From Duran Duran to nail salons, the iconic work of Patrick Nagel.
Most artists go their entire careers and never achieve the iconic status that Patrick Nagel had in the late 1970s / early 1980s. Like Warhol or Dali, his style is instantly recognizable. Influenced by Japanese wood block prints, French poster illustration, and Art Deco, he created an ultra simplified high contrast illustrative style most famously seen in his paintings of women.
Nagel Women
The “Nagel women” are a series of paintings begun in the mid 1970s. In 1974 Playboy began publishing some of these paintings as illustrations alongside stories which introduced Nagel’s idealized women to a whole new audience. Nagel’s women have paper-white skin, jet black hair, they’re confident, they’re detached, and they are out of your league.
Nagel would work from photographs of models and Playboy Playmates as inspiration but he also painted portraits of celebrities such as Joan Collins and Brooke Shields. He used a photo of model Marcie Hunt, from the February 1981 issue of Vogue France, for his illustration of a woman smiling. This painting became known the world over after it was used on the cover of Duran Duran’s classic 1982 album Rio.
Duran Duran and beyond
No piece by Nagel is more famous than his Rio album cover painting. Duran Duran found Nagel through his Playboy illustrations and after the mega success of Rio his style was everywhere. Even though his work began in the 1970s it helped to define the style of the 1980s.
Nagel’s influence spread around pop culture. The dancers in Robert Palmer’s 1986 video Addicted to Love were modeled after Nagel women. The character Desire in Neil Gaiman’s series The Sandman was modeled after Nagel women. The Catherine Deneuve vampire character in 1983’s The Hunger has the style of a Nagel woman.
Soon imitators were creating illustrations of women in Nagel’s style. This gave us the nail & hair salon posters of Nagel-esque women which never quite measured up to the real thing.
Nagel’s 1980s success was cut short in 1984 when he died at 38 of a heart attack following 15 minutes of participation in a celebrity Aerobathon (which was raising money for the American Heart Association). In the years since his death his work has been seen in collaborations with Forever 21 and Gucci. The Nagel style can be found in Grand Theft Auto, the short-lived 1980s styled TV show Moonbeam City, as a prompt in Midjourney AI art, and more.
