Quote:
Originally Posted by Grouchy
Can anyone tell me... Why is it known as "cheesecake"..?
Just askin'..!
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best I could find on Internet @
http://www.salon.com/2001/06/21/pinup/
Those American girls. Sitting primly in their sleek swimsuits — hands behind their heads, their breasts like happy nose cones. They were “look but don’t touch” girls.
Pictures of these dolls were called “cheesecake.” Supposedly the term comes from a photographer’s trick to induce a smile: “Say cheese.” But a distant fable says that, in 1912, New York Journal photographer James Kane was developing a photo of an actress whose gown had slipped open. The man was at a loss for words at this vision of delicious flesh. All he could finally say was “What cheesecake!”
“What cheesecake!” was probably the first exclamation out of Louis K. Meisel’s mouth when he was a baby in 1950s Brooklyn, N.Y. Meisel is perhaps the foremost expert on the American pinup, that cultural icon whose golden age occurred between 1930 and 1960, when pastel and airbrushed paintings of long-legged, busty dames graced magazine covers, barbershop calendars and even the sides of Air Force bombers.
In the past 20 years, there has been a resurgence of interest in cheesecake. “Everything that you’ve seen happening, without bragging, is 100 percent due to my efforts for showing pinups as fine art in this gallery,” Meisel says. “I’m a collector first before I’m a dealer,” he says. “Somewhere back around 1975 it occurred to me that the original works by the pinup artists of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s were absolutely undercollected, undershown
there is more text at the web page but the above seems to answer the question