THE ART OF FRITZ WILLIS

Fritz Willis was born in Oklahoma in 1907, and raised in Boston.

- Daniel Zimmer

He studied art at Noble and Greenough Preparatory School, and later attended Vesper-George Art Academy. Following school, he gravitated towards the film industry in California, and as he was a handsome young man, he landed some small roles as an actor, including a part in Alice Adams with Katherine Hepburn (RKO Pictures, 1935.)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he worked for Warner Brothers as a production-design and publicity artist making compositional set designs. He worked alongside another ambitious young artist, Joe DeMers, and they began to collaborate, often producing different parts of the same drawing. In the summer of 1946, Esquire announced an important new feature entitled the “Esquire Gallery of Glamour,” and the magazine selected Willis and DeMers to supply the inaugural illustration, to which both signed their names. A number of newspapers reported on this unique working arrangement in 1951:

Who actually creates the fabulous Esquire Calendar Girls?

In reality, they are created by both the artists who draw and paint them—and by the general public which each year expresses itself, both by purchase and by market surveys, as to the best, and the worst, approximation of their ideal American woman…

Joe De Mers and Fritz Willis worked on the Esquire Girls as a team. Each of them, by himself, could draw a honey of a girl at the drop of a shoulder strap. But, instead, they worked closely together. Joe sketching the left eyelid, Fritz the blue in the white eyeball, Joe the left toe, and Fritz the fourth one.

Or, they might each work on a complete section. DeMers himself explained one cooperative effort: