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  Lucien Lelong / French Art Deco Handpainted Porcelain Vase circa 1935

  LUCIEN LELONG (1889 – 1958) Paris, France

  “Metaphysical” vase c. 1935

  Hand painted and glazed porcelain with aqua, black and silver tones.

  Marks: LL monogram, AB

  H: 13 3/4″

  Lucien Lelong was born in Paris, France on October 11, 1889. Lucien learned his trade from his father, Arthur Lelong, who owned a textile factory in 1896, and his mother Eleanore, a dressmaker. He discovered his vocation in the family business and as soon as World War I was over, he expanded the family business by creating his own fashion house in the late 1918.

  He became immediately famous due to the neat tailoring of his designs and his skill in choosing and manufacturing fabrics. He did not actually create his own designs but hired the most prominent designers of the moment to design his collections such as Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain and Hubert Givenchy. Lelong was one of the first designers to diversify into lingerie and stockings. He introduced a line of ready-to-wear in 1934 which he labeled “editions.” In 1939, Lelong’s collections showed tightly waisted, full skirts; a style which became the “new Look” in Dior’s collection in 1947. After the war, in 1947, Lelong showed pencil-slim dresses; pleated, tiered, harem hemlines; and suits with wasp waists, cutaway fronts and square shoulders.

  After a trip to the United States where he learned everything pertaining to the working methods in the mass production of clothes, he returns to France and creates a line of pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) collection, branded “LL” Edition. Lelong used his double” LL” logo to influence his designs as well as refining the packaging design of his perfumes and cosmetics. He was a master of the use of knits and bias to shape the body in the most complementary way. His house’s trademark was their unique ability in designing with fur.

  He was married to Natalie Paley who was the daughter of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia that assisted him with his business. Lelong was an active member of high society; socialized with the women he dressed, and did not miss the opportunity to capitalize on his name. From 1937 until the end of the war in 1948, Lelong was President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, in which role he was able to fight and hinder the transfer of the Parisian fashion houses to Berlin during the German occupation. It was largely due to his efforts that ninety-two houses stayed opened during the war.

  Poor health caused the end of his career; Lelong retired in 1952, and died in 1958 of a heart attack.

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  Herbert Bayer, Self Portrait, Gelatin silver print , 1932, printed later

  HERBERT BAYER (1900-1985) Austria

  Self portrait   1932 (printed later)

  Silver gelatin print

  Edition: 28/40

  Signed: bayer 32 (in ink on bottom right corner)

  Provenance: Kennedy Gallery, New York

  H: 13 7/16” x W: 9 ½”

  Framed size: H: 21 ½” x W: 17 ½”

  Price: $16,000

  Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect. Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface, universal, now issued in digital form as Architype Bayer that bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters.

   In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. In 1938 he left Germany and settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts. In 1946 Bayer relocated again. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer’s architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s. Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a collection of around 8,000 of his works. In 1959, he designed his “fonetik alfabet”, a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.