These are the artists who drew it first, before anyone was allowed to: the collar, the cuffs, the woman in command, and the woman who kneels to her and is glad of it. They worked in mail-order magazines and under-the-counter serials, often under false names, for an audience that had to send away in plain brown envelopes. Every one of them deserves to be collected properly.
If what you respond to is the rule, the restraint and the pleasure of a woman exactly where she has been put, here is where to look.
John Willie. Start here, because everything starts here. Born John Alexander Scott Coutts, he published Bizarre out of a small office from 1946 to 1959: 26 issues of corsets, high heels, rope and leather, with letters from readers who had been waiting their whole lives to find out they were not alone. He drew, he wrote and he photographed, and his line is the most elegant in the whole tradition, clean, witty and impossibly tight-waisted. His serial Sweet Gwendoline follows a wide-eyed blonde who is forever getting herself trussed up, and the dark-haired female agent U69, who is forever arriving to deal with the situation, which she does in ways that rarely involve untying anyone quickly. If what holds you is the beauty of the bind itself, rope as composition, this is the source. To own: Taschen's two-volume complete reprint of Bizarre. Hunt for original issues if you want the paper itself; they turn up, and they are worth it.
Eric Stanton. If Willie is elegance, Stanton is appetite. He drew for Irving Klaw's mail-order serials in the 1950s (the same Klaw who photographed Bettie Page) and then spent forty years drawing nothing but women in charge: Amazons with impossible thighs and waists cinched to nothing, in towering heels and gloves to the shoulder, winning fights, tying up their rivals and standing over them. His women are enormous, gorgeous and wholly unbothered by the consequences of their strength. Read alongside him the work of his friend and sometime collaborator Gene Bilbrew, who signed as "Eneg" and drew the same world with a darker, lusher line. If what holds you is the woman who simply takes, start with Stanton. To own: Taschen's The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place, a title we could not have improved on.
Guido Crepax. The Italian, and the one who brought it into the drawing room. Crepax gave the 1960s Valentina, a dark-bobbed photographer whose dreams keep sliding into bondage, and then in 1975 he adapted The Story of O as a comic, panel by fractured panel. His pages look like no one else's: the frame shatters into slivers, a wrist, a collar, a parted mouth, a glove on a thigh, so that you read a scene the way you would remember it, in pieces, out of order, overwhelmed. If what holds you is the interior of submission, the way it feels from inside the woman experiencing it, this is your illustrator. To own: his Story of O, in any edition you can find. It is the single most beautiful book on this list.
Alberto Vargas. Now the register lifts. Vargas painted the Vargas Girl for Esquire through the war years and for Playboy through the 1960s and '70s, in watercolor and airbrush so smooth the skin seems lit from inside. There is no rope here and no collar. What there is instead is the idealized body taken as far as it can go: the impossible length of leg, the waist, the heavy curve of a breast under a sheer slip, and a woman painted at the exact moment she knows she is being looked at and has decided she doesn't mind. If what holds you is the worship of the body itself, start here. To own: any good Vargas monograph, and look for the Esquire gatefolds, which were pulled out and pinned up by the hundreds of thousands and survive in surprising numbers.
Gil Elvgren. The lightest touch, and the most underestimated. For thirty years Elvgren painted calendar girls for Brown & Bigelow, and every one of them is caught: a skirt blown up by a gust of wind, a stocking snagged on a fence, a dress tangled in a dog's leash, the girl turning to us with a gasp and a smile that says she isn't nearly as embarrassed as she should be. It is the gentlest version of exposure, but it is exposure, and he painted it with a commercial artist's genius for warmth and skin. If what holds you is the moment of being seen, before anything else has happened, Elvgren is a pleasure. To own: Taschen's Gil Elvgren: The Complete Pin-Ups.
Here is what unites them, and it is not the sex. All five drew in the margins, for magazines sold under the counter, calendars hung in garages and gatefolds folded into soldiers' kit bags, and all five took that work completely seriously. They drew women who were displayed, bound, overpowered or caught, and in every case the woman is the most alive thing on the page. Not one of them drew a victim. They drew women in the moment of pleasure, power or surrender, rendered with more care than most painters ever gave a duchess.
Once you know their women, you will recognize them everywhere. Buy the books, frame a page, and hang it somewhere you'll pass every day.
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