Five Spirals for December - #3 One Winter's Night... by Erté

Winter (1 of 4 from a seasonal suite), Erté. Geometry: DS.

One Winter's Night

As I walked along my favorite path through the trees that night, a path almost entirely obscured by drifts of snow, I stopped once to look at the crescent moon - for it was huge in the sky - when I saw something very curious on the slope below me. Leaning against an old tree and enveloped in its shadows was the form of a woman - sans clothing - lying in the snow, her white face faintly glowing against its trunk. Uneasily, I began to walk towards her. It was then that I realized she was never a living woman at all. She was made of snow; a snow-woman!

Of course, upon this realization, it also came to me that someone must have created her. My first thought was that some juveniles had vandalized my property. Who else but a teenaged boy would build a naked woman out of snow? And, then I thought my would-be Picasso must know quite a bit about human anatomy; the snow-woman was fashioned far too well. But who? There are no young people in the neighborhood... certainly no vagrant artists. I chose this part of the country for it's solitude.

But, the story gets stranger... because scraping against her frozen torso was a tree branch. At least, it appeared to be a tree branch animated by the wind, but it behaved like a hand; a hand with twigs for fingers. I can still remember this dark branch hand moving like an enormous insect shadow against the snow. It was as if the tree itself was perfecting the snow woman's form; a form it had created! Shivering, I turned and would have half-ran home... but then I saw the flower. A Christmas rose. They grew here and there across the countryside. It was if it had risen of its own accord up through the snow-woman's lap. But, I could see, even from my distance, that its stem had been carefully poked into the snow furrow where her inner thighs met. A joke? An enigmatic prank?

Or, was it art... created by the wind with cooperation from the falling snow... and a tree, who even as I produced this thought, seemed to rearrange it's branches, flinging snow in my direction? Now shaking from the bitter cold, I decided to continue my musings in the shelter of my living room. I'll write it all down... and then, hopefully, forget it.

- I figured, this image needed a narrative, so, I wrote it. Inset right is a photo of a "Christmas Rose," that is, the hellbore plant (helleborus niger) featured in Erté's image. A very interesting winter plant!*

As for the image, is it just me, or does that stump of a tree limb hovering over the snow-woman's shoulder kind of appear like a faceless head wearing a white wig? Moreover, doesn't the shape of the sky inside the spiraling tree look like the silhouette of a man's narrow head with the tree trunk extending from the area of his nose? In any case, Erté's snow-woman sure beats the standard snowman. 

"If you lived through the '70s and '80s, you saw an incredible revival of a still-living artist whose control over his meticulously rendered images never wavered. He worked up until the last two weeks of his life at 97. He was fond of the publicity he had from his revival, and made many appearances in his celery and lavender-colored suits with scarves and hats adding extra glamour.

Of his hallucinatory and decadent imagination he said, "I'm in a different world, a dream world that invites oblivion. People take drugs to achieve such freedom from their daily cares. I've never taken drugs. I've never needed them."

- Via the 2013 Advocate article: 22 Russians Who We Won't Let Vladimir Putin Forget Were LGBT.

"This book's biographical text is fine enough and is peppered with interesting stories from Erté's career, including an amusing one from 1913 in which he showed up at a Paris dress rehearsal party as an anonymous lady in a red dress, leading the newspapers the next day to speculate as to who the mysterious lady was. In another, he threw one of the leading actresses of the silent cinema, Lillian Gish, out of his studio when she criticized his choice of fabric for one of her costumes, leading to his dismissal. In a tragic story, Erté's business partner and lover of 25 years, Prince Ouroussoff, died from a freak infection contracted from a mere prick of a rose thorn. The death coincided with a decline in Erté's career and fortunes until the 1950s' art deco revival."

- Via this Goodreads review of a 2014 publication of Erté's graphic work. The bit about Prince Ouroussoff and the rose sounds like another strange fairytale! Inset left (above) is a photo of Erté in his 20s.

"Not only do I do what I want to do, but I do my work in my own way and never have been influenced by another artist.  The sole influences on my art, through the course of my entire career, were the Persian and Indian Miniatures and Greek vases I saw in my childhood at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).  I think that these influences have stayed with me to this day, although they were assimilated long ago."

- Excerpt from: Erté at Ninety: The Complete Graphics. Inset right is the cover graphic. Somewhere in that image... is gold!**

***

Born in the Russian Empire around the turn of the 19th/20th century, Romain Petrovich de Tirtoff was in line to follow his father into the Russian navy. But, then, in a marvelous coup, he moved to Paris in 1910, made art, fell in love with a Prince, and became Erté.

And, what an amazing body of art he produced, developing a distinctive style which combined the clean lines and geometrical elegance of Art Deco with the erotic, organic spirals of Art Nouveau.

Now, about those spirals...

Queen of the Night, Erté

Well, like Mucha, Erté utilized numerous arabesques in his designs, so, it stands to reason that few of them might accidentally conform to that certain proportion; all it takes is the repetition of a specific part of a circle. But, the image of Erté's that most impressed me as a genuinely golden design is the one below... coincidentally, one of his (several) designs for the goddess Aphrodite. (For another, here's a sculpture of Aphrodite with her hand mirror.)

And, here is Aphrodite - in her early 20th century incarnation - with her famous doves, all attached to silk cords which have been gathered together on ornate, bejeweled sleeves she wears on both arms.

Now, let's look at her spiral (below).

Aphrodite by Erté. Geometry: 2023, DS.

Note the way her arm falls into the smallest golden triangle and how the spiral terminates around the black jewel on her armband. Oh yeah, and then there's the way the spiral goes between the eyes of the dove on the right. A happy accident?

Anyway, that's all I have for Erté right now, and, as I intend to put spiral #4 up for Christmas, my time is running out. Suffice to say, the man lived from the turn of one century till the turning of the next, passing away in April of 1990... so, he must've been doing something right!

For more Erté, try Artnet, this Met page, or this France Today article!

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* "As one of the classical witchcraft herbs of medieval lore, Helleborus has associations with necromancy, the Dark Goddess, raising and banishing spirits, and appeasing spiritual forces when they have been disturbed.  It can be found mentioned in medieval grimoires attributed to Hermes Trimegistus and Cornelius Agrippa, who places it under Martial and Saturnian rulership.  It also has a connection to elemental water, and its subterranean qualities, when it acts as a portal to the otherworld, sub-conscious, and lower realms."

- Via this Patheos article. I believe I've also read somewhere in the past that the wild plant, apart from being poisonous, has narcotic properties, and was used as a witch's ingredient in "flying" potions.

**

           

Next up: Five Spirals for December - #4 The Vision of St. Cecelia by Orazio Gentileschi