Erté valuation
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.
What a work by Erté is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 23 November 1892, Saint Petersburg
- Died
- 21 April 1990, 14th arrondissement of Paris
- Movement
- Art Deco
More on Wikipedia.
Sevenarts, Chalk & Vermilion and the copyright line
The Art Deco revival of the 1960s brought Erté a second career, and in his last decades he moved into limited-edition prints, bronzes and wearable pieces. Many of the serigraphs and bronzes were published jointly by Sevenarts in London and Chalk & Vermilion Fine Arts in the United States, and the bronzes are often inscribed with a copyright line naming both firms and the year, alongside the edition number.
That inscription, the edition number and the foundry or publisher's certificate are what identify a bronze or a print. The original designs on paper from the 1910s to the 1930s carry none of these, and are identified by subject, commission and provenance.
Mata Hari, Hollywood and Symphony in Black
Erté's father was an admiral in the Russian fleet and wanted him in the navy, and he took the pseudonym so as not to embarrass the family. He worked for Paul Poiret in 1913 and 1914, designed costumes for Mata Hari and the dancer Gaby Deslys, and besides Harper's Bazaar drew for Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the Ladies' Home Journal and the Illustrated London News. His stage work ran from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923 to the Bal Tabarin and Le Lido, and in 1925 Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood, where he designed for Ben-Hur, The Mystic and Dance Madness. In 1980 he designed the sets and costumes for Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne.
His best-known image is Symphony in Black, a tall woman in black walking a slender black dog, which has been reproduced and copied many times over. In 1988 he designed seven limited-edition bottles for Courvoisier. The published references are Erté at Ninety: The Complete Graphics, of 1982, for the prints, and Alastair Duncan's Erté Sculpture, of 1986, for the bronzes. His work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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.
