Erte: Irrepressible at 90

By Patricia Blake

The master of art deco celebrates with four shows

In 1926, when Erte made an electrifying appearance at the Paris Opera costume ball, he was dressed in a toreador outfit of varying shades of gold lame. "That night," he recalls, "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." Though the glitter of the gold fabric has dimmed a trifle, and Erte has just turned 90, both the costume and the celebrated designer were on hand at the opening of a retrospective at the Dyansen Gallery in Manhattan, one of four major Erte shows currently on view in the U.S.*

Erte is one of the few fortunate artists who have lived long enough to luxuriate in their own revival. The acknowledged master of art deco in the 1920s and '30s, he created exuberantly fanciful costumes in his Paris studio for Anna Pavlova, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst and Josephine Baker. The sets he designed for the Folies-Bergère and the Ziegfeld Follies were backdrops for the extravagances of the age. In the postwar era, however, Erte's conceits were often dismissed as high camp or low kitsch. Undeterred, he kept on painting the Erte woman, who is the focus of most of his grand designs. Stylized, curvilinear and faintly kinky, she is identified by her festoon of jewels, trailing furs or crown of feathers. Often accompanying her, on a diamond-studded leash, is a borzoi or a leopard.

By the mid-'60s a new audience in the U.S. and Europe had discovered Erte. Former Vogue Editor Diana Vreeland declared that no one in the 20th century had had a greater influence on fashion. Bar bra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and other Hollywood folk began collecting his original costume and scenic designs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has bought more than 200 of his drawings and paintings.

In 1974, The irrepressible Erte undertook a new genre, the serigraph. His remarkable technical skills, combined with an innovative use of color, gold and silver, proved to be ideal for serigraphs and lithographs. By the 1980s Erte had become one of the most popular graphic artists creating fine-art prints. Many have been splendidly reproduced in a new volume, Erte at Ninety; The Complete Graphics (E.P. Dutton; $75). On the cover is Beauty and the Beast, a serigraph of the quintessential Erte woman, who still rules his world. Coiffed in a peacock's tail, she has wrapped her naked body in the ultimate art deco fur coat, a live black panther.

Erte was born Roman Tyrtov in 1892 in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad); his pseudonym was coined from the French pronunciation (Air-tay) of his initials. At the age of five, he was already sketching designs for dresses. His entranced mother had a dressmaker whip up one of his creations, which she wore with great eclat. In the library of his father, an admiral, young Erte found a book of reproductions of Persian and Indian miniatures; the boy was so delighted that he decided to become an artist.

When Erte settled in Paris in 1912 at the age of 19, he had already developed a taste for the precise detail, blazing colors and stylized but highly idiosyncratic motifs that are characteristic of 16th century Persian miniaturist painting. He also had a flair for attracting the eye of celebrated clients, including Mata Hari, the Dutch dancer executed by the French as a German spy in 1917.

Erte's current exhibits demonstrate his lifelong fascination with every permutation of show business and fashion. No graphic artist and designer of his time has displayed greater versatility and playfulness in creating modes of illusion. Take the mysterious objects in the Dyansen Gallery windows. Rococo confections of white foxtails and myriad colored stones, they are headdresses that once topped the nakedness of Paris showgirls. On the gallery walls are Erte's original paintings of the sets and costumes he created for such disparate productions as George White's Scandals in New York City in the '20s and Mozart's Così fan tutte at the Paris Opera in 1952.

Reminiscing about the sumptuousness of the decors he designed on visits to the U.S. in the '20s, Erte recalls that one set for the Ziegfeld Follies was built with 6 1/2 miles of gold lame, specially ordered from France. Still, Erte's work did more than coruscate. At the other end of the spectrum of his sensibility are the exquisite gouache-and-ink fashion illustrations of his original designs, drawn for Harper's Bazaar from 1915 to 1926.

For all his theatrics, Erte has always been a prodigiously hardworking artist who, for nearly seven decades, has spent virtually every night, all night, at his desk. He habitually sketches and paints in a dark room under a single spotlight, listening to recordings of Beethoven and Schubert. Since 1935 he has lived in an apartment in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, with a succession of cats as companions. "Being alone is vitally important for me and my work. I'm like a cat, solitary, independent and quiet by nature," he says. To keep in shape he works regularly with weights, even carrying a light set in his briefcase. Says he: "It's almost a duty to keep your body svelte--for other people's sake."

At the opening of the Dyansen show, Erte was dressed in a black-leather dinner jacket with cobraskin lapels. Around his neck he wore his mother's gold lorgnette and a heavy gold watch chain that had belonged to his grandfather, an admiral like his father. He stood beside his old toreador outfit, which was on display, his pale blue eyes alight with reminiscences of his grand entrance at the 1926 ball. He remarked proudly that he could still fit into the costume, flower-lined cape and all. Clearly, Erte would like nothing better in his 90th year than to toss roses once again to his new, appreciative fans.

--By Patricia Blake

*The others at Gallery One in San Francisco, the Richard Mann Gallery in Los Angeles and the Laura Pollak Gallery in San Diego.

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