Viva Vargas!

Ever since, March of 1957, when he first appeared in these pages. Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chavez, the Peruvian-born artist known as Vargas; has delighted Playboy readers with his delicately sensuous renderings of the female form. Vargas began his career as a portan artis for the Ziegfeld Follies, producing hundreds of works using the famed Ziegfeld Girls as his models. During the Thirties, Vargas moved to Hollywood where he worked for Paramount 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. studios, doing pastel portraits of their starlets for movie advertisements. After the effort to organize studio arttists in 1939, Vargas, a union sympathizer, found himself blacklisted. But by then his reputation had reached the editors of the old Esquire magazine, who were looking for a replacement for the petulant George Petty, creator of the famous Petty Girl. Vargas enjoyed a brief but prolific career there until contractual problems forced his resignation--luckily for Playboy, for which he has produced more than 160 portraits over the past 18 years. Now Vargas and former Playboy Art Director Reid Austin have prepared an impressive volume of his work, published by Crown and spanning the long creative life of the best of the pinup artists.