Celebrating artists Before Bishop.

I'm starting off with an artist about who virtually nothing is known. But because I want to concentrate on the work and not so much on his personal history, that isn't a problem. We only know him as Mario, and he put out a rather small body of work in the years 1954 and1955. His complete oeuvre can be found compiled in one of the Bélier Press books from the '70s.

When I encountered his work for the first time, back in the seventies, the first thing that attracted me was that his models looked mature. They were women, not girls. And although these drawings were made before I was born (ever so slightly, but still), they immediately resonated with me. From the mid-sixties on, as a youngster, I had been watching movies from the forties and fifties on television, and Mario's models perfectly resembled the actresses therein. I had always considered them to be the perfect bondage victims, and now: here they were, in their full glory!