Erté
Friday, February 22, 2019 at 9:00AM 
Erté (Romain de Tirtoff) - "Mariage d'Amour . . . Mariage de Raison": Cover Design for Harper's Bazar - May 1927 - Gouache on cardboard - Sheet: 13 11/16 x 10 3/16 in. (34.8 x 25.9 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art - New YorkRussian-born artist Romain de Tirtoff (1892-1990) was known by the pseudonym Erté, from the French pronunciation of his initials. He was a 20th-century artist and designer in an array of fields, including fashion, jewelry, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor.
His set and costume designs were featured in the Ziegfeld Follies, the Folies Bergère, and a number of silent films produced by Louis B. Mayer. Between 1915 and 1937, he designed more than two hundred magazine covers. Many of these, as in the example above, were for the popular, upscale fashion magazine, Harper's Bazaar. His designs and illustrations also appeared in many widely read women's glossies of the day, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal. Since the majority of Americans were more likely to read magazines and go to movies than to visit galleries and museums, the fact that Erté's work was so visible in popular culture made it possible for the Art Deco style to be disseminated more widely rather than remaining largely the domain of a wealthy elite.
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