Art: Girlie pin-ups find a new home

Believe it or not, when she died in December, there were people in the free world who actually didn't know pin-up icon Bettie Page from Alan Page. Dan Murphy was not one of them.

"Nashville's finest, right?" said Murphy, the Soul Asylum guitarist, who then went into a ticker-tape-paced history of the pin-up, from the Marilyn Monroe nude that sold for 50 cents and became the template for Playboy centerfolds, to the mores of times past when now-modest photos were considered porn and sold under-the-counter at bookstores, to the fate of photographer Irving Claw, who Murphy says was "in jail half his life" for his portraits of Page and others.

"Pin-up's a really weird world," said Murphy, who with his wife, Sarah, runs GrapefruitMoonGallery.com, a website that specializes in vintage pin-up art and photography. "A lot of our customers are elderly gay males. And an interesting thing for us is that a lot of it was based in St. Paul. The biggest calendar company in the world [in the 1930s and 1940s] was Brown and Bigelow in St. Paul, which hired staff artists who were pretty phenomenal.

"Like, we have paintings by this guy Gil Elvgren. He was a St. Paulite; the family had a hardware store in downtown St. Paul. But one of his paintings last May sold for $263,000. A pin-up painting."

Nice art if you can get it. For the rest of us, a browse through Grapefruit Moon is a priceless return to a time when pulp fiction, bawdy music, turn-of-the-century fashion and woman-as-muse inspired painters worldwide. To that end, the auction money keeps Grapefruit Moon in business, but it's the art that keeps Murphy interested.

He has accrued an impressive collection, and these days it doesn't hurt that pin-up culture has found renewed interest, embraced as it has been by rockabilly kitties, rollergirls and women of all ages who pose for personal pin-up portraits.

Murphy collected pin-up art long before it was cool. In the early '90s, when Soul Asylum was one of the biggest bands in the land and making good money, he discovered Silver Screen Gallery in a loft space in New York City's Garment District. The proprietor dealt in pastels by Rolf Armstrong, who specialized in painting portraits of silent movie stars for magazine covers. Murphy bought one and was hooked.

"I started collecting them, but back then it was much, much cheaper," he said. "You could buy something for $4,000 or $5,000 that might be worth $45,000 or $55,000 now. I put the website online the day after Thanksgiving five years ago; that weekend I was in New York City and a woman called me up and bought a whole bunch of paintings for kind of crazy money.

"I didn't know if it was going to work. I didn't know if anyone would find the gallery, I didn't know if I'd do any commerce. But I spent the next year writing [artist] biographies, amassing photographs and inventory. And now it's more than a full-time job. It's starting to pay dividends, and we have a fabulous client base; almost all repeat customers."

The Murphys have become the go-to couple in the suddenly trendy pin-up art game. They sell most of their finds to Hollywood movie moguls, hard-core fans of Americana and aficionados of art that celebrates women by reclaiming clothes.

"For me, the way women were portrayed in the '60s is really kind of flat and sexist," said Dan. "But the pin-up art we deal with mostly is like the early '20s stuff by [noted Esquire and Playboy illustrator Alberto] Vargas -- showgirls in lavish costumes. It's sexy and beautiful, and it's also kind of powerful in a nonsexist- aggrandizing way. It's really liberated.

"The Roaring '20s and that whole kind of decadent sexual freedom period in history is the height of what we do. That was really the Golden Age of illustration. From the commercial aspect, this is truly fine art, and what distinguishes it is just how well these people could physically paint. Gil Elvgren is called 'the Norman Rockwell of pin-up' because it's almost photo-realistic in a really idealized way."

Murphy is constantly trolling his connections, whether he's on the road with Soul Asylum or spending time in his apartment in New York or homes in Florida and Minneapolis. It has been a lesson in perseverance and following your bliss ("It's sexually provocative in a really perverse/modest way," is how he explains the ultimate appeal of the pin-up). For pack rats everywhere, the message is: Hang onto your junk.

"You couldn't give this stuff away in the '60s and '70s; it was really out of fashion," he said. "But then a coffee table book came along [in 1996], 'The Great American Pin-up,' and before that it had never been taken very seriously. Now it's considered high art.

"Sarah went to an auction in Los Angeles last month, and there were movie stills of Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and all these other silent movie stars, and they were going for tens of thousands of dollars."