Gil Elvgren

Gil's girls: The seminal pin-up artist Post-depression America was in desperate need of a defining iconography that would lift it out of the black and white doldrums, and it came in the form of Gil Elvgren’s Technicolor fantasies of the American dream.

His technique—which earned him a reputation as "The Norman Rockwell of cheesecake"—involved photographing models and then painting them into gorgeous hyper-reality, with longer legs, more flamboyant hair and gravity-defying busts, and in the process making them the perfect moral-boosting eye-candy for every homesick private.