Coco Chanel, Deauville in front of first Chanel store, 1913 via
Coco Chanel, Deauville in front of first Chanel store, 1913 via
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Fashion at Longchamp 1912 by Seeberger Frères
Ziegfeld Girl Anna Held
Helene Held (1872 – 1918) was a Polish-born French stage performer and singer, most often associated with impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, her common-law husband.
Touring through Europe, Held was appearing in London in 1896 when she met Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld asked her to return to New York City with him and she agreed. He set about creating a wave of public interest in her, by feeding stories about her to the American press, such as her having had ribs surgically removed.
From 1905, Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway which, apart from bolstering Ziegfeld’s fortune, made her a millionaire in her own right. Ziegfeld’s talent for creating publicity stunts ensured that Held’s name remained well known. Held suggested the format for what would eventually become the famous Ziegfeld Follies in 1907, and helped Ziegfeld establish the most lucrative phase of his career.
In 1909, Ziegfeld began an affair with the actress Lillian Lorraine; Held remained hopeful that his fascination would pass and he would return to her, but instead he turned his attentions to another actress Billie Burke, whom he would marry in 1914.
The film The Great Ziegfeld (1936) tells a sanitized version of the story of the Ziegfeld-Held relationship. Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for her performance as Held.
Anna Held via
Anna Held
Belle Epoque Beauty Geneviève Lantelme – Two Early Photographs by Reutlinger
Geneviève Lantelme (b. 1883) was a French stage actress, socialite, fashion icon and courtesan; she was considered by her contemporaries to be one of the most beautiful women of the Belle Epoque.
Geneviève Lantelme by Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, 1900s via
Geneviève Lantelme by Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, 1900s via
W.B. Yeats “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”
“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the Platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.” – W.B. Yeats, ll.49-58 in the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”.
Vintage Photos of Bloomsbury Clique Society Hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell (1873 – 1938) was an English aristocrat and society hostess. She was part of the literary Bloomsbury clique, along with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster and more.
Perhaps Lady Ottoline’s most interesting literary legacy is the wealth of representations of her that appear in 20th-century literature. She was the inspiration for Mrs Bidlake in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, for Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, for Lady Caroline Bury in Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield, and for Lady Sybilline Quarrell in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On. The Coming Back (1933), another novel which portrays her, was written by Constance Malleson, one of Ottoline’s many rivals for the affection of Bertrand Russell. Some critics consider her the inspiration for Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley. Huxley’s roman à clef, Crome Yellow depicts the life at a thinly-veiled Garsington, one of her estates.
Non-literary portraits are also part of this interesting legacy, for example, as seen in the artistic photographs of her by Cecil Beaton. There are portraits by Henry Lamb, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, and others. Carolyn Heilbrun edited Lady Ottoline’s Album (1976), a collection of snapshots and portraits of Morrell and of her famous contemporaries, mostly taken by Morrell herself.
Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell by George Charles Beresford, 4 June 1903 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell by Cavendish Morton platinum print, 1905 via
Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell by Adolf de Meyer, c. 1912 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell by Baron Adolph de Meyer
platinum print, 1912 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell, by Cecil Beaton, 1927 © Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London via
Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1929 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell in her bedroom at Amerongen, 1925 via
Three Photos by Robert Demachy (1859–1936)
Robert Demachy (1859–1936) was the leading French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century. Pictorialism began in response to claims that a photograph was nothing more than a simple record of reality, and transformed into an international movement to advance the status of all photography as a true art form.
Demachy is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. Demachy was particularly interested in nonstandard photographic processes and is noted especially for his revival of the gum bichromate process (invented in 1855 but little used until the 1890s), which allowed the introduction of color and brushwork into the photographic image (source).
He gave up taking photographs in early 1914, and never again touched a camera, even refusing to take snapshots of his grandchildren. No one was ever able to extract any reason from him for this sudden change, and it remains a mystery to this day.
Dans les coulisses by Robert Demachy, ca. 1897 via
Behind the Scenes of the Opera by Robert Demachy via
Behind the Scenes by Robert Demachy, 1906 via
Photos by Visionary Photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 – 1966)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 – 1966) was an early 20th-century photographer who became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism – the name given to an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination
Coburn became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.
Study – Miss R by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1904 via
Landscape by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1902) (Alvin Langdon Coburn/George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film) via
Vortograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1917 (Alvin Langdon Coburn/George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film) via
Portraits by Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934)
Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934) was one of the most influential American photographers of the early 20th century. She was known for her evocative images of motherhood, her powerful portraits of Native Americans and her promotion of photography as a career for women.
Her husband supported her financially when she began to attend art school at the age of thirty-seven, a time when most women of her day were well-settled in their social positions. Käsebier never indicated what motivated her to study art, but she devoted herself to it wholeheartedly.
Throughout the late 1910s and most of the 1920s Käsebier expanded her portrait business, taking photos of many important people of the time including Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Mabel Dodge and Stanford White. In 1924 her daughter Hermine Turner joined her in her portrait business.
In 1929 Käsebier gave up photography altogether and liquidated the contents of her studio. That same year she was given a major one-person exhibition at the Booklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Käsebier died on 12 October 1934 at the home of her daughter, Hermine Turner.
Miss N (Portrait of Evelyn Nesbit), 1903 by Gertrude Käsebier via
Girl in Satin Dress with Roses by Gertrude Käsebier (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) via
The Bride by Gertrude Käsebier, 1902 via
Genevieve Lyon by Gertrude Käsebier, 1914 via
Portrait of Miss Minnie Ashley by Gertrude Käsebier, 1905 via
The Magic Crystal, or the Crystal Gazer by Gertrude Käsebier, 1904 via
Self-Portrait by Gertrude Käsebier, 1905 via
Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt at Litzlberg Attersee (Early 1900s)
Emilie Flöge (1874 – 1952 ) was the life companion of the painter Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918). In 1891, Helene, the younger sister of Emilie, married Ernst Klimt, the brother of Gustav Klimt. When Ernst died in December 1892, Gustav was made Helene’s guardian. At that time Emilie was eighteen years old and Gustav became a frequent guest at the home of her parents, spending the summers with the Flöge family at Lake Attersee.
Klimt died from a stroke on 11 January 1918. His last words reportedly were, “Get Emilie”. She inherited half of Klimt’s estate, the other half going to the painter’s family.
In the final days of the Second World War, her house in the Ungargasse caught fire, destroying not only her collection of garments, but also valuable objects from the estate of Gustav Klimt.
Gustav Klimt with Emilie and Hermine Flöge on a jetty in Litzlberg Attersee, 1906 via
Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, 1900s via
Emilie Flöge, Gustav Klimt, Therese Flöge, Emma Bacher, Rudolf Schuh and Paul Bach, Litzlberg Attersee, 1904 via
Rudolf Schuh, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, Litzlberg Attersee, 1906 via
FROM THE BYGONE 