Sunbathers 

Edwin Georgi made this colour illustration, titled Sunbathers, sometime in the mid-twentieth century, very likely as commercial art. But it's also a document of social history. Georgi's image creates meaning through visual codes of leisure. We see a scene of privileged relaxation: sunbathing, card-playing, and an exoticised masculinity represented by the man draped in a garland of flowers. Georgi was working in a period when the advertising industry was rapidly developing sophisticated methods of representing social class and aspiration. Consider the figures in the painting: they have an idealised appearance and a detached coolness. What do they tell us about the image of wealth and beauty that was emerging in the post-war United States? The whiteness of the figures, especially in contrast to the flowered man, also speaks to the ways that advertising imagery has historically been involved in the social construction of race. To understand its social context, one could research how images of leisure and beauty were used in advertising campaigns of the period.