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I’m the stuff of tattoos!” declares Olivia with gusto. “You won’t see Robert Ryman’s work tattooed on someone’s back very often. You won’t see Mark Roscoe or Picasso or Pollack. The establishment calls me a guilty pleasure – but as far as I’m concerned, I am popular culture!”

Resting atop a hillside in California overlooking a panoramic vista of the Malibu coastline, Bizarre finds Olivia De Berardinis, the queen of pin-up art, adding the finishing touches to a resplendent portrait of Dita Von Teese, one of her famous muses.

The sassy artist – who speaks like a 1950s film noir star – has carved a niche in a world that was once, and still is to an extent a man’s domain. Through publication in leading men’s magazines such as Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse, Olivia has helped to redefine notions of female sexuality and eroticism, and created startling images of the contemporary outré-hip along the way.

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Masuimi Max, Courtney Love and Pamela Anderson are a few of the tough women Olivia’s painted. Olivia’s interpretations of Bettie Page, though, are her most iconic – the painter and airbrush artist has been an important figure in the Bettie Page revival phenomena since the 1970s.

Whether they’re ethereal, punk-edged fantasies or super-realistic Alberto Vargas-inspired images, Olivia’s pin-up art has inspired a generation to get tattooed with her work.

Olivia was born in 1948 and grew up during a period when pin-up art saturated the cultural consciousness, with images of long legs and pointy bras ubiquitous on movie posters, calendars, matchbooks, advertising billboards and aircraft noses.

“Little girls go through that phase where they draw big horses, but I was always drawing women,” she says. “My mother would do terrible imitations of sexy women such as Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Marilyn Monroe – anybody with a thick accent. She was sexy, and was well-endowed with a small waist. I used to love watching how people got upset by her presence and her large breasts. Men would just lose it and become fucking idiots – I drew her for years!”

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But when Olivia began studying at the School Of Visual Arts in New York, during the post-sex revolution of the 1960s, imagery that was once a mainstream addiction had become passé. “Most of the art in the sex magazines was horrible,” she explains. “Although I didn’t really know what I was doing, I thought I could do a better job. I wanted to give the women respect and draw sex with dignity.”

She began by illustrating a column by Nancy Friday (an author born in the 1930s who’s written about female sexual fantasies) in porn magazine Swank.

“Then I got a regular double page in Club,” says the artist. “Some of the work was absurd, but they printed it anyhow. Lesbianism and bondage with explicit genitalia shots was my big thing. Everybody just thinks I appeared as this innocent, squeaky-clean pin-up artist, but I have a dirty past. I was studying Franz Von Bayros, Aubrey Beardsley and the Marquis De Sade – the sort of people who are almost polymorphously perverse, everything would turn them on. And at that time, that’s where I went. If I drew a doorknob it was Alice In Wonderland with vaginas.”

Olivia shares her self-built dream house and studio with husband Joel Beren, who she met in 1975, and pug George (named after pin-up artist George Petty).

It’s a perfect union, where Olivia pushes the paint and Joel handles the business. He designs and publishes Olivia’s lavish art books, while providing invaluable inspiration with a huge collection of erotic material – thousands of photos, postcards, books, original art and vintage high-heeled shoes.

He also snaps reference photos of the models for the paintings – Olivia never uses a life model. “I don’t really want somebody here naked,” she says. “It’s uncomfortable. I’ve found I’m not good at voyeurism.”

A brutally honest character, Joel tells it how it is. “Olivia wasn’t very good at reference photography and I was,” he laughs. “I’d hire models who understood very clearly they’d be posing nude. I’d set up lights, hand Olivia the camera and leave. But the pictures would come back and the models would have clothes on. Olivia would say, ‘Well, I could never get around to asking them to take their clothes off!’”

As she talks to Bizarre about her life in pictures, Olivia remembers meeting the magazine execs who first gave her work. “We met all the men’s magazine giants back in the 1960s and it was kinda bizarre,” she says. “Bob Guccione from Penthouse came over to our apartment one time. But I got frustrated with Penthouse, and so we took a job for Playboy. When we saw Bob again, he was like, ‘Don’t ever work for the bunny again,’ and we said, ‘OK’.”

But the bunny was where the best in the world worked, and Olivia quickly struck up a friendship with Playboy – in fact, Hugh Hefner still displays her portrait of him in the Great Hall of the Playboy Mansion. Soon after meeting Hef, Olivia was commissioned to illustrate a page for the magazine each month, a prestigious gig that once belonged to the legendary pin-up artist Alberto Vargas.

For over half a decade now, every edition of the mag has featured one of her pin-ups, which receive the deft comic touch of the Hef caption. “He’s very old school,” she says. “I can’t put a tattooed woman in there. But it’s his world and I’m very happy to be in the pin-up throne that Hef set up in the 1950s.”

Olivia also creates the invitation artwork for Hugh’s big Playboy parties, and she’s been in attendance at every major shindig at the mansion for over 25 years. “Its like an old French court with political intrigue about who gets to sit in what part,” she explains.

“We missed the early days – everyone is always quick to remind us those were the incredible years – but what’s amazing about the Playboy Mansion is that not only is Hef one of the most recognisable human beings on the planet, but almost every recognisable famous person has gone through those doors. Joel and I are married so, as for the sex stuff, we never look in the Mansion’s grotto. We don’t want to interrupt everybody, even though we know its packed in there. We go home at 12.”

It was at the Playboy Mansion that Olivia finally met her muse. “Hef came running over to us saying, ‘Do you know Bettie’s here?’ He was excited to meet her, as were we,” she says. “It was like having Greta Garbo in the house.”

Joel continues: “For many years, we were in the same boat as everyone else. Bettie had disappeared. So when she resurfaced and Hef became involved in helping her sort out her life, we were able to become friends with her.”

Bettie Page had been off the cultural radar for nearly 20 years when Olivia started to paint her in 1975. She originally discovered Bettie through a collection of photos belonging to Joel’s pal, Jeff Rund, who later published Private Peeks – the first Bettie collection.

Olivia’s ‘Bettie’s Shoes’ painting was commissioned by Italian clothing company Fiorucci in 1980 – it was the first use of Bettie’s image to advertise a mainstream product since her retirement.

Her paintings of the legend capture her spirit like no other – from BDSM interpretations that find Bettie as a maid, nurse or teacher, to fantasy images that show her as a mermaid or devil girl.

After their first meeting, Bettie immediately became a fan of Olivia’s work and was delighted to hang her portrait of ‘Crackers In Bed’ in her own boudoir. “Better than Vargas and Petty combined,” said Bettie in an interview. “Olivia, she makes me look so beautiful, her pictures outshine the rest.”


Years after their first meeting, Joel and Olivia escorted Bettie to the Playboy Mansion for a screening of The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s unauthorised biopic. Joel explains that the legend was unhappy. “She said to me, ‘Notorious Bettie Page? That’s not good. Why am I notorious?’ She didn’t like the title and she really didn’t enjoy seeing some of the things they put on screen.”

“She kept yelling, ‘Lies! Lies! All lies!’” says Olivia. “It was like a public spanking being administered. I remember the people next to her getting up and shuffling chairs. She was just groaning and mumbling throughout the whole picture. And I don’t blame her. After the lights came up, she headed out, upset. She was about to beat to a pulp anyone that got in her way.”

Olivia watched as Joel took Bettie to her waiting limo. “She was wailing and I just didn’t have a clue what to say to her,” she recalls. “Then someone told Hef that she’d left crying and he came out and started whispering in her ear. In a perfect moment of Hefner behaviour, he knew exactly what to say to her. He calmed the situation, she started to smile and everything was fine.”

When Bettie passed away last year, Joel was one of the pallbearers at her funeral. The icon was suitably buried about 20ft from Marilyn Monroe. “It was sad to see the old girl go,” sighs Olivia. “But the last year or two of Bettie’s life were so miserable that I was happy for her. We never got to see her that much, but she’d phone about once a month. It was so cool to hear, ‘Hi, this is Bettie Page,’ on the end of the line.”

While recently polishing off the film poster for the upcoming Bettie Page Reveals All documentary, Olivia’s started a clothing company selling T-shirts through her website. “These images of Bettie Page seem to have a life of their own, and what I now have that I didn’t 30 years ago are the fans,” she says. “They give me feedback so I can embellish and add to it. The fact they understand what I’m doing is what I most adore.”

See Olivia’s work at Eolivia.com