Under The Cover And Over The Top

A Pictorial Peep At Cheesecake Album Art Of Post World War II America

 

“Cheesecake” covers featured scantily dressed women of all shapes and sizes lounging in martini glasses, erupting from volcanos, caressing instruments, and straddling stuffed animals. Sexual innuendo, double entendres, and sometimes blatant requests spoke from the shelves (McKnight-Trontz 16).

When George Petty and Alberto Vargas fashioned the pin-up girl in Esquire, they tapped into a curious piece of popular culture, sparking a wartime craze that juxtaposed morals and morale. True, the ubiquity of women and its power to persuade are nothing new. Take the French poster art of Jules Cheret, for example. Think of the glossy sophistication of Playboy; the flappers, divas, and femme fatales of the silver screen; or the cult status of Bettie Page. Depictions of the female figure are as universal as they are contentious.

What artists like Petty and Vargas crafted, later colored a gritty wartime canvas with fantasy, charm and a glamorous touch - paving the way for the cheesecake style that shaped the postwar era. Since then, cheesecake has encompassed everything from lowbrow to high art, from the alluring to the absurd. While synonymous with women and primarily targeted to men, it maintains fans and critics from both sides of the gender line.

Pinpointing the origin of the term cheesecake, as it applies to women, is dubious at best. Mark Gabor, in his book The Pin-up: A Modest History, related a popular account:

Cheesecake...is said to have gotten its name when, in September 1915, a newspaper photographer, George Miller, noticed a visiting Russian diva, Elvira Amazar, just as she was debarking her ship in New York. Miller asked the opera singer to hike up her skirt a little for the sake of his picture. Later, the photographer's editor, something of a gourmet, is supposed to have exclaimed, “Why, this is better than cheesecake!” (Gabor 23).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as a “display of the female form, especially in photographs, advertisements, etc., in the interest of sex-appeal”; and cites a September 1934 article from Time as the earliest usage in print.

Besides flexing muscle in the workplace during World War II, women kept the home fires burning with sheer beauty. Lovelorn soldiers adorned planes, barracks walls and just about any other surface with calendar girl artwork, photos of Hollywood stars, and snapshots of sweethearts left behind. In postwar America, camera clubs and amateur photo contests proliferated as affordable hobbies that naturally complimented the rising popularity of cheesecake. With more of the average American taking part the proverbial knothole widened, transcending the fantasy of the pin-up to embrace the realism of cheesecake. As a style, cheesecake possessed a physical truth unlike the pin-up, and relied more on an unabashed, down-to-earth spectacle of imperfection, playfulness, and humor to arouse the nation's sexual conscience.

It was a new epoch of freedom, and with it came a splintering of feminine ideals: Betty Friedan, June Cleaver, Rosie The Riveter, Marilyn Monroe. Cheesecake flourished in this tumultuous environment, appearing everywhere from magazines to television to cinema. The record industry was no exception to this rule - if the music didn't lure, the album cover would. In fact, the examination of cheesecake album art is nothing less than a voyeuristic journey into the heart of pop culture - where a picture is, perhaps, worth a thousand words.

 

To view the gallery of album art, click here.