Pinup Girls of Rolf Armstrong

Rolf Armstrong was born in Seattle. He moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri.

After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.

During the 1920s and 1930s, his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines. Many stars posed for his portraits, including Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, and even Boris Karloff.

Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a cirulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best selling calendar artist at Brown and Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line.

Rolf Armstrong died in 1960, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Pin-Up Dreams: The Glamour Art of Rolf Armstrong

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This book is not just a biography of Rolf Armstrong, it is also a commercial art history and fashion history of the first half of the 20th century. The book takes the reader through the decades in text and pictures. It is extremely well written-I got so caught up in his life story that I even got a little teary-eyed when he died. Especially interesting to me were the pictures of the advertisements of the time. Rolf Armstrong was beginning his career when color printing was starting to be used for magazine covers. The pictures of Armstrong's work are fabulous! Due in good part, I'm sure, to the fact that Armstrong's work itself was fabulous. The pictures of his 3,000 pastel palette were almost as interesting to me as his artwork, although most of the pictures he posed for, he posed with a brush and paint palette because he thought it looked better. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in art and/or the early 20th century.

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Rolf Armstrong: The Dream Girls (Vignettes)

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