IN WHICH WE WILL LEARN:

• Two ways to make 1940s Neoclassical Robot Pin-ups
• Art History: the end of the Neoclassic Era and the rise of the Pin-up
• Which is more important: wealth and fame, or a deep appreciation of the female form?
• ¿Por qué no los dos?
  
• What if boobs were made of porcelain?

WOMBO Dream is all about styles. Every image you make is the result of your prompt and the style you are using. Styles can turn your characters into cartoons, make your scenes look like impressionist paintings, or spontaneously generate topless velociraptors. The Dream app has dozens of styles, and members can create their own on WOMBO’s Discord Server.

I have created dozens of styles for WOMBO’s Stable Diffusion-based art bot, Wombot (if you count all the variations). A style to make topless velociraptors, of course. Also seven different styles for slimewomen, five styles based on the late Patrick Nagel (Curse you, aerobics!), four synthwave styles, three glowwave styles, two 40s pinup styles, and a style based on the neoclassical paintings of John William Waterhouse, John William Godward, And William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

First Impressionism rose to challenge Academic art, and then Modernism deconstructed it into irrelevance. Godward’s 1922 suicide note read, “The world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso.” Bouguereau was spared some of this, dying in 1905 near the start of Picasso’s career. I’m not sure what became of Waterhouse; his biography is sparse, and I mostly just picked him because of the parallel name thing.

So when I was struck with the idea of mixing Pin-ups and Neoclassicism into some sort of artistic nude peanut butter cup, there were two ways I could go – start with Vargas and work backward, or start with Bouguereau and work forward. I decided to try both, and let the best nekkid chick painter win. To even out (or at least confuse) the playing field, I added a third heat to the mix: robotic ladies of the night.

Get ready for the Battle of the Brothel Bots! The Titanium Trollops’ Tussle! The Duel of the Demimondaine Droids!

It’s Bouguereau sexbots vs Vargas robo-courtesans !

For those of you who want to stick around after the bout, I started to write a quick comparison of the two in terms of artistic output, commercial success, number of boobs painted, and number of robots painted. It got a tiny bit long-winded, so I figured, let’s just get to the match. The short version:

Subject	Bouguereau	Vargas
Paintings Completed	822	460+
Commercial Success	Most successful artist of his time; bought by European royalty and American millionaires	Esquire only paid him $75/painting, and then swindled all rights to them
#Of Boobs Painted	30-40 nude or partially nude paintings	I lost track after 200 boobs. So. Many. Boobs.
#Of Robots Painted	1 (if you count a statue that come to life)	0

Bouguereau has an edge by the numbers, but Vargas scores where it counts.

Lets Battle!

Bouguereau nails the pin-up style right out of the gate, but he’s having trouble with the “bot” part of the equation. Vargas also has a good handle on the neoclassical style. The skimpy clothes and bust size aren’t what an Academy-trained painter would choose – they were either “boobs or no boobs” kinda guys, but there’s no such thing as bad cleavage in my book. A strange choice of Japanese models, not found in the Neoclassical tradition… hold on, I have been informed that Vargas may be making a subtle parallel between the way modern art supplanted Academic art and the way the oiran courtesans, a centuries-old Japanese tradition, were replaced by the upstart geisha during the same time period. Heady stuff!

Vargas sticks to his strengths, but Bouguereau makes a critical error! In an attempt to pick up lost ground, he has overplayed the cheescake disastrously. Vargas painted plenty of nude Pin-ups for Playboy in the 60s, and a few for the Ziegfeld Follies in the 30s, but the 40s was a time for wholesome teasing sensuality – no bare boobs allowed! The Bougue manages one robot arm in his last picture, but it’s still too much sex and not enough bot.

Bouguereau takes a penalty to change up his prompt, but he’s so far behind now, it would take a miracle anyway… which he doesn’t get. He’s showing improvement: he’s got the bot, he’s got the sex, he just can’t quite get them together. Disappointing to say the least. He goes home with the second-place trophy, a bust of Cleopatra that comes with your very own pet snake.

Meanwhile, Vargas pulls out all the stops and pulls off all the bras, giving us two big doses of what his Vargas Girls are famous for. And unlike Bouguereau’s Pin-up misstep, bare breasts are almost a requirement in neoclassical art. What a triumph!

Alberto Vargas wins our very first prompt battle with an amazing display of mammarial might. And those creamy white spheres give me a great idea for the winner’s photoshoot…

There you have it. All of Bougereau’s wealth and productivity aren’t enough to win against a man who knows his boobs. Thanks for watching/reading our first-ever Prompt Battle, we now return you to our regularly scheduled art history lesson.

A quick programming note: for those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about art history, The link to some truly magnificent porcelain hoo-has is right up there. For the more refined and erudite among us here are a few details about the contestants that were meant to be a “Tale of the Tape” but ended up being more like an “Epic Trilogy of the Tape”:

As these two Titian-esque titans of tatas prepare to go toe-to-toe, let’s take a dekko at some details. Both of these prodigious painters put out piles of pictures, but which man made more?

Who produced more paintings?

During the 40s, Esquire worked Vargas to the bone. His contract with the magazine required one painting every week, a total of 180 during his tenure there. Add the dozen or so years of work as the official artist of the Ziegfeld Follies, a couple of years making movie posters for Hollywood, and the 150+ paintings he made for Playboy…

And you still only have a little more than half of the mind-numbing 822 known paintings by William- Adolphe Bouguereau. Plus several thousand sketches, drawings, and preliminary studies. The man was a machine. Wake up, sketch a bit, paint until dark, eat, sleep, wake up, go to Paris, finish a painting, sell it for FFFFat stacks, eat, sleep, repeat.

It doesn’t help their output inequality that when Bouguereau’s youngest child Jeanne died of tuberculosis eight days after his wedding (he married her mother after living with her for after 10 years and having 3 children with her), Bouguereau poured his grief into Jeanne, one of his finest in a long series of paintings of children. When his 15 year-old son Georges died of tuberculosis, he poured his grief into Pietà, one of his finest religious works. When his wife died of tuberculosis, followed two months later by their infant son, Bouguereau poured his grief into The First Mourning, a haunting depiction of Adam and Eve mourning Abel. When his son Paul died of tuberculosis… I think you get the picture.

When Vargas’ wife and muse died in 1974, he lost the will to paint altogether, creating only a handful of paintings between 1974 and his death eight years later. Bouguereau kept creating – and selling – paintings until his death in 1905. 79 years old, suffering from atherosclerosis and failing eyesight, he was still cranking out a painting a month the year he died.

“Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come … if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.”

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Bouguereau slaughters Vargas like TB slaughtered…

…Maybe let’s not go there

Oh, and about those FFFFat stacks (That’s F as in francs. The French were so cool that they didn’t need a symbol for their money. They figured they already owned F. )

FFFinancial success$$$:

Perhaps the most sought-after artist of his time, Bouguereau’s works were purchased by European monarchs and American Gilded Age millionaires alike. Emperor Napoleon III commissioned one. When Gold tycoon Leland Stanford’s San Francisco burned down in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, the world lost two Bouguereau paintings.

After Bouguereau’s death, some of his Impressionist students, art critics, and the new wave of modern painters blackened his reputation for seven decades, his work stricken from most major art histories, and seen as anacronistic, overly nostalgic, and almost campy by the rest. Starting in the 1970s, though, the art world renewed its interest in Bouguereau with paintings going for thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of dollars at auction. One of his paintings was sold for over $20 million in 2019.

Vargas paintings have hit the hundreds of thousands range at auction recently, two orders of magnitude below Bouguereau, but two to four orders higher than what he was paid to paint them in the first place. At his height in the 60s, his paintings for Playboy earned him $500-$1500 a pop. At what should have been his height in the 40s, when tens of thousands of soldiers were plastering their barracks with his Esquire centerfolds, He was conned into a contract that gave him $75 per painting. (George Petty, Esquire’s centerfold artist before Vargas, was fired when he asked for a raise on his $1800/painting contract) Esquire even made him sign his paintings “Varga,” so when Vargas quit and tried to sue for the rights to his paintings, the magazine was able to convince a judge that he only could only claim paintings by “Vargas” They won, and kept the all of their “Varga Girls”

“Every minute of mine costs 100 Francs.” 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Bouguereau tromps Vargas

#of Boobs painted:

Finally, a category that Vargas can sweep easily. I lost count of his nude works somewhere around 100, and I was nowhere near the end. Also, Vargas famously painted all of his “Varga Girls” nude before painting clothes on them. His first visit to bustling, cosmopolitan New York forever changed his life, setting the tone for all his paintings to come:

“From every building came torrents of girls. I had never seen anything like it… Hundreds of girls with an air of self-assuredness and determination that said, ‘Here I am, how do you like me?’ 

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chavez

Surprisingly, out of more than 800 paintings, Bouguereau only painted between thirty and forty nude or semi-nude paintings. And that’s counting the men. (But not the dozens of children and babies – almost all portraying Baby Jesus or Cupid and his putti minions) Apparently, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, art buyers’ tastes turned away from naked mythological women and bathers, and toward simple country girls. And Bouguereau just happened to move back to his seaside hometown right about then and just happened to start prolifically painting portraits of pretty peasant girls – paintings like these make up over half of his finished works.

A word to the wise – this makes Bouguereau a dangerous man to use in a topless Prompt Battle. His more famous works make him a great name to call upon nekkid ladies, but Stable Diffusion knows all about his many paintings of les trop jeune filles as well. When I used him in my Neoclassical-V2 style, I made sure to toss in an “Adult woman, mature lady, fashion model, cover model” line at the start of the prompt, a spell that a Prompt Master friend came up with to counteract the “Kuvshinov Effect.”

Robot Paintings: tie

Neither artist produced any paintings featuring robots. In fact, the word “robot” did not even exist until fifteen years after Bouguereau’s death. No wonder the poor guy washed out of the Prompt Battle.

Bouguereau did paint a copy of Raphael’s “Galatea,” the most famous artificial intelligence in Greek mythology. But statues come to life only count as robots in two cases, as far as I am concerned:

1. If and when the US declares war on France, and the French government finally activates their Trojan Statue of Liberty to lay waste to New York City  

2. In my Mannequin/Terminator cross-over fan fiction starring Kim Cattrall as Skynet, Kristy Swanson As John Connor, and Andrew McCarthy as the guy who gets stepped on by the giant robot in the first scene.

How would you prompt a mechanical madam? More importantly, should James Spader from Mannequin play all the Terminators, or just the giant one that crushes Andrew McCarthy? And even more importantly, what kind of sexy robots do you want to see fight/kiss?? Let me know in the comments.

Yeah, I thought all of them at first, too, but then I came up with something even better. He is all of them, but… at the end of Act 2, just as Kristy Swanson is pounding a cyber-stake into Spader-Prime, the robot splits wide open, revealing (digitally recreated) Estelle Getty at the controls. She turns into a liquid metal manta ray and flies off. The rest of the movie is just one long action sequence where they have to kill all of the 10,000 Getty clones – if even one survives, humanity is doomed.