[.ca] Pin-Up Dreams: The Glamour Art of Rolf Armstrong (ISBN 0823040151)

Not just another artist biography:
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.