler, May 1979

We've got terribly behind with our centrefold Venuses which are some of the highest ranking posts by number of views.  While we enjoy presenting these lovely young women from the past the posts do take an inordinate amount of time to format.  As a result, we have got about one year behind which gives us the opportunity to try to try to keep up starting from January.  We have posted a couple of centrefold Venuses for April and June already so we thought we might give us some breathing room by posting another for May this time, meaning we only have to do nine in 2014.

This centrefold Venus is a first as she is the first one we have featured from  Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine, from their May 1979 issue.  This has been requested by a reader of this blog, Minotaurus, following the posting of a couple of pictures from the pictorial in our last Pubic Wars post.

magazine

We not only have scanned the pages of the magazine but we have some outtakes as well.  Contrary to our usual practice we are going to mix these up so that similar pictures are together, rather than doing all the magazine pictorial pictures first and then having all the extra pictures.  We'll note which were in the magazine though.  The opening double spread contains all the text for the piece and introduces us to Pamela.

magazine

The photographs, by Hustler chief photographer, Dutch-born, James Baes are shot by a pool.  Although some of the pictures are taken inside most are outside in the bright sunlight.  Baes had been working as a fashion photographer for Stern magazine in Germnay when he was asked to take photographs of fellow photographer Clive McLean and his Penthouse Pet wife Stephanie.  It was through McLean that he got involved in shooting for men's magazines, doing Penthouse's first ever girl/girl shoot for their December 1970 issue.

Here we have the reverse angle of the shot from the one above it; this time looking from the inside out to the pool.  The "searchlight" style of reflector use was characteristic of Baes. The writing with the piece said that Pamela was French but both she and the setting look Californian rather than Gallic.

magazine

A few more pictures from the poolside room.  It's strange that these indoor shots have her with her sunglasses on and very seventies sunglasses they are too.

Here Baes has Pamela illuminated with natural light streaming through the window.  Her face in the shadow, its more an exercise in form, fosussing on her torso.

Here we get a rare shot of Pamela without her glasses on, her skin nicely covered in droplets of water.

magazine

More portraits, but with sunglasses this time (at least we assume she has her sunglasses on in the top two, as they aren't hanging from her necklace).

This one of Pamela on a towel on the grass is a one-off; we don't have any other shots like this.  She looks as if she could be a natural blonde and has the below the waist colouring of one of Agent Triple P's ex girlfriends from the eighties.

The rest of the shots in the pictorial centre around this folding chair which we saw in the opening spread.

Pamela spreads her labia and starts doing a Miley Cyrus on the chair.  Quite a lot of tongue sticking out in this pictorial!

magazine

The bottom one  of these two actually appeared in the magazine and was a very rare, at this time, example of self penetration in Hustler.  Pamela actually has a good inch of her finger inside her vagina and hasn't just slipped the end of her finger between her labia, as some of the faux masturbatrion shots of the time showed.

magazine

The final three shots have Pamela in the chair and pissing into the air.  There was no mention of this activity in the magazine itself nor in any follow up letters.  This was eighteen years before Bob Guccione in Penthouse did the same with one of his Pets.  It is clear, from the top picture of the three, which didn't appear in the magazine, that she is actually pissing and it's not, for example a hosepipe or some such.  Whatever, this particular activity wasn't repeated in the pages of Hustler for many years and, in fact, the magazine became a little less explicit over the next few years, especially as regards its couples pictorials.

So this set really doesn't have much in the way of artistic merit despite Baes' usual distinctive lighting.  It' is a prototypical late seventies Hustler set with the unusual addition of self penetration and even more unusual urination..

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Venus in Black Stockings 4: Wally Neuzil by Egon Schiele

Wally Neuzil in Black STockings (1912)

Here is a fine study by Austrian artist Egon Schiele of his mistress Wally Neuzil.  Schiele was a very linear artist compared with his older contemporary and mentor Gustave Klimt, who preferred big blocks of bright colour.  As a result the black stockings stand out against the delicate line work of her figure and underwear. 

Wally Neuzil

Wally (Walburga) had been, it is thought, Klimt's model too but Schiele started his relationship with her as soon as she began, at the age of seventeen, modelling for him.

Seated woman with bent knee

He produced an even more famous painting of her in black stockings and a green top and her red hair features in many of Schiele's paintings of the period.  Schiele eventually married Edith Harms, one of his neighbours and a more acceptable wife to society than Wally.  He  expected Wally to remain as his mistress, however, and suggested that they had a holiday together every year. She didn't agree to this (his wife wasn't too happy with the idea either) and she left him and trained as a nurse during WW1.  She died in 1917 in Sinj (now in modern Croatia but then part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia; part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) of scarlet fever at the age of 23.  Both Schiele and a pregnant Edith died less than a year later in the great influenza epidemic which killed 20 million people in 1918.

Jane Birkin as Wally

In the 1980 film Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung Wally was portrayed by the far from redhead Jane Birkin.  This flawed, but still interesting, film focussed on the time that Schiele was arrested on charges of seducing an under age girl at their house in the Vienna Woods where their unmarried co-habitation was a source of local scandal.  Wally stuck by him, visiting him in prison and eventually he was released only finally being charged with possessing erotic drawings in a place that a child might find them.  

More Schiele another time.

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Harem Venuses from Lui magazine 1990

We haven't had any harem girls for a while and as the whether has turned colder here perhaps a bit of eastern heat wouldn't go amiss.

This oh so tasteful pictorial is from October 1990's issue of Lui magazine, which was recently relaunched in France.  This incarnation of the magazine, also published by Filipacchi, like the original Lui, was launched in 1987 and ignoring the previous magazine's numbering started again from 1.

Early on in the run the magazine was published in two separate volumes but by 1990 was back to just one volume every month.  By 1993 circulation had dropped so much that the magazine went bi-monthly before ceasing publication in 1994.

Lui in this period was a lot less visually explicit than it had been in the seventies and eighties with fleeting glimpses of pubic hair a rarity.  It was also published in a larger format than the original which gave the pictures much more impact.

The pictorial was shot on location in Morocco giving a splendid authenticity to the intereriors and making them look like nineteenth century Orientalist paintings.

The photographer was Richard Suzuki who is most famous for being the cinematographer on Emmanuelle (1974).  He also shot a couple of other slightly racy films in the seventies: Catherine & Cie (1975) starring Jane Birkin and Boarding School (1978) starring Nastassja Kinski.

Four models are credited for the shoot but we only get their first names: Dina, Ulrika, Danielle and Armelle and can't find out which is which.  

Some of these shots could quite easily have come from a women's magazine as any eroticism is very gentle.  Nevertheless, they are a very effective attempt at bringing to life an orientalist painting.

We did wonder about putting this pictorial in our Seduction of Venus blog instead but there is really only this one shot which intimates any sort of gentle sapphic activity and as we have other harem themed posts in this blog we decided to put it here instead.

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