"His world is a strangely refined and beautiful one, which must be explored slowly, and with a curiosity which will, little by little, give way to admiration and love."
Ah, Romain de Tirtoff... Who? I hear you ask.
Yet, 116 years since his birth into a prestigious aristocratic St Petersburg family, we still adore this enigmatic man and his work. Having designed his first successful costume design at the age of five, at age 19 the young Romain left home and moved to Paris where he became a junior designer with the esteemed couturier Paul Poiret.
There, partly to save his estranged family from shame, and partly as a camp construct that suited the decadence of that era, he chose thenceforth to be known by the French pronunciation of his initials - and thus was born the genius known as
Erté.
From his early years learning from the masters in their art, the apprentice soon eclipsed his tutors to become the most famous designer of them all - often referred to as the "Father of Art Deco". For the next 22 years he gained fame and fortune creating cover art and illustrations for the magazine
Harper's Bazaar, designing 250 covers and numerous drawings for its fashion pages. After a brief move to Hollywood where he designed sets for flamboyant silent films including
Ben Hur, Erté left the magazine to create sets and costumes for theatre and opera. He often modelled them himself...
Erté designed the most over-the-top extravagant costumes and stage sets for Diaghilev's wildly successful
Ballets Russes, for the
Folies-Bergère in Paris and for George White's
Scandals in New York, utilising colours, fabrics, jewels, textures and sinuous lines unprecedented in the theatre. For the next 40 years, he dressed the greatest and most stylish stars of the day, including Josephine Baker, Marion Davies, Lillian Gish, Mata Hari and Anna Pavlova.
His images of impossibly tall, slender, uncompromisingly glamorous female forms continue to be wildly popular today - largely thanks to the "rediscovery" of Erté by London art dealer Eric Estorick in 1967 - and exhibitions, lithographs, books and other reproductions of his work still sell to millions. Indeed, flushed by the revival of his fame, Erté carried on working until his death in 1990, at the age of 97.
Of the
three Erté prints we have in our collection, perhaps the most iconic is
Symphony in Black - an image that these days may be found on gifts, cards and even wrapping paper, and must rank as one of the most popular fashion drawings ever...
Erté was indeed a genius.
Homoerotica in Erté designs
