This deliriously posed nude Follies girl blowing bubbles is by the prolific American illustrator Earle K. Bergey and was created for the August, 1933 cover of La Paree Stories, loosely illustrating the interior story Parisienne Gaiety. A sexy redhead with flaming hair is seen in profile with the bold figural outline that was Bergey’s artistic signature.  A suggestive and erotic artwork with playful pre-code style. This is a Bergey Girl for the ages with charismatic art deco allure, painted in bold blocks of color with snappy jazz-age modernist graphics. Grapefruit Moon Gallery previously sold this painting in 2014; we are delighted to get it back from the original buyer.

 

 

Raised in Philadelphia, PA, Earle K. Bergey attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1920s. He worked for the Philadelphia Public Ledger after which time he produced covers for the Fiction House line of pulp magazines. By the mid 1930s and with relationships well established with leading publishing houses, Bergey settled in historic Bucks County, PA.

Earle K. Bergey worked as a freelance illustrator for competing publishing houses throughout the 1930s. His provocative paintings were featured on a diversity of publications from risque pin-up magazines and widely circulated pulp magazines to standard periodicals including The Saturday Evening Post.

It is not unusual for Bergey’s unsigned pin-up art to be falsely attributed to other artists, such as Enoch Bolles, even though Bergey’s treatment of flesh and the female figure makes his work uniquely recognizable.