Twenties Venuses by Eugene Reuinier

We have posted some of German artist Eugene Reuinier's (real name Carl Breuer-Courth 1884-1960) frothy erotic drawings on our The Seduction of Venus blog, here, here and here.  Now we will round off our look at his work with a selection of some of his solo ladies.  His slim, leggy beauties all match the idealised shape of the nineteen twenties flapper which was when these illustrations were done.

This page of studies features a lot of Reunier's common themes: girls wearing only stockings, riding crops, stripping off and enjoying their bodies.  The girl enjoying the attention of an excited monkey is something of a one off however!

Reunier often included  fantastical elements and disembodied phalli often appeared in his drawings too but here he combines them into a sort of x-rated Quidditch game, as saucy witches fly around at full moon..

In this study of a bride he makes it quite clear how the young lady views her husband and what it is, exactly, that she is marrying.

Fifty years before Penthouse and Hustler Reunier depicted a girl putting on this assertive spread-legs display.  The interesting thing about this drawing is that he has depicted the creases in the skin across the girl's midsection that you would indeed get from such a pose but which you would not include if drawing an idealised image.  Could it be that this was drawn from  life?

Our final illustration, and Triple P's favourite, is this young lady elegantly servicing herself with a dildo as she, apparently, dreams of a previous or, perhaps, hoped for,encounter.  This is a lovely drawing.  

We have one more Reunier to post under our Venus with a Snake label which we will put up this week.  We have to say that he was one of the very best erotic artists of the last century and had a unique talent for combining character, humour and eroticism without one ever detracting from the others.

Centrefold Venus of the Month 35: Charlie Goode, April 1977

Time for just a brief Centrefold of the Month post this time as we try to catch up on our backlog. So it is back to 1977 again for April but this time we look at Paul Raymond's Men Only and a pictorial by Fred Enke, suggested by a comment made by Darkwolf.  The fact that this was volume 42 gives something of an idea of the history of this venerable publication,a lthough Raymond didn't take it over until 1971 (volume 36) and turned it into a Penthouse clone.

The cover features our centrefold, Charlie Goode (almost certainly not her real name) in quite a naughtily self probing pose. 

Fred Enke was born in Ohio in 1940 but was educated in California.  Initially his commercial photographic work was focussed on car magazines.

Enke was spotted by Men Only's photographic editor Alan Walton who signed him up to do a shoot for the very first issue of Club, Paul Raymond's attempt to crack the US market, which came out in February 1975.

Over the next two years Enke shot a lot of pictorials for Club, Men Only and Club International.  This period coincided with increasingly frank depictions of the models' genitalia, a trend which Enke's approach, as can be see here, certainly embraced.

However, just two years after the first issue of Club premiered in the US, Enke died suddenly at the age of 36, just two months before this issue was published.

Not everyone, however, liked this blatant approach and in the very same issue the Men Only letters page carried an epistle from H Kilner of York who said: "I'm getting really fed up with all the open-crotch shots in sex magazines: they are so bloody repetitious!"  He waxed nostalgic for the less explicit days of Harrison Marks and went on: "There was no opportunity to flaunt cunt in those days...now that you can show "the lot", it would still be more titillating if the cunt were allowed to appear naturally, rather than have it blatantly presented."  Mr Kilner suggested that other readers write in with their views.

Write in they did and Men Only published a selection of them over the next six months.  In the October issue they admitted that 75% of the letters agreed with Mr Kilner.  Paul Raymond publications must have listened because from late 1977 onwards the blatant labia shots started to disappear.

However, given that the publishers were using the pictorials for both the UK and the US markets (where there didn't seem to be any objections to cunts) they started to obscure the girls's bits in post photographic retouching increasingly over the next few years.  This was rather similar to what went on in Playboy in the late seventies in that the magazines reversed the trend of the previous few years and got less explicit. 

Indeed, even this pictorial, brazen though it was, was considerably less gynecological than Enke's previous centrefold shoot for the magazine the previous month.

The girls still adopted the same spread legs poses, it's just that what they possessed wasn't visible anymore (at least in the UK).  The versions that appeared in Club in the US continued to be more explicit as we shall see. Whether this was a genuine artistic reaction on the part of the readership or a move by the publishers to head off criticism from the then vociferous anti-pornography campaigners Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse isn't clear. Whatever, this pink-pussied centrefold would be the last such for some time in Men Only.

The same month, but using a mirror image of the Men Only cover shot, Charlie was also the centrefold in Club although going under the name Charlene in a pictorial credited to "Olivia".

Elite April 1978

The different levels of explicitness seen in different markets can be demonstrated by these pictures from the same shoot which appeared in the Canadian magazine Elite two years later.

Elite February 1975

The Montreal based Elite magazine was an attempt to put out a home-grown men's magazine for the Canadian market and first appeared in February 1975 running until  1982.

It certainly risked some stronger covers than Playboy or Penthouse did at this time, as this daringly full-frontal cover from 1976 demonstrates.

Here Charlie has now become Debbie and the photographer is listed as "Quark" but it is definitely the same girl from the same shoot.

Her pussy shots are maybe half an order of magnitude more explicit than the Men Only ones.

Oddly, the centrefold was censored by a "banned in Canada" black blob.  Canada always had different rules regarding what was permissable compared with the US.  This resulted, in the nineties, as Penthouse went hardcore for example, with a proliferation of black blobs being put on offending items in the magazine.

These blobs must have been imposed after printing as no publisher is going to put in a picture that he knows he will have to self-censor before it goes to print.  He would just use a different picture.

Triple P first became aware of these black blobs when he bought the May 1997 issue of Penthouse in a newsagent in the World Trade Center in, ironically, Montreal.

Andrea Kurtz tinkles into Penthouse history

We couldn't understand why this picture of Pet of the Month Andrea Kurtz had a large black oblong printed between her thighs.  It was only later that we found out that this was the first of the notorious pissing Pets of the late nineties and the Canadians had blocked out her stream.  

The other thing that got the Canadians exercised was any sort of bondage; which led to strange black shapes appearing over any rope or chain that might appear in any pictures.  Eventually Penthouse had to produce a special Canadian friendly version of the magazine every month.

We can see from these pictures how they have been printed in a much brighter way compared with the shadowy approach of Men Only in the UK.

Whether called, Charlie, Charlene or Debbie this young lady posed for other magazines too and we finish off with a few more pictures of her we have found.

May's Centrefold of the Month will also be from Men Only  and should be appearing in a week or so, with luck.

Agent Triple P published in Baron Magazine!

Much to our surprise, a couple of months ago Agent Triple P was contacted by the editor of a new erotic magazine, Baron, who asked us to write a piece for their first issue.  Also to our surprise our piece, a brief distillation of our Pubic Wars series, was the first item in the magazine, which came out at the beginning of this month. 

It's a non de plume, naturally!

While technically a magazine it is more like a pocket book and, given its exclusive nature it's £8 cover price is probably not that much of a surprise.  

Photography by Aaron McElroy. Lingerie by Affinatas Intimates

The photographs are definitely at the arty end of the erotic spectrum and for this issue feature some ladies in top-end lingerie, as part of the visual theme of the issue.

The most interesting photos in the magazine actually don't feature models at all but are pictures by German photo duo Blommers & Schumm of everyday objects photographed in an erotic way, such as this clever study of a lamp.

Photography by Adrian Wilson

Although Triple P has written quite a few articles for the trade press and international newspaper's in his professional area of expertise, we think this is the first time that we have been paid for an article in a magazine on sale to the public. Exciting!

Most of the other articles, as is Triple P's, are really about the selling of sex rather than being erotic in themselves including pieces on the sex shop Harmony, Soho  peep shows, a Melbourne madame and  a gay porn star.  

Thanks to the team at Baron for giving Triple P this opportunity.  You can buy Baron here.

Non-centrefold Venus of the Month 8: Lilyan Howe, April 1965

Non-centrefold of the Month for April is the lovely Lilyan Howe from 1965.  We are still trying to catch up with ourselves but at least this post is only two weeks late!

Lilyan appeared in Penthouse's second ever issue which was, in fact, designated April/May as the magazine, overwhelmed by the popularity of its first issue, struggled to get enough copies printed.

No doubt all the text about her was rubbish as usual so she may or may not have been a water-skiing, tennis-playing, car freak who liked Jelly Roll Morton, trees, wet afternoons and hated television, cats, the colour mauve and words beginning with the letter "y".

Much more likely to be true was the fact that she was born in 1945 so was twenty at the time these pictures were taken.

Also quite believable, on the visual evidence, is the fact that she was 37-22-35.  She has a splendidly ripe, soft-looking body and, we venture, would have made a far better Pet of the Month than that issue's actual example, the rather underwhelming Linda Richie, as featured on the cover of the magazine that month.

The photographer for this set was Eric Wilkins and this must have been one of his earliest published pictorials.  He went on to shoot many of the more explicit pictorials for some of the more downmarket men's magazines in Britain in the seventies and eighties.  However, although many of his models thrust their pink bits at the camera in the most spread-legged of poses he always managed to get their characters across and this was helped by the fact that he got his girls looking relaxed and smiling as we see with Lilyan here.

He later specialised in spanking pictures for the likes of Swish magazine, often featured girls with cars and even shot some hardcore stuff for continental magazines.

There is nothing arty or technically challenging about these pictures but Wilkins did know how to make a girl look sexy, even in these pre-pubic days.  Our favourite from the set is this fine study (above).  It's full of attitude and confidence.

Birthday Venus: Monica Bellucci

It is Agent DVD's birthday today so we have to post a picture of his ideal woman: Monica Bellucci who, we have to say, is an excellent choice.

Monica does not appear in this year's FHM 100 Sexiest Women in the World list which tells you everything you need to know about its worth.

Happy birthday Agent DVD!