Erté
Art Deco made portable: costume designs, Harper's Bazaar covers, and bronzes issued by the hundred.
Erté was Romain de Tirtoff, born in St Petersburg in 1892 into a naval family and taking his working name from the French pronunciation of his initials. He moved to Paris at nineteen, worked for Paul Poiret, and from 1915 designed more than two hundred covers for Harper's Bazaar over twenty-two years. Alongside that came costume and set design for the Folies Bergere, George White's Scandals, opera and film. Rediscovered in the 1960s when the Metropolitan Museum bought a group of his designs, he spent his last decades issuing his imagery as prints and sculpture. He died in 1990, at ninety-seven.
This is a name where establishing what you actually have matters more than usual, because four quite different things carry it. There are the original gouache and metallic-paint designs on paper from the 1910s to the 1930s, which are unique. There are signed limited-edition serigraphs and lithographs from the 1970s and 1980s. There are cold-cast and bronze sculptures issued in large numbered editions, often with an accompanying certificate. And there are unsigned open-edition reproductions and later decorative items. Signature, numbering, foundry mark and the publisher's paperwork separate them.
If you own a work by Erté
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.