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Alone among the pin-up artists
in being entirely self-taught, Billy De Vorss sold his
first three published pin-ups to the Louis F. Dow
Calendar Company in St. Paul about 1933. Until that time,
he had been working as a teller in a bank in St. Joseph,
Missouri. There he had met the stunning woman, Glenna,
who became his wife and first official model. Encouraged
to develop his talent by Gene Sayles, the manager of
Brown and Bigelow's Kansas City branch office, De Vorss
soon received his first commission from the company.
To celebrate, De Vorss and his wife moved to New York and set up a penthouse studio in
the Beaux Arts Building, at Eighteen East Tenth Street.
Signing up with the, prestigious American Artists group,
De Vorss spent the next several years working for
calendar-publishing houses such as Brown and Bigelow, Joseph C. Hoover, and Louis F. Dow. Most of his pastel
originals were large and bore his highly distinctive Art Deco inspired signature.
Covers for Beauty Parade and the
King Features Syndicate as well as calendar commissions
from the Osborne and Goes companies followed in the early
1940s. In 1949, the artist illustrated a highly
successful campaign for Botany Woollen's robes with
depictions of handsome men lounging at home with their
own De Vorss pin-ups.
De Vorss used an incredible variety of pastel colours for his work, and he applied
them directly onto the board, blending them dry with his
fingers. His occasional oil paintings bear the rich,
painterly brushstrokes of the Sundblom School. Like Rolf Armstrong, De Vorss always worked from live models for
the final painting. He did, however, employ photographs
for preliminary stages. His vibrant pin-ups, inspired by
New York's theatres and nightclubs, display a fine sense
of composition, a flowing, graceful line, and a daring
blend of colours.
In 1951, Billy and Glenna De Vorss returned to St. Joseph, their first home. After
some time there, they settled in Scottsdale, Arizona, where De Vorss died in 1985. |
