s the art of Bill Ward long for this modern world? With a body of work shaped from tits and giggles—hyper-curvaceous women, lascivious everymen, and risqué double-entendre captions—it can understandably be shocking to contemporary sensibilities.
I know all about this. A legion of enthusiasts might fill historic theaters on my world tours. They might champion the vision I play out in front of the camera lens. Or collect the fashion and lingerie and beauty wares that I design.
But there are equally many others who fret. Am I a poster gal for post-feminism or its ruin? My art seems to be just one more quandary in the ever-evolving discourse on gender roles, identity and power. I get it. I welcome it.
I also believe there is a space, among consenting adults, for exploring, even delighting in sexuality. This includes film, novels and, yes, even illustrations once dismissed as throwaway cartoons.
Like the sky-high stilettos Ward’s women teeter in, what I do before the camera or on stage, and what he and his contemporaries did with charcoal on paper, all require a sense of balance and context.
A dose of naughty wit, screw-ball absurdity and sharp satire, after all, is fundamental to the grand tradition of burlesque. Oh, yes, the sparkling, extravagant costumes drew me to this grand American artform. But the brilliance of burlesque is its commentary on the human condition. That it is expressed with humor, ribald and whip-smart, makes the allegories that much easier to take in. Enjoying as well as examining that legacy, likewise, informs today’s burlesque. The audiences are no longer dominated by straight males, but, wonderfully, every gender-identity under the starlight.
The strip cabarets in Ward’s panels from the 1950s and 1960s are attended by dressed-up husbands and wives, the martinis not quite quenching their thirsts for more. The pneumatic performers dazzle with tassels that seem to sparkle and fans that feather and articulating satin gloves, realized with his deft knack of the stark white conte crayon. Amusing details fill this world such as a pie-eyed burlesque manager and a production company called I. Peek. Ward was a stunningly prolific journeyman, and so much of his oeuvre, even when it had nothing to do with the showbiz of stripping, is charged with that burlesque spirit.
Oh, to be sure, this is a man who had a type, at least anatomically. Don’t we all? But not all of his buxom beauties equally navigate the storylines. There are ditzes and there are divas, bimbos and bitches. More than not, there are glamazons whose power is not limited to their seductive gifts. Many of these broads have little time or patience for the schmucks vying for their attention.
And there is so much else going on in the frame! Even in his earliest panels, Ward mocks toxic masculinity. He pokes at human nature and precarious social constructs. Money also cannot account for why some of these women are seemingly content with guys, clad in crumpled suits and so obviously out of their lady friend’s league. Does beg to know what other talents these Joe Blows might have…
No doubt, Ward’s women made an impression on me. The slick gloves. The shiny stockings. The vertiginous heels. The elaborately rendered lace. The corsets and cinched waists. The glamour! These women, especially in the panels through the early 1960s, embody what I’ve come to coin femme totale style. Those sartorial details transfixed me when, all of age 20, I became really aware of this artist.
They also intrigued Rebecca H. Heels, the alter-ego of the confidante who schooled me on Ward, the late Reb Stout. Jovial with a sly laugh and infectious smile, Reb was three times my senior when we met in 1992 through a fetish wares and media house. He helmed many of the operations both logistically and creatively there and I modeled in exchange for corsets. He and I shared an affinity for stockings, heels, gloves…. Not only did I learn about fetish art and style from him (he had an enviable collection), but also the psychology of fetishism. The first films of me trying on corsets and heels, campily wiggling about, Reb shot and produced during those first couple of years of our friendship.
He also released a 1986 documentary “The Wonderful Women of Ward.” It’s impossible to find, sadly. Reb was both fan and friend of the artist. One of the two Bill Ward originals along with several prints I am so fortunate to own came by way of his massive collection and generosity. (What a dear, he also gifted the masters to those early films he shot of me.)
A second original Ward I acquired via auction in 2015 from “the property of a distinguished gentleman” (seriously, that is what the documentation states). It hangs in my salon alongside works by other celebrated Twentieth Mid-Century artists in this genre—George Petty, Peter Driben, Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Fritz Willis, John Willie, and Zoë Mozert. These talented men and women may have seemingly been churning out post-war glamour girls as commercial ephemera, but the output of these artists deserves to be hailed, studied and admired with the best of their “fine art” contemporaries.
Ward’s mastery as a visual artist notwithstanding, does the content, the humor, merit extolling given today’s evolving values?
Yes. The mirror Ward holds up—to his time, to his imagination and desires—jabs at the cultural mores among the sexes. This remains as complicated as ever, even as we strive to navigate toward a more gender-, body-, and sex-positive era. Whether it is Ward or Degas’s ballerinas or a Bacall-Bogie film noir or a burlesque act, the best art provokes us to consider new and better perspectives about ourselves and the worlds we individually and collectively live in.
Ward’s considerable canon teases the libido, the senses, as well as ideologies and values. And from where I stand, in four-inch heels, legs swathed in silky stockings, the most arousing of all is how much one of his singlepanel cartoons can titillate the mind.
Dita Von Teese
Los Angeles, Spring 2021
