IMAGE/TEXT

A (very) brief history of typography, design and real photo postcards

“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.” 

Paul Rand

A statistic from 1903 tells us that an average of 1 446 938 postcards were mailed in Germany every day that year (You have to love German precision). Basic maths tells us that was in the vicinity of 376 203 880 for that year, and given a certain percent of the population of 56 000 000 were too old, too young or had no interest, clearly some people were very busy. Not all the postcards were photographic but 1903 was also the year that the real photographic postcard emerged as the latest fashion in mail culture. It seems that images of stage actresses were the most popular but so were postcards that amateur photographers made themselves, and then there were images like these, where studios and publishers took current ideas in design and transformed them into photographs. It’s not hard to see why: the only reasons a studio wouldn’t embrace the new process were that it was too expensive or that the studio had established some success with the half-tone process, and neither made much sense businesswise considering those figures from Germany. This card with its obvious religious message comes from an unidentified studio. Though the message is in French the studio could have been based in Germany: studios were never constrained by political boundaries. It could have been running a profitable line in soft porn images as well. With the kind of money involved in the photographic postcard trade, it paid to be pragmatic. If there were a market across the border for Catholic imagery a hard headed Lutheran in Berlin would have no trouble responding to it.

 

John Beagles & Co was one of the most prolific publishers of photographic postcards in Britain up to the 1930s and specialized in stage stars. This was published before World War 1 so the idea of remembrance is uncertain. The tulips (?) generally refer to love – which makes sense in an image filled with beautiful women – and the horseshoe of course means luck, but ‘remembrance’ normally implies mourning and while it wouldn’t be strange to publish a series of cards intended to be sent to the recently bereaved it would be odd to design such a card filled with a collage of famous actresses. Possibly it refers to John Beagles himself, who died in 1909. The company could have produced a series commemorating its founder showing portraits from some of its best known cards.

 Barnstaple is a small town in Devon, which at the beginning of the last century only had a developing reputation as a tourist destination. The postcard was published by J. Welch & Sons of Portsmouth. If the publishers were using templates sourced from elsewhere they may have had little to do with the design of the finished product and may not have even supplied the scenes of the town. The motifs could have been used for any town in Britain and it is also possible that the letters with their collages of women and girls were created elsewhere. The price for a photographic postcard in England was a penny and even though some are on record as selling in the hundreds of thousands, it’s unlikely that Welch & Sons would invest any time on the typography for a card selling in small town Barnstaple. Note the collage of the girls and women. It is a feature that can always date a postcard to being pre World War 1; not because the war had anything to do with it but because fashions changed.

 

 No account of typography and design in photo postcards can be complete without examples from the Reutlinger studio. They produced the most sophisticated examples and dominated the French market. A comparison with the Barnstaple card is enough to show why. Even though the studio mass produced images and recycled the photographs - this portrait of Gilda D’Arthy would appear on at least half a dozen other designs - there was always a sense that if the postcard wasn’t unique it was different. This comes from a series employing the Art Nouveau typography and featuring a woman against the backdrop of a lake. Together the letters spell out ‘Reutlinger’ and the idea was for people to collect the full set. Another statistic from 1903 indicates that of the nearly 200 000 000 postcards bought in Britain that year, only a quarter were posted. The real market lay with collectors and the trick was to make sure they always returned to buy more. 

 

 Postmarked 1930 but most likely produced in the 1920s, this Freudian double entendre urging Dad to use his cane and repopulate France was a response to the huge loss of life in the First World War and the 1918 flu epidemic, which together accounted for over two million deaths, or around five percent of the population. Even before the turn of the century, France’s population had been considered too low for full economic prosperity. It wouldn’t fully stabilize until the 1960s, when with independence millions of immigrants from former colonies in Africa and the Middle East arrived. We don’t know how successful this campaign was but it’s doubtful Mum would have been too thrilled at the prospect of thirteen children. 

    

 The Rose Stereograph Company was founded in Melbourne in the 1880s by George Rose, a man who realized that for a stereographic company to thrive it needed international scenes and the best way to get them was to do the travelling himself. By the 1920s the market for stereographs was in decline and the company turned to producing postcards. Mostly, it appears, the postcards were standard topographical scenes but this is an inspired example of what could be achieved with a little imagination. I can’t say I’ve seen anything else quite like it and the inclusion of the waratah with the eucalyptus flowers suggests the template may have been particular to the company and not sourced from elsewhere. Note the sign on the building at the right for Martin and Pleasance Homeopathic Pharmacy. Like the Rose Postcard Company, it is still in business.  

 

 From the 1930s onwards the strongest challenge to the real photo postcard came from brightly coloured linen cards and in the U.S the Curt Teich Company ruled that roost. There’s good research on the company with stories of a small army of salesmen travelling desert highways and offering lonely gas stations and motels such tempting ideas as the addition of a couple of girls in bikinis to the image at little extra cost. The large letter linen postcard with the name of the place, town or city writ large is a distinctly American vernacular. Large letter photo postcards are not as common though in some ways they are much better. The photos in this postcard were taken by the Nevada Photo Service but we are more interested in the illustrations. Lew Hymek was a newspaper cartoonist in Reno during the 1930s and 40s, the era when the town suddenly boomed on account of relaxed gambling, and divorce laws before mob town Las Vegas took all the attention. Obviously there was a collaboration between Hymek and Lawrence Engel, who operated the Nevada Photo Service, and because this is a photographic postcard it could have been produced and published by the Nevada Photo Service. A linen card version would need to be sent to somewhere like Curt Teich that had the printing technology. This is better than a linen card because it displays Hymek’s skills and it has that cowboy glamour we associate with Reno when North Virginia St was still worth visiting.

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IMAGE/TEXT

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

 

Erotic postcards

 “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing more interesting than sex.”

Aldous Huxley

 A scholarly history of the erotic postcard would be an admirable undertaking, particularly as it is full of problems obvious before even beginning. One is that actual facts are rare. People didn’t keep open and detailed records, so the statistical data that would reveal how popular or lucrative the market was doesn’t exist. Another is that most photographers didn’t identify themselves on the cards and the best known studios, Julian Mandel and Yva Richard, didn’t have a look they could call their own. Also, it’s hard to find information that isn’t weighed down with ideological encumbrances. Not being a topic for polite society, it’s no surprise that the greatest amount of information comes from the organizations dedicated to suppressing the trade. The various committees against vice found in America and Europe were good at accounting for the number of magazines and photographs they had destroyed in the last month. A problem is that their definition of pornography was broader than the general population’s, so a lot of images considered filth in their eyes were mild by most other standards. The example above by Reutlinger wouldn’t have survived the flames. When Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice announced it had put 5000 photographs to the torch, how many of those would have met the definition of depraved in most people’s opinion? And let’s not forget, these societies worked on the message that the country was under assault by pornographers dangerously close to corrupting the entire society. When it came to publishing figures, exaggeration was required. They not only had to give the impression that a wave of obscenity was sweeping the country but that despite their best efforts they were in imminent danger of losing the fight. In that situation big numbers would get reactions even if they were completely false. 

A place to start might be to ask who were the photographers behind the trade. The answer appears to be pretty much all of them. Anybody who ran a decent sized studio in a major city regarded the erotic postcard market as a legitimate aspect of their business, well, so far as they were prepared to take it on. There must have been some who considered it a matter of principle not to get involved but generally speaking, whenever the archives are investigated it isn’t long before the erotica comes to light. Some companies, like Reutlinger, made it a stock in trade but it sat alongside their chaste and sentimental line in portraits of children and animals. Basically they responded to customer demand, whatever that meant. The photographer dedicated to manufacturing pornography, inevitably a man of dirty appearance and habits (and frequently a foreigner), was an image concocted by moral guardians. What we know is that some of the most respectable studios in Europe ran a sideline in erotica, and some of those were operated by women.

So what about the women who posed? First hand accounts tend to come from two sources. On the one hand there are the women like Kiki of Montparnasse who not only openly admitted that they posed but knew it added another frisson of scandal to their reputations. A typical story from the age is that the woman arrives in Paris – having been deserted by her lover from the ranks of the minor nobility – and desperate for some money takes on a bit of work that in normal circumstances she thinks is beneath her. Either that or, yes, before she became recognized across Europe as a great dancer she too was forced to do things she is not proud of. It might have sounded like a chapter from a cheap novel but terms of self-promotion it only added to her allure. 

The other side of the coin is the model as innocent victim. Oddly (not really), this one tends to emerge in court trials where the vice committees had a hand in the arrest of the photographer. Apart from protecting society against pornography, one of the self-appointed jobs of the vice committees was to save young women from its clutches. Typically, she had arrived in the city with no money or friends and soon felt the wicked grip of the unscrupulous photographer. Given the attention some of these trials attracted, it served the woman well to also portray herself as victim, especially if family, friends or her official employers were likely to read about it. Sometimes a small detail muddies the story; it emerges that she has form, she assaults the police when they barge in, some point between the original account of the arrest and the trial she undergoes a transformation of character. There are reports of women turning on their so-called saviours, of being taken to a safe location only to escape at the first opportunity. What bothered people then, and still does, is that being an artist’s model might not have been respectable but that didn’t mean women were unwilling.

What about the customers? In his book, Erotic French Postcards, Alexandre Dupony says that a lot of cards were sent by French women to their boyfriends at the front during World War 1. This sounds so typically French; it’s difficult to imagine Australian women doing that, still there’s a hint that Dupony might be trying to let the customer off the hook. It is rare to find these postcards with messages on the back, such as you would therefore expect: “Tu me manque, Pierre”. Not that we can base much of an argument on that but we do know that companies usually advertised their photos for sale in magazines using language that made it obvious what was on offer: ‘artist model photos for sale’, that sort of thing and it was normal, or common, to buy them in sets. That leads us to think the standard customer was a man looking to add to his collection. He was probably married, with children, wore a bowler hat and handlebar moustache and considered himself an aesthete. The really expensive stuff, the limited edition large format photogravures, was beyond the reach of his wallet.

You might wonder why Paris was the centre of the industry. There is plenty of evidence to support the usual arguments that it was a more liberal city than London or New York but there’s a couple of things to consider. Firstly, there’s a point where ‘liberal’ and ‘exploitation’ start to merge. Paris was also famous for its human zoos, where under the guise of education the citizens could go and stare at African villagers who were literally behind cages. And there’s a reason why Nazism and fetishism became entwined. The upper echelon of the party was dominated by men with stunted attitudes to sex; the type who watched porno films but couldn’t look a real woman in the eye. Also, it’s easy to think of the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge and forget that most Parisians didn’t set foot in those places. On Sunday mornings they were more likely to be on their way to Mass than nursing a hangover with some chorine they’d met backstage. What it might be about isn’t Parisian openness so much as strident prudishness in other places. America in the 1920s had prohibition. People could be forgiven for thinking anything went in Paris. 

If you have seen Auguste Belloc’s stereographs from the 1860s you’ll think this one from the 1930s is moderate, even discreet (If you haven’t, go to Courbet’s Origin of the World, painted at the same time. It is tame in comparison.). You will also realize that any talk of historical development in photography of the nude is largely ephemeral; Belloc’s work is as hardcore today as it was then. The notion that the real photo postcards that flourished in France between the 1900s and the 1930s represent some kind of shift in aesthetics is nonsense. The only shift to speak of is commercial, which is a problem if you were writing a serious history because it wouldn’t be long before you found yourself examining technical production, modes of transmission and economic processes, all of which, your viewers would agree, are beside the point. Not that they’d mind if the book was lavishly illustrated.

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BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

BODY DOUBLE

Reutlinger and Walery postcards from the Belle Époque

“Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured.”

Marilyn Monroe

In Paris at the turn of the last century, female dancers employed at one of the premier theatres or music halls needed to have their portrait taken and the best known studios in the city were Reutlinger and Walery’s. The artiste was expected to pay for the portraits herself and these studios weren’t cheap but they had cachet, and something else. Given the proper treatment, an appearance in one of the studios’ postcards could be enough to transform a dancer from one among the thousands into a star. 

The careers of Leopold Reutlinger and Stanislaw Julian Ignacy were mirrors. Both were born in 1863, into wealthy families that had left Germany and set up photographic business in France and both inherited their studios from their fathers, who had established reputations as portraitists to theatrical stars and minor royalty (Walery also inherited a title, Count Ostroróg of Pomerania, though he seldom used it). In portraits taken of the two men in the 1920s they even look uncannily similar, with the same clipped, steel grey hair, stiff and alert appearance and impeccable dress. Presumably they knew each other, since they operated in the same milieu, but you wonder whether they were friends or not. It’s one thing to admire another photographer’s work but when that photographer is in competition for the most reputable studio in Paris egos can get a little sensitive. 

The sons came on to the scene just the bohemian era of their fathers was passing and the Belle Époque was beginning. During their fathers’ time notoriety was expected from actors and writers but it was accepted because they were an exclusive group and widely if thoughtlessly assumed to be geniuses. During the Belle Époque the axis shifted from genius to beauty.  At its centre were the music halls like the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris where thousands of young women from Europe and beyond applied in the hope of becoming stars. In the 1860s George Sand had scandalized Paris by smoking and wearing men’s clothing. By the 1890s the George Sand look was everywhere in the theatres; all that was missing was a sense of rebellion.

In the 1860s and 70s the bohemians kept a discreet distance from the nobility, in public, either because they were politically opposed to each other or in Sand’s case, flaunting of her noble lineage would have damaged her credibility. By the 1890s backstage at the Folies Bergère was a meat market and dukes, princes, ageing fat bankers and wealthy, indolent sons of industrialists jostled each other for a place. There was scarcely a queen in Europe who didn’t have to step in and tell her son that his very public affair with a young starlet had to end now. Reutlinger and Walery didn’t photograph this world in the sense that Toulouse Lautrec painted it. Their job was not to expose its reality but sustain the fantasy of a magical land full of beautiful and glamorous young women, closer to the exteriors of the theatres with their elaborate Art Nouveau façades of classical goddesses than any of the stuff that went on behind the doors.

By the time Reutlinger and Walery took over their respective businesses the technology of photography had advanced to the degree the style of portraiture their fathers had built their reputations on was passé. Electric lighting for one gave them much more freedom in the studio and the carte de visite and the cabinet card had been superseded by the photo postcard, which were cheaper and more disposable. More crucially, the cheap, portable amateur camera had arrived. Anyone could take a photo of a starlet with their five dollar camera if she let them. Studios were pushed to create work amateurs couldn’t reproduce and this might be one reason why Reutlinger especially embraced photomontage.

Once a re-toucher’s job was to remove blemishes or add some coloured inks to a portrait. Upstairs from where Reutlinger took his photographs and the maquettes were made was a room employing women whose job it was to receive the portrait, apply combination printing, montage, hand colouring, even paste jewellery and turn it into a small triumph of Art Nouveau design. He could also come up with an idea, a woman floating on a butterfly’s wings for example, and apply it to portraits of dozens of women, creating sets that encouraged collectors to buy twenty cards at a time. 

In their more standard portraits Reutlinger and Walery images are often indistinguishable save the studio autograph. It takes practice to tell them apart at a glance yet it’s usually very easy to spot either one among the lesser competition. They took greater care in the production of their images than most, beginning with the photography, which was sharp and clean and both had a practiced sense of how to photograph costumes. The hand colouring was assiduous with little to no leakage of colour and they knew how to apply colour, that muted pastels worked better than bold primaries on photographs and sometimes only the barest amount was needed. It’s pushing things to call either man a great artist since they were obviously more interested in business than art but they understood aesthetic principles better than any of their rivals. 

One thing that distinguished Reutlinger’s portraits from Walery’s was that he put women on a higher pedestal. In Reutlinger’s world, and this was true across the Art Nouveau movement, women were ethereal creatures devoted to high culture, for whom living was apparently a work of art in itself. The truth, need we say, was more complicated than he let on. Some of his most popular subjects had sex lives that put famous rakes to shame and a lot came from backgrounds far removed from sophistication. All that was easy to disguise behind a tendrilled border or a classical Greek backdrop, but he also sought a particular demeanour from the women. They ought to have been aware of their beauty of course but too absorbed in art or nature to attach much importance to it. Walery’s women were more likely to play the gamin for the camera. As a general rule, (very general; between them they produced thousands of images) Reutlinger’s women were dangerous because they were unobtainable, Walery’s because they weren’t.

Walery was less interested in the special effects - he rarely used any apart from hand colouring – but the notion of erotic fantasy was just as strong, especially lesbianism. Actresses in male attire became one of his specialties. The source may have been the theatre – cross-dressing was popular in the music halls – but he understood something sharp minded photographers have since the beginning; two fully dressed women getting passionate with each other can excite some men more than a naked man and woman will. At the time postcards were the main source of income for both men they were running profitable sidelines in soft porn for more exclusive customers. Mostly they kept within particular boundaries for while France was considered freer than either Britain or the U.S there were morals agencies about and an arrest could set back business. The closest most customers were likely to get to the real erotica were in images like the one above, that left little to the imagination yet remained within the law. 

A mistake they usually avoided was to suggest cuteness. One of the most popular motifs in photo postcards of the time was of a young woman coyly gazing out from behind a posy of flowers or about to slip a letter in the post box, usually embossed with some message about as deep and sincere as, “ je pense a vous”. They sold by the truckload back then and turn up in truckloads today at second hand stores, where a dollar for one can seem a bit steep. Some of Reutlinger and Walery’s models may have only been seventeen years old but they never played the sweet little girl next door. There was always an edge. Well, the women at the Paris music halls were seldom innocent for long anyway and they learned what the photographers wanted and how to give it.

After World War 1 and the death of his son, Leopold Reutlinger began to retire from photography and did little work in the 1920s. Walery on the other hand was to produce his best known work. Beginning in the war erotic postcards appeared in Paris bearing the signature Julian Mandel, a name now assumed to be an alias. In trying to identify Mandel people have pointed the finger at Walery. The postcards were more explicit than anything he had produced for general consumption but as they fell within his métier he was a logical suspect. In the 1920s he also produced a book of photogravures of nudes that straddled the line between Pictorialism and modernism, this time under the pseudonym Yrelaw. His fondness for aliases was another causer for suspicion; that and his middle name being Julian left some in no doubt who Mandel was. 

Walery died in 1935, just two years before Reutlinger. It seems strange now that when so much attention is given to the history of photomontage and fashion photography they are often overlooked. Part of the problem was their popularity. Neither has ever been taken seriously in any artistic sense and after the First World War Art Nouveau was regarded as an embarrassing indulgence, especially compared to the stripped back clinical approach of modernist architects. All those pretty women framed within folding fans, turned into domino chips or set against painted backdrops of classical landscapes suddenly looked anachronistic. When you look at their work now you realize they were ahead of their time, pushing the idea of what a photograph could be beyond what had come before.

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BODY DOUBLE

WOMEN IN LOVE

 Some scandalous lives of the Belle Epoque

“I have to admit that I'm up to my neck in frivolity, buried in dresses to the point of ruin!”

Liane de Pougy; My Blue Notebooks

"I have been a slave to my passions, but never to a man."

Carolina Otero

“The thought flashed across my mind,” Carolina Otero explained with studied flippancy to the journalist from the London Daily Mail. “Why not try marriage, just to see what it is like?” In January 1907 she had been married to Englishman Rene Webb for just two months. He came to the marriage with a substantial dowry including a promise to set La Belle Otero’s sister up in business, and something else – his collection of several thousand postcards of the dancer. These images were almost certainly in the collection. Leopold Reutlinger, photographer to the stars of Parisian theatres and dance halls had shot Ms Otero over hundreds of sessions and she was one of the most popular subjects for his photographs. 
The biography of Carolina Otero that appears in the Who's who on the stage 1908 makes for fabulous reading. Born in 1871, the daughter of the Count and Countess Cassarow, she first appeared on the stage at age eight. While performing in Madrid she was kidnapped “by secret agents of the Spanish King, spirited off to his palace and locked in a room. She forced a window and escaped.” More likely she was born to poor Galician farmers a few years earlier, may have been raped when she was ten and possibly married an Italian count when she was fourteen. What is certain is that in the process of bedding a fair number of Europe’s royals and statesmen she accumulated several million dollars worth of jewelry, which she gambled away, dying penniless in 1965 aged about 96.
 

American journalists working around the beginning of last century referred to prostitutes as courtesans. They would not however call a courtesan a prostitute. A true courtesan was not paid for her services, she received gifts sometimes more from a single assignation than typical streetwalkers could expect to earn in their entire lives. Caroline Otero had no problem with the word courtesan, she exploited her reputation to the fullest, but she was usually referred to as a dancer or, in that way that French can be simultaneously explicit and inoffensive, la belle horizontale. The three great horizontales in the Belle Époque were Otero, Liane de Pougy and Emilienne d’Alencon. They made no secret of their lifestyles or the price they attached to it but flaunted their extravagances with a kind of grinning contempt for the ordinary people who found something offensive about it. Of the three, d’Alencon pushed the idea of succès de scandale to its limits, sharing her bed with the usual motley crew of dissolute nobles as well as the famous can-can dancer La Goulue, the American poet Renée Vivian and possibly de Pougy. She was also an enthusiastic consumer of opium and cocaine, which led many people to assume she lived her final years in a drugged out fog. Actually she lived a respectably long life, dying in 1946 aged 77.
This portrait by Reutlinger presents her as an epitome of innocence. She started out her stage career as a young girl with a troupe of performing pink rabbits and was described by Jean Lorrain (author of Nightmares of an Ether Drinker) as ‘raspberry ice’ – presumably he meant something cute. By the turn of the century the rabbits had been packed away and she was performing with a python as her dancing partner. She was also an inspiration to Coco Chanel and one of her favourite models for headwear in the 1910s.
 

Were Otero and d’Alencon talented performers or was their fame thanks more to their notoriety? It’s hard to say since very little survives of their work – a brief clip of a frenzied Otero on YouTube and a book of poems by d’Alencon that veers between sentimental and crassly erotic. One way a critic could show disapproval of their lifestyles while maintaining a veneer of sophistication was to soundly trash their performances. That happened often but no performer came under so much cruel scrutiny as Gaby Deslys. “The worse she sings and the further in her dancing she widens the limits of choreographic mediocrity, the more evident it is that she is a pretty girl.” That was Paris critic Ernest Charles writing in 1912 in an article that was so nasty she sued. A year earlier the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini tersely dismissed her as ‘not art’. (In the same interview the opera singer complained that she had recently seen a suffragette parade but ‘they are all ugly and not neat in their dress’.) In her brief career Gaby Deslys managed to have official censors called in during performances in London, Paris and the US and became the focus of a riot by Yale students when the police cut one of her performances short. Part of the problem was her popularity. She was one of the very few to make a name for herself in Europe, Britain and the US, and that was because her stage act hovered between highbrow and popular. Filling a concert hall with ill behaved students was one way to offend the arbiters of taste. Another was to carry on a very public affair with King Manuel II of Portugal. When Manuel was deposed in a revolution in 1910 Deslys was widely held to be a culprit; her goings on with the King apparently inflaming radical Portuguese tempers. Actually the revolution had been brewing for years and might not have happened had the initial insurrection been handled properly. She had nothing to do with it though years later she was still referred to in some papers as the woman who brought down the king.
In December 1919 she was hospitalized with a throat infection. It may have actually been a tumour. Thinking surgery would destroy her looks and her voice, she refused to allow the doctors to cut into her neck. After nine operations, on February 11 1920 she died, aged 38. One of the minor scandals in her affair with Manuel had involved a string of pearls he had given her on their first date. It was estimated to be worth $70 000. In her will she directed that all her jewelry including the infamous string of pearls be sold and the proceeds distributed among the poor of Marseilles.

Even in death Gaby Deslys could not be left in peace. It had always been assumed she was born Marie-Elise-Gabrielle Caire, daughter of a middle class merchant in Marseilles and her stage name was a contraction of Gabrielle of the Lilies. During her affair with King Manuel a private detective claimed to have discovered that she was in fact Hadiwga Nawrati, a Czech farmer’s daughter. This obviously excited a few people though unlike Otero and d’Alencon Deslys had never concocted a past so at the time the story never gained real traction. After her death however various Czechs, Hungarians and Americans bearing similar surnames came forward claiming her inheritance. One Hungarian man declared he was her father while an American woman cited a cross shaped scar on her finger and a nurse’s story as proof she was the singer’s daughter. It was also said that the real Gaby Deslys, that is to say the woman whose identity she had stolen, was still alive and could be found. These claims dragged on for years. None were found valid though in accumulation they had the effect of adding mystery to a fairly ordinary background. On March 21, 1930 thieves inspired by stories she had been buried draped in pearls smashed open her mausoleum but couldn’t get past a steel plate.
A bed bought for her by King Manuel and designed in the shape of a swan was bought by Universal Studios after her death and appeared in several films, most notably it was Norma Desmond’s in Sunset Boulevard.

Sophisticated critics were in no doubt that Lina Cavalieri was an exceptional singer, and that she deserved her reputation as one of the most beautiful women in the world. The difference in their treatment of Deslys and Cavalieri speaks volumes, especially as both performers came from similar backgrounds and both began their careers in the less than high-toned music halls. What mattered was that Deslys’ persona was funny and animated while Cavalieri played her part with cultivated poise. Reutlinger’s photo of her above was taken near the turn of the century, as she was making the transition from the music halls to opera. Opera singers were expected to lead glamorous public lives with enough romantic intrigue to keep the public interested, but scandal and by extension open sexuality was out. In the future she would be portrayed in ways more fitting to a world famous soprano. Cavalieri might have been astute enough to keep her affairs discreet but she was helped by a fawning press. Critics whose ears pricked up at the latest gossip concerning d’Alencon or Otero turned a deaf one to news that, yet again, Cavalieri’s recent marriage was foundering.
In August 1908, Princess Vittoria de Teano, who claimed a lineage extending back to the 5th century and included several popes among the various dukes and princes, attended a reception held by the Duchess of Sutherland. On hearing that Lina Cavalieri was to be the guest of honour the Princess announced; “I am not accustomed to meeting such people,” before making a haughty exit. A few of her equals, including well known pouncer Edward VII, approved of her stand. Cavalieri’s great offence apparently was that she had begun her working life as a humble flower seller. Apart from casting an unnecessary light on how class bound Europe was, the story reveals something of how the lives of celebrities were already being confected to suit the market. The Princess claimed to have principles and in her vulgar way, she was saying she saw through the hype. No matter how beautiful or talented Cavalieri was, she came from the streets. 

 Cavalieri’s private life doesn’t quite square with her press (Whose does?). Take her four marriages, all to men with either artistic credentials or titles, two of which lasted just months. She could have made poor choices but one mark of an elegant woman is that she shouldn’t. The suspicion is that behind the quietly dignified persona lurked an unpleasantly temperamental diva. Her death is also obscured by conflicting accounts. On February 7, 1944, the US Air force began a bombing raid over Fiesole outside of Florence. Either she was collecting her jewellery before running to the air raid shelter or she suddenly jumped from a car and ran back to collect it but a bomb hit the house, killing her. The first version suggests bad timing, the second that she had misplaced her values.

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WOMEN IN LOVE

BAD GIRLS

Anthony Comstock and erotic photography

No sect nor class has ever publicly sided with the smut dealer, except the Infidels, the Liberals and the Free-lovers"

Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock cut a formidable swathe through New York Society between 1873 and 1910. Being a postal inspector he had some idea of what was passing through the city’s mailrooms and as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice he was given the power to clean them up. In 1873 he announced that over the previous two years, alongside more than five tons of books, 21 000 impure song sheets, 5000 obscene microscopic watch and knife charms, 5 500 obscene playing cards and 30 000 immoral rubber articles, he had overseen the destruction of 182 000 obscene photographs. That suggests there was a fair amount of salacious photography in circulation, and or Comstock had a broad definition of pornography. It’s unlikely he would have been persuaded that a flesh coloured body stocking protected anyone’s virtue. A nude was a nude no matter what she wore.

Comstock argued that anyone who photographed a nude was a grubby and seditious pornographer, the type of character who skulked around back alleys and seldom washed. After several raids and attempts at entrapment of Weil’s studio on Broadway, he uncovered a portrait of the photographer’s naked infant son, which was enough in Comstock’s opinion to call in the police. One could never underestimate the cunning of a smut dealer or the vulnerability of young minds. Comstock’s witch-hunt extended to photographs of artworks even though the originals were on public display in museums. Many, probably most of the photographs circulating through the city actually originated in Europe; the number of New York photographers active in the porn trade was lower than Comstock wanted people to believe. 

He also insisted that the women who posed nude for a photographer were innocent victims and cruelly exploited. The same idea would get some traction among feminists in the 1980s though in Comstock’s late Victorian world view suffragism was an evil on a par with pornography. Any woman who dared challenge his concept of marriage or suggested women should establish more economic independence was also a target. The New Woman movement emerging towards the end of the century had no fixed manifesto but its members tended to be straitlaced when it came to theories of work and economics. By ‘profession’ they meant law, medicine, business or education. Being an artist’s model was a little frivolous. 

It followed however that if men like Comstock were as virulently opposed to suffragism as they were pornography, then eroticism could be used as a form of protest. For some performers it was definitely liberating. The photos of ballerina Regina Badet on display here are relatively chaste; she was not the slightest bit ashamed at undressing for the camera and whenever she did she appeared to be cocking a snook at someone. Women didn’t have to take off their clothes to rile the Comstockians. Smoking, drinking, dressing as a blacksmith or even just implying lesbianism, any behaviour that transgressed the image of the obedient woman was subversive.     

Most of the women in this gallery are anonymous and we can’t be absolutely sure what their intentions were. They don’t look like victims. A few of them would be aspiring actresses, which has always carried a sense of being exploited, but appearances are everything, as Comstock well understood. It is enough to look like you enjoy breaking the rules to become dangerous to certain eyes. We could consider these photos as exploitation of women’s bodies but they could also be act of defiance.

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BAD GIRLS

A STAR IS BORN

 Paganism and photography in the 1900s
“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.”
Aleister Crowley

Dancer Olga Desmond’s performances were simple in theory. She assumed poses as Aphrodite or Venus on stage – essentially she became a living statue – and like most representations of the gods in classical art she was nude. Between 1908 and 1910 she succeeded in offending not only the authorities in St Petersburg and Berlin, who had her shows banned, but also that echelon of artists who believed in a pretty and saccharine depiction of nature and did very well for themselves as a result. Because those artists were the ones governments turned to for opinions and advice she was never going to get a fair hearing. There was always a question too whether her devoted audience admired her performances for their beauty or her nudity. In Paris at the same time Isadora Duncan was experimenting with free expression in dance and spectators packed the Folies Bergére and the Casino de Paris to watch dancers who left nothing to the imagination. Paganism was fashionable again.

In London Aleister Crowley made at least one court appearance and was named in others. In March he won an appeal against a ruling that had prevented him from publishing details of Rosicrucian secret rituals in his magazine Equinox and in October George Jones, a chemist, sued Looking Glass for an article that associated him with Crowley, a man generally agreed to be ‘a person of disgraceful and criminal character’ (at least so far as the London Times was concerned). Crowley never appeared too upset by all this attention. It takes some vanity to believe you hold the key to divine mysteries.

The Theosophists were probably the only people who did not call their movement pagan, though they wouldn’t have thought the term derogatory.  By 1910 the society founded on the principle that all religions were evolving towards a single, universal faith was splintering. Charles Leadbeater had been accused of child abuse and a power struggle had developed between him and Annie Besant. Still, Theosophy held influence over intellectual life in Britain and the US. W B Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, William Crookes, Kandinsky and Mahler were all sympathizers though for different motives. And if Theosophy was too intellectual or political or your interests in the occult were more fleshly, there was always the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its various splinter groups to get involved with.

Which brings us to photography and the pagan imagery that flourished between the turn of the century and the First World War. Leopold Reutlinger, the subject of a previous post, was one of the best known producers of postcards of women but there were hundreds of others, spread throughout Europe and America, who recognized that paganism provided the essential link between glamour and the erotic.  A photograph of a beautiful woman was guaranteed to have a market but enhanced with some of the accoutrements of popular culture from the ancient world and the message was amplified.

There are any numbers of reasons to explain the phenomenon. You could talk about the decline of religious authority, the influence of suffragism or take a more strictly Marxist approach and analyse the sudden wealth of the middle classes, but we are concerned with photography. While all of the above matter they only scrape the surface and they aren’t as interesting as the influence of that aesthetic curiosity the Art Nouveau movement. It’s called a movement though it had no manifesto to underpin its ideas and no coherent theory. It was mostly defined by surface detail and the common link between all the major practitioners was that beauty ought to exist for its own sake. Unlike neo-classicism, which in architecture linked classical imagery to power (hence so many Greek columns and domes on US Government buildings), when it came to the ancient world, Art Nouveau didn’t care for Aristotle or Cicero so much as its disrobed nymphs and the notion of lying about under the sun and drinking wine.

 These photographs are often dismissed as banal and ignored in histories of photography but if you want to know how important they were, consider any 19th century cabinet card of an actress and then one of an actress from the 1920s, when fashion photography was emerging on its own terms then ask at what point did stiff, formal portraiture became expressive and elegant. These photographs mark the transition. They still owe a debt to 19th century ideas about composition and they haven’t quite reached that moment when photography individualised the celebrity but the cool, studied atmosphere of 1920s fashion photography might not have existed were it not for these photographs. And these photographs would not have been taken without the fashion for paganism in all its forms.


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A STAR IS BORN

THE PAINTED VEIL

Leopold Reutlinger, Art Nouveau and the tinted photo postcard

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”

Oscar Wilde; Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray

“Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul.”

Saki, The Unbearable Bassington

Art Nouveau was the most feminine of art movements. Floral embellishes, lacy filigree and curvaceous typography have never been exactly manly in their intent although some of the best examples can be found in the unashamedly masculine skyscrapers constructed in New York and Chicago from the 1890s to the 1920s. Whether used in printmaking or the design of a gate, there was always something subversively erotic about Art Nouveau. It suggested beautiful, rich people indulging themselves by lying about all day in silk kimonos, sipping Japanese tea and smoking Turkish cigarettes through long, alabaster holders. Consider Frederick Evans’ iconic portrait of one of its most famous practitioners, Aubrey Beardsley, his chin cupped in his hands, his long, womanly fingers extending past his ears. This man wouldn’t hold a cricket bat, let alone a spade yet his output suggested he spent a lot of time in the presence of naked women, and that must have infuriated to a lot of working men. (Beardsley’s gaunt appearance was largely due to tuberculosis, which killed him when he was 26.)

Leopold Reutlinger inherited the Reutlinger Studios in Paris from his father, Emile, who had taken them over when his brother Charles fell ill. Charles had built the business up as a successful portrait studio. Leopold would expand it into one of the best known in France and along the way he’d expand into postcards and more or less create the idea of Art Nouveau photography.

Reutlinger didn’t invent a single element in his postcards but he brought some together in a way that made them distinctive, incidentally allowing him to charge a price that defied the petit bourgeois to buy them. Take a portrait of an actress or dancer, preferably a current attraction at the Casino de Paris, then montage it into a country scene or against flowers, in a heart or some other obviously romantic image. The most difficult part was the tinting, which had to be done by hand. The secret to tinting was to only select particular details, her scarf, her lips or a flower in her bonnet, and only use pastels. The idea wasn’t to create colour photographs but give the illusion, and illusion was everything. However Reutlinger’s models behaved in private, in his world they were delicate, diaphanous creatures with sensibilities as fragile as a petal. 

Reutlinger had his rivals in the market for tinted postcards of women; “Professor” Edouard Stebbing in Paris and, the Steglitz Studio in Berlin being two whose style was often indistinguishable from his.  All of them produced images that were too soft to be pornography, too banal to be erotic but suggested the women in their cards were unobtainable to any man save the most aesthetically minded. Meanwhile, before seaside postcards became synonymous with a smutty, working class humour, holiday-goers could buy tinted photographs of girls in swimsuits. Images of women using classical Greek themes implied paganism was for the very sophisticated. There were also markets for veiled girls from the Orient and Valentine’s Day cards. Despite the efforts of their creators, some of them stand up today as passably beautiful objects. 

‘Dancer’ or ‘actress’ was often a euphemism for prostitute and in popular opinion most of the women posing for photo postcards would have been regarded as being on the same level or just a shade above it. The women who posed for Reutlinger were too famous to suffer that insult. Aino Ackte was a Finnish soprano, Marville a celebrated singer and actress. The Casino de Paris where they performed opened in October 1890 and on the 19^th of that month a reporter from the New York Times described ‘stained glass windows signed Champigneulles …  a huge electric sun … quite as stupendous as the luminous fountain’ and the performances; chorus girls in one hall, a ballet in another and clowns appearing between variety acts. ‘There is so much to see and so little monotony that it takes several visits to place every attraction in its proper locality.’ This was la Belle Époque at its most extravagant.

In 1930 a friend was opening a bottle of champagne when the cork flew off and struck Reutlinger in the eye, blinding him and ending his career. That may not have been fair but it had an undeniable poignancy to it.  Today Reutlinger’s postcards can be found sandwiched in dusty piles in junkshops and antique stores. They deserve better than that. Reutlinger’s postcards avoid the cheesy sentimentality of most of his competitors and his women are placed in the design to suggest that art wasn’t ornamentation so much as a lifestyle choice. In the way that Art Nouveau architecture has come to define certain cities like Budapest better than their recent history, his photo postcards suggest the glamour of the age better than any documentary photographer we know about.

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THE PAINTED VEIL