{"id":23371,"date":"2011-11-16T08:00:25","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=23371"},"modified":"2011-11-15T18:09:04","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T23:09:04","slug":"cherchez-la-femme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/16\/cherchez-la-femme\/","title":{"rendered":"Cherchez la Femme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Kermit Westergaard, an interior designer, had come to SoHo from his home in the neighborhood where Greenpoint, Brooklyn, nudges up against Ridgewood, Queens, to attend a 110th anniversary retrospective<\/a> of works by Ert\u00e9, the \u201cfather of Art Deco,\u201d at the Martin Lawrence Gallery. Westergaard, an affable, lightly balding man, seemed somewhat underdressed in comparison to the other gallery attendees, but clothes were in fact the purpose of his visit: from his mother, the theatrical producer Louise Westergaard, he had inherited twenty costumes designed by Ert\u00e9. The garments are in a storage locker, and Westergaard hoped to find someone at the gallery who could put them to use. \u201cI would rather have the drawings of the costumes than the costumes themselves,\u201d he said, somewhat sadly. \u201cI mean, what do you do with them?\u201d He held a catalog of the costumes under his arm, and took it out to show me. They were exquisite, diva-worthy confections: stars and pearls and spiderwebbed dresses, halolike headpieces, cascading nets of rhinestones, and silver lam\u00e9. They brought to mind the sparse garb of the exotic dancer and spy Mata Hari, for whom, in fact, Ert\u00e9 had also designed, in 1913.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Stardust<\/em>, the 1987 Broadway musical from which Westgaard\u2019s collection comes\u2014for which Matel also produced a special series of porcelain Barbies, all wearing Ert\u00e9\u2019s designs\u2014was one of the artist\u2019s final efforts before his death in 1990, at the age of ninety-seven. He was born Roman Petrovich Tyrtov (the name is usually Frenchified as Romain de Tirtoff) in Saint Petersburg in 1892. The pseudonym Ert\u00e9 derives, like that of Tintin<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>creator Herg\u00e9, from the French pronunciation of his initials. Ert\u00e9 designed his first dress, an evening gown, at age six, and his mother was impressed enough to actually have the thing made. (The family was not, however, wholeheartedly supportive of Ert\u00e9\u2019s making a career out of such amusements.) He moved to Paris at twenty, where he found a home in that city\u2019s bohemian and gay demimondes, gaining a place under his new name at the house of couture designer Paul Poiret. During the twenties and thirties, Ert\u00e9 gained renown as a costume designer for, among other places, the Folies-Bergere in Paris and George White’s Scandals on Broadway. Along with many of the era\u2019s most stylish women\u2014Sarah Bernhardt, Joan Crawford, and Lillian Gish among them\u2014 Ert\u00e9 often wore his own designs, most famously a toreador outfit of gold lam\u00e9 which he donned for an opera ball in Paris in 1926. He told Time <\/em>magazine in 1982: \u201cThat night, the huge cape I designed was completely lined with fresh red roses which I tossed, one by one, at my audience as I descended the grand staircase.\u201d Theatrics aside, Ert\u00e9 worked diligently on his art. In 1915, he began contributing drawings to Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>, for which he would eventually create 250 covers over twenty-two years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The erotic in Ert\u00e9\u2019s art is subtle, but that may be the only element to which the adjective could be applied. The pieces are drenched in exoticism and rich, saturated color and texture. The drawings, seriographs, gouaches, and bronze sculptures that comprise the gallery\u2019s show are highly stylized, reflecting the influence of European Orientalist art, Byzantine mosaics, Greek vases, and Egyptian motifs. In his autobiography, Things I Remember<\/em><\/a>, Ert\u00e9 recalled admiring the Persian and Indian miniatures at the Hermitage Museum as a child. These, he writes, aside from inspiring the technical perfectionism that characterizes even his largest works, were his introduction to the feminine eyes, called yeux des biches<\/em> (\u201cdoe eyes\u201d), that came to embody the flapper era: large, upturned almonds with ascending, pencil-thin brows.<\/p>\n

\u201cErt\u00e9\u2019s purgatory is Woman,\u201d Roland Barthes wrote in 1972, \u201cTo tell the truth [it is] as if he could never free himself from them (soul or accessory, obsession, or convenience?), as if Woman signed each of his sketches more surely than his finely-hand-written-name … Cherchez la Femme<\/em>. She is found everywhere.\u201d At the gallery opening, women were indeed everywhere\u2014not only the sable-draped sirens of SoHo, but gleaming from the walls and cases as well. The pieces Barthes was discussing, a series of gouaches in which the letters of the alphabet are composed of intersecting women\u2019s bodies (and the occasional man), were represented in the show by the cryptic syllabary E, F, H, O, D, and P. Following this alphabet, Ert\u00e9 did a series of numbers, and the gallery displayed the collected originals, numerals zero through nine, together for the first time. The zero is formed by a ring of blue smoke circling a cigarette clasped between a pair of disembodied pink lips; in the four, a woman is held at ninety degrees to a man\u2019s waist, bending her upper body toward his head, both wound in flowers and vines (on the man, a lily blooms slyly where one might have expected a fig leaf).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci once commented that Ert\u00e9\u2019s women seem like \u201ca woman disguised as a woman,\u201d and there is indeed something drag-queenish about many of these sylphs. As in fairy tales, Ert\u00e9\u2019s women can take almost any form: they are peacocks, firebirds, butterflies, and fish, lean and lithe and sinuous. It is not their bodies but their clothes that come to the fore: The dress, as Barthes wrote, is extended into the body, which is draped in furs and dripping with feathers and scales, as intricate as a Faberg\u00e9 egg.<\/p>\n

From New York, the Martin Lawrence retrospective will tour the United States, making two-day stop offs in a number of cities. A catalog of the work, which includes reflections by certain prominent friends and appreciators, has been published by Chalk and Vermilion and edited by Charlotte Perman, the gallery\u2019s associate director. In her smooth British accent, Perman related that when she began reaching out to collectors of Ert\u00e9, she was surprised that even incidental acquaintances felt a personal connection to him. \u201cBarbara Streisand told me that she still keeps the picture of the two of them together in her house in California,\u201d Perman said. Stella McCartney, who met the artist on an airplane when she was thirteen, and later visited his studio, praises the artworks in her essay as \u201csimply beautiful, incredibly delicate and overwhelmingly sensual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ert\u00e9\u2019s career languished in the 1940s and 1950s, but was reignited by a revival of Art Deco in the sixties. At 75, he began to recreate his earlier designs, and, for the first time, turned to designing jewelry and creating bronze sculpture. Opinion at the gallery seemed to favor the earlier work, a tendency Kermit Westergaard worried made the disposition of his late collection that much more difficult.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, \u201cthat\u2019ll never go out of style,\u201d a woman beside me said, gesturing toward a Harper\u2019s<\/em> cover in the downstairs of the two-floor gallery. The cover showed a woman blooming pinkly out of a flower. Denise, as the woman told me her name was, said she used to work at the gallery, and still enjoys coming back to help out for events such as this one. Her job that night was guarding the downstairs door, though in the quiet room it hardly seemed necessary: \u201cWe\u2019ve never had anyone steal anything,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Were one inclined toward thievery, \u201cThe Clasp,\u201d a objet d\u2019art<\/em> being unveiled upstairs, might have presented a worthy target. Made by jeweler Stefan Canturi from an Ert\u00e9 design created for George White\u2019s Scandals in the 1920s, the petite mesh bag is valued at the staggering sum of $780,000. Luminous with 3,978 diamonds and sixty-three sapphires, it portrays a diamond-skinned pair of humanoid creatures lolling against one another above a cascade of forty-three liquidly red rubies. \u201cThe Clasp,\u201d like much of Ert\u00e9\u2019s work, is about an ideal of beauty rather than any achievable standard\u2014it\u2019s impossible to imagine anyone carrying such a thing. If designers are any guide, however, it is an ideal that is experiencing a resurgence, an impossible dream made all the more tantalizing by our era of economic hardship. After speaking with Eric Wilson from The New York Times<\/em>, Perman told me, she\u2019d learned that many of the fashion houses were drawing on the Art Deco aesthetic for their spring collections: Frida Giannini\u2019s collection for Gucci was called \u201cHard Deco,\u201d and the flapper made an appearance on the runway at Ralph Lauren, among other places. \u201cI think it has to do with women wanting to be elegant again after all these studs and toughness,\u201d Perman told me. \u201cI\u2019m tired of wearing ripped jeans and skinny jeans. It\u2019s nice to just wear a dress again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jenny Hendrix is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kermit Westergaard, an interior designer, had come to SoHo from his home in the neighborhood where Greenpoint, Brooklyn, nudges up against Ridgewood, Queens, to attend a 110th anniversary retrospective of works by Ert\u00e9, the \u201cfather of Art Deco,\u201d at the Martin Lawrence Gallery. Westergaard, an affable, lightly balding man, seemed somewhat underdressed in comparison to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[4923,4938,4378,4937,4922,4930,4936,4941,4931,4942,4068,4934,2030,4924,4932,4925,4926,4927,4929,4943,4935,3348,4928,4940,4939,4933,4451],"class_list":["post-23371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-art-deco","tag-barbara-streisand","tag-barbie","tag-charlotte-perman","tag-erte","tag-folies-bergere","tag-franco-maria-ricci","tag-frida-giannini","tag-george-whites-scandals","tag-gucci","tag-harpers-bazaar","tag-hermitage-museum","tag-joan-crawford","tag-kermit-westergaard","tag-lillian-gish","tag-martin-lawrence-gallery","tag-mata-hari","tag-matel","tag-paul-poiret","tag-ralph-lauren","tag-roland-barthes","tag-sarah-bernhardt","tag-stardust","tag-stefan-canturi","tag-stella-mccartney","tag-things-i-remember","tag-tintin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCherchez 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