Woman With a Flower 

Rolf Armstrong made this pastel drawing, Woman With a Flower, sometime during his career as a commercial artist in the first half of the twentieth century. Armstrong was one of the foremost pin-up artists of his day, and this is a typical example of the kinds of images he produced for calendars and magazine covers. He was part of a group of illustrators who made their names producing idealized images of women. His work, however, lacked a certain depth, and we can understand this in light of the institutions in which he was trained. He studied at the Chicago Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York, institutions that, at the time, emphasized technique over content and that taught artists to produce images on an industrial scale. If we want to understand the historical context of his art, we have to examine the rise of commercial culture in America and the ways in which institutions of art, such as schools and publishers, helped to shape the tastes of the public.