Erté

Erté ~ a pseudonym for Romain de Tirtoff ~ as born in St. Petersburg in 1892 to a noble Russian family. Erté’s alias comes from the French pronunciation of his initials, R and T.

He moved to Paris in 1910 and began as a costume designer in the workshop of famed Parisian couturier Paul Poiret, where he would dress dancers and film stars like Josephine Baker and Joan Crawford and design stage sets for Broadway productions and Hollywood films.

 

Also a professional illustrator, Erté designed over 200 covers for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Widely celebrated as the “Father of Art Deco,” Erté created glamorous illustrations that reflected a modern luxury and prosperity emphasized by clean lines and geometric patterns found in classical Greek pottery and Japanese woodblock prints.

His paintings and drawings are held in the collections of renowned institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. He died in Paris in 1990.