Cheesecake nude

This is a copyrighted image from the 1940s by T.R. Braithwaite, who after art training spent his life toiling in the "creative" departments of corporate advertising. Advertising permanently taints the creations of those who practise it. Braithwaite probably drew a decent nude before he put on the spectacles of commerce. The result is a nude that has been cheesecaked. It means the picture is selling the attractions of the model to me, instead of just delineating them and allowing them to speak for themselves. The genre grew (inevitably) out of US consumerism and the popularisation of young female beauty through Hollywood leg art, which is neither about legs nor about art, but about merchandising. At the same time in the 1930s and 40s, arted pin-ups entered circulation. The most famous exponent of this genre was Vargas. I think the cheesecake giveaway in Braithwaite's nude, called Diane, is the foot, which looks as if it is in a high-heeled shoe, even if it is not. The most famous exponent of shoes in the 1940s and 50s was Andy Warhol, who had already made a fortune out of drawing shoes commercially, long before he launched into his second career as a pop artist. Vargas pin-ups are rarely without high-heeled shoes. The conjunction of legs, degrees of nudity and high-heeled shoes was obviously a powerful turn-on for earlier generations, being a uniquely American blending of consumer packaging with ancient lust. It was so pervasive at the time that poor Braithwaite was unable to draw a nude in any other manner.