It is difficult to imagine summer, even this very unsettling one in the year, 2010, without remembering another of long ago when the consummate Golden Couple, Sara and Gerald Murphy, reigned, embracing the very embodiment of the season itself.

While both frolicked in their youth on the shores of the Hamptons, it was their arrival at Antibes, in the south of France, during the Summer of 1923, that christened the dawn of a new era. Their very appearance on the French Riviera that summer, she sunbathing in her signature pearls cascading down to the small of her back (she explained, they wanted sunning), and, he, meticulously clothed and accessorized in sartorial perfection, fueled the same renaissance in arts and letters as did the excitement of Paris, especially among the cafés of Montparnasse.

Gerald and his beloved Sara, considered one of the great American beauties of her generation, were icons of the most enchanted period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans; they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. Her magnetic hospitality, along with her spontaneity and adventurous spirit, and his fun-loving antics, humor and warm regard, drew people to them for life.

The Murphys hosted the Picassos and just about everyone else who counted in adventurous art and literature in those heady days of abandon, including Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Archibald MacLeish, John O’Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

The Murphys claim on the French Riviera was immediate and, one might conclude, revolutionary. In the 1920′s if one were to walk the sands of that famed stretch of beach in summer, their gaze would have been met with shuttered hotels, boarded residences and empty, desolate beaches as the fashionable and famous thought only to winter there, in the south of France. The mere idea of spending the high summer months along the wind swept sands of the Mediterranean was simply unimaginable.

Enter the Murphys in the summer of 1923. In a stroke of sheer genius and social virtuosity, they convinced the famed Hotel du Cap to do what had never been done — remain open for the summer season so they might sensibly entertain their friends, hence, sparking a new era for the French Riviera as a summer haven. Imagine.

Three years later, the couple purchased a villa in Cap d’Antibes and named it Villa America, residing there with their three children for many memorable years to come, all the while hosting many unforgettable parties to follow. So stylishly de rigueur and trend setting were the pair, they were the first to introduce the outlandish idea of sun bathing, swimming and cavorting on the beach of the Riviera.

The notion of the beach as being a place simply to sun was unthinkable to the highly refined French and the Europeans who vacationed there. The Murphys, with their long forays and picnics at La Garoupe, were so consumed with fun, frivolity and friends, that inhibited spectators on either side of the merrymaking marauders soon took notice, adopting the practice as their very own. In no time, the new art of sunbathing on the previously restricted beach, became the epitome of fashionable chic, making its way into the most prominent of circles.

In those glorious days on the beach at Antibes, it was the Murphys’ friend Scott Fitzgerald who described the couple best:

 

“There is Sara, her face “hard and lovely and pitiful,” her bathing suit “pulled off her shoulders” and her brown back gleaming under her rope of pearls, “making out a list of things from a book open in the sand.” And there is Gerald, her husband, tall and lean in his striped maillot and a knitted cap, gravely taking the seaweed from the beach as if performing “some esoteric burlesque,” to the delight of the little audience of friends they have gathered around them.

On the “bright tan prayer rug of the beach,” they and their friends swim, sunbathe, drink sherry and nibble crackers, trade jokes about the people with strange names listed in the “News of Americans” in the Paris Herald: “Mrs. Evelyn Oyster” and “Mr. S. Flesh.” Their very presence is “an act of creation”; to be included in their world is, Fitzgerald says, “a remarkable experience.”

 

As history would, in time, reveal, Fitzgerald wasn’t literally portraying the Murphys, of course, he was writing a novel, called Tender is the Night, about a psychiatrist named Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole. In the novel, the woman with the pearls is recovering from a breakdown brought on by incest, and the man with the rake ends up losing his wife, his position, everything he most cares about. Things not known to have happened to Gerald and Sara Murphy, but to the tragic Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Art imitating life, many would say.

Yet the magic of that golden couple prevails to this day. Just as the Murphys served as symbols of the great theme of the Lost Generation in literature, with Fitzgerald modeling the fictionalized world of Dick and Nicole Diver after them, so, too, did their idealized images sear the imagination in photography with this iconic photograph taken by George Hoyningen-Hueve in 1930, posing his assistant, Horst P. Horst and a model, mistaken by many over the years to be the Murphys themselves.

Fittingly, some may say, the photographer, Hoyningen-Heuve, whimsically entitled the photo, “The Divers.”

 

Gerald and Sara Murphy on La Garoupe beach, Antibes, 1926.
Gerald and Sara Murphy dancing on the beach of East Hampton, 1915.
Excerpt: Everybody Was So Young, Amanda Vaill, Houghton Mifflin
Divers (Horst with Model, Paris), George Hoyningen-Huene, 1930

I had just settled in my easy chair when a key turned in the lock and a nattily-dressed man in his 60s let himself in. He held a bottle of Teachers’ scotch under his arm. He walked to the sideboard, took a glass, poured a shot, and while filling it with soda from the siphon, asked me, “Fancy a spot?”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” I said.

“Oh, my.”

This man sat on my sofa, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m Henry.”

“Am I…in your room?”

“Oh, no, no, old boy! I’m only the owner. I dropped in to say hello.”

This was Henry Togna Sr. He appears in a Dickens novel I haven’t yet read. I’m sure of it. He appeared in my room almost every afternoon when I stayed at the Eyrie Mansion.

 

---

 

“I Met a Character from Dickens”
Roger Ebert,

Chicago Sun-Times, February 5, 2010

 

Filed under: Memes, Selected Sojourns Tagged: 22Jermynstreet, EyrieMansion, London, personal, rogerebert ]]> http://theerrantaesthete.com/2010/02/07/farewell-22-jermyn-street-eyrie-mansion/feed/ 3 Errant Aesthete hallway-thumb http://theerrantaesthete.com/2009/03/05/barbies-debut/ http://theerrantaesthete.com/2009/03/05/barbies-debut/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:57:51 +0000 Errant Aesthete http://theerrantaesthete.com/?p=11899 ]]>

“Barbie, Beautiful Barbie,
I’ll make believe I’m you.”

Barbie’s network debut, 1959, or how little girls grew into women with eating disorders, diet addictions and pathetically poor self esteem.

A timely tribute to an aesthete’s car of choice — Mercedes-Benz. Somewhat unfairly, the “Benz” has never garnered the designer laurels of its immediate competitors. Although the company – the oldest automotive brand in the world – has done more than any other to shape the form of the automobile, Mercedes has always seemed content to let other firms present their work as ‘design-led’. Yet one has only to witness the evolution of design over the years to understand Mercedes-Benz has no equal.

SLIDE SHOW

It’s only in the past decade, in a car market defined by the dark art of branding and an unprecedented proliferation of products, that the German firm has been more vocal about the processes and practices that shapes their range.

So what defines Mercedes-Benz design? Like all car makers, Mercedes-Benz likes to talk genetics, implying that car design is akin to raw evolution, a survival of the fittest ethos where only the best expressions of the brand make it to market.

DESIGN, a monograph intended for internal consumption only, is rich with intriguing prototypes and concepts, some of which demonstrate their place is this most ordered of families, others representing a more distant future or even blind alleys that were never pursued.

While there are welcome glimpses of the earliest cars produced by the company, as well as the impressive set of autobahn stormers conceived during the 1930s, our eyes are drawn to the svelte concepts and research cars. These demonstrate a company always looking to push the technological boundaries, if not the aesthetic ones (although some, like the gullwinged C111 supercar, do both with aplomb).

Mercedes’ key reputation rests on its saloon cars, traditionally deemed to hide over-engineered excellence beneath sober surfaces and straitlaced proportions. Sometimes this resulted in a brutal, bombastic simplicity, like the mighty 600 Pullman limousine of the 60s. Yet the company has also led the way in sports car design, with the fabulous race cars of the post-war era spawning the 300SL, a fabulous creation that is a direct ancestor of today’s SL range.

After being overseen by Peter Pfeiffer for the bulk of the 21st century (Pfeiffer worked for Mercedes-Benz for over forty years in all), the company’s design studio is now led by Gorden Wagener. The modern Mercedes-Benz is a rather more muscular creation, aimed at consumers who have largely abandoned discretion in favour of stylish statements about their own personal tastes and desires.

With the emergence of new propulsions systems and shifting consumer attitudes to cars in general, automotive design language is entering a new era. As the company that effectively kick-started the industry, we imagine Mercedes-Benz will want to play a key part in keeping it alive in the future. [Link]

Artists yearn to create works of permanence. Often, they start by selecting topics of permanence– those big, timeless subjects that might resonate with all people for all time.

Lorado Taft (1860-1936) was that kind of artist. A Chicago sculptor of monumental, heroic subjects, Taft worked from 1907 to 1922 on his life’s masterpiece, a huge sculpture about mortality based upon lines from Austin Dobson:

Time goes, you say?
Alas, time stays; we go!

Taft sculpted a 120 foot long parade of humanity with over 100 different figures symbolizing life’s journey from birth to death completing his masterpiece on November 15, 1922.

Unfortunately, he had worked on his sculpture so long that his classical “beaux-art” style, which he was certain would endure, had become unfashionable, replaced by modernism. Before long, the leading Chicago newspaper labeled it as one of the city’s “pet atrocities.” Resentful at the way styles had passed him by, Taft became a leading spokesperson for conservative sculpture, lecturing against the evils of modernism and abstraction in sculpture.

Taft also tried to construct his sculpture using materials that would last a long time. After long consultations with engineers, he decided on steel reinforced, hollow-cast concrete. Unfortunately, this choice was not well suited for Chicago winters. The concrete expanded and contracted, causing cracks in the surface. Details eroded and crumbled away forever. By the 1980s, the interior was crumbling due to moisture buildup, and the surface had become pitted and drab, assaulted by time, elements and pollution.

And time was not done transforming Taft’s work. Taft had envisioned his sculpture as the centerpiece of an elegant park in the style of the World’s Columbian Exposition, where Taft first worked as a sculptor. However, the neighborhood changed with time. The surrounding city deteriorated even more than the sculpture. The sculpture became overgrown with weeds. There were no funds for sculpture repairs in a rough neighborhood of the south side of Chicago.

As a small boy in Chicago, I used to stand in that park and stare up at Taft’s sculpture. The subject was scary for a kid, but not as scary as the changes wreaked by time.

I revisited that sculpture years later when I returned to Chicago as a law student. By then, time had transformed me as well. For one thing, I was a lot taller. For another, I had grown to understand that art would not help us outwit time, no matter how big or permanent we tried to make it. No matter how grand or eternal the subject matter. No matter how much we got paid. Even art can’t rescue us from the gaping maw of time. We have to keep looking.

This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays and morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world’s vice.

….

This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger’s paws
And vindicates its cause.

Edwin Muir

Special thanks to David Apatoff of Illustration Art (where more photographs are available) for this profoundly moving post.

Debate abounds on the fate of the 441-year-old pixel. Jonathan Hoefler of typography.com for one, feels confidently certain the pixel is nearly dead — except as a design cliche.

The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliche to connote “the digital age.”

ABOVE: Bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567. [via link]

Primo Levi in the Periodic Table: “There have been centuries in which ‘beauty’ was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognizes itself, is found in upright stones, ships’ hulls, the blade of an ax, the wing of a plane.” From the new monograph on Deborah Berke. [via link]

Twelve logos by Saul Bass. [via designobserver]