Old lace
Quentin Bell
Things I remember, an autobiography Erte (Peter Owen £7.50)
A rather stiff price; but for the lovers of Erte, and their name is legion, it will no doubt seem a bargain. There are a great many illustrations, some reproducing works by Erte, others, the majority it would seem, pictures of the author
himself in a great variety of epicene disguises. The text harmonises with the pictures; as is natural in an autobiography, the biographer ,
steals the show: what M. Erte remembers of an outstandingly successful career is inevitably the applause that has greeted all his
undertakings. He quotes extensively from Die Welt, the New York Times, the Temoignage Chretien, l'Aube, !Illustration, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, M. Roland Barthes and 'William Randolph Hearst. Indeed, there is so much agreeable commentary to record that the author has to provide an appendix for some of those press notices which he was unable to incorporate in his text. Needless to say, these are all favourable notices, the only whisper of
dissent recorded in these pages came from a critic who described the work of M. Erte as
"kitsch," but even this, we are assured, is a term which can be construed in a not unfavourable manner.
This is all very pleasant and, apart from the death of friends and relations inevitable in the biography of an octogenarian, and the failure of the American stock market in 1929, this book is all sweetness and light the simple record of a happy life spent in the more affluent parts of Paris, Monte Carlo, Hollywood and the Bahamas. And yet these mundanities are, so the author tells us, but a part of his existence. He is, as he reminds us from time to time, an artist, a lover of the solitary life, one who communes with Nature "almost to the point of being a part of it," and a mystic, a believer in the efficacy of prayer. It is altogether in keeping with the fortunate disposition of his universe that M.
Erte's prayers are promptly answered. On one occasion when he lost a wallet containing a substantial sum he went straight to the nearest Church, and had his entire property back within the hour.
Of his spiritual, as of his artistic adventures, M. Erte tells us comparatively little. The greater part of the autobiography is taken up with an account of his many and various assignments, his success in dealing with them, and his many friendships with wealthy, beautiful and fashionable people. Whether it be their fault or his one cannot tell, but they do seem to have been a little dull; but then so do the famous places which, as an indefatigable traveller, he has visited. The Prado, he tells us is "a wonderful place," Florence is a "city of dreams," Rome is on the whole rather unlike Florence but has, nevertheless "a unique appeal" and so on. In fact one wishes that he could have devoted himself to his real interest; but even on that subject he is strangely uncommunicative. We gather that he is an amiable and highly successful person but, of the artist and the sources of his art we hear very little; and we should like to know mbre.
As an aesthetic phenomenon M. Erte is of particular interest to those who, like this reviewer, can remember something of the flowering of Art Deco, at least in its final stages; for he had, as he very rightly says, a great deal to •do with its development. Today that movement in the applied arts arouses the enthusiasm of a younger generation which never knew it while it was a going concern, so to speak, and who envy those of us who did. The sad thing is that the envy, in my case at all events, is misplaced. We seem to have missed our opportunities; it did not interest us at all. This I am afraid is in a large measure true even of the work of M. Erte.
At a time when he was producing sets for the ,Ziegfield Follies, George White's Scandals and The Fleets Lit up, our attention and our admiration were devoted to the decors of Picasso, of Derain, ofRouault, and even of Marie Laurencin. If pressed, I think that we should have excused this narrowness of vision on the grounds that Erte, despite his manifest concern with and affection for the fashion of the age, belonged, as Diaghilev's post-war designers did not, to the past. I think that there would have been some truth in the accusation, though whether it is an accusation of any
• gravity I am not sure. I think that there is, even in Erte's fashion plates, an element which derives from the late nineteenth century and that it is in fact the revival of interest in Art Nouveau which makes him, today, so very popular with the young.
If we compare the dress design for Poiret made in 1913 with those made in the following year by Boussingault (which are published by Palmer White), we shall see how much closer Boussingault was to the Fauves than Erte ever was. He was capable of adopting decorative patterns from the cubists but the most apparent influence is that of Beardley. It is not simply that a costume like that entitled Les Esclaves de Salome (of 1926) is Beardleyesque both in theme and treatment, but that one finds again and again in Erte's work the pictorial habits of the 'nineties; the bold isolated figure against a dark or patterned flat background, the famboyant line, the stylised linear conventions, the minute laCey detail. In the same way, in the age of the decedents, audacity was united with a kind of neurotic reserve, so in Erte's drawings, although he is at times violent and vicious he is never seductive; he is strangely indifferent to the voluptuous possibilities of the human figure which indeed is so dwarfed and imprisoned by his designs as to be, at times, almost annihilated. He is, above all things, a stylist and perhaps this is the secret of his attraction. As a young man he was told to imitate nature. "My teachers would always tell me to paint what I saw, but I always replied, why should I create something that already exists?" He need not have worried, there was not the slightest chance that he would ever do SO.
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