"Paris was where the twentieth century was."- Gertrude Stein
Les Annees Folles (The Crazy Years) as the French called the year between the two world wars, were heady ones for modern design. The
official name of the 1925 Wold's Fair was Exposition des Arts
Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, in preparation for more than a decade, postponed
due to war in Europe. The French were eager to reassert their role as
the world's arbiter of good design. Post-war prosperity made it possible once again
for the middle classes to shop freely, and the designers and department stores that
participated at the fair were eager to lure the public to spend with grand pavilions,
each one more dazzling than the next.
Like the 1925
exposition itself, modern design was then largely a Parisian phenomenon,
extending piecemeal to the suburbs with an occasional outpost on the Riviera (think the Villa Noailles
designed by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens). Much
of what was on display at the exposition was commercial in nature, aimed at
encouraging the war-weary public to spend its newly-acquired wealth. Most of it
turned out to be conventional and not radical at all.
The iconic Cubist trees at the French pavilion were a cheeky exception, subjected to
ridicule in the contemporary press: “one cartoon depicted a baffled gardener
debating whether to water them.”
Although we now think of 1925 as the year of Art Deco, that term was
only coined in the 1960s by Bevis Hillier, a British art historian. At
the time, the style was generally referred to as Paris moderne and its foremost chronicler was an American expatriate named Therese Bonney who
had founded the first illustrated press service specializing
in French design and architecture - the Bonney Agency - which eventually
supplied as many as 350 photographs a month to publications in dozens
of countries. So who was Therese Bonney and why don't Americans know more about one of our own?
She was born Mabel Therese Bonney in Syracuse, N.Y in 1894. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father an electrician. The family grew in 1889 when a sister, Louise, was born. The Bonneys had lived in New York
State for several generations, so when they moved to California around 1903, first to
Sacramento and then to Oakland, it was a momentous change for a family of modest
means.
While in high school, Bonney began earning money by
tutoring other students in French and
Spanish. She dropped her first name, considering it too prosaic and not
French enough for this budding Francophile; from then on she would be known simply as Therese Bonney.
After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1916, Bonney came east alone to attend Radcliffe College where she earned a master's degree in Romance Languages. New York City had many attractions,
not least in halving the distance between a West Coast Francophile and
Paris. Bonney found her first job in the city with the Theatre du Vieux
Colombier, then on tour in North America.
From this foothold, Therese was able to send for her sister Louise;
the two young women opened a bookshop specializing in French theater, with
Therese doubling as the official English translator for the French
actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Within months of the Armistice, Bonney sailed for France
early in 1919, supported by a newly-created position with the American Association of
Colleges; she was to set up a student exchange program. Arriving
in Paris, Bonney received a scholarship from the Sorbonne to complete a doctorate (begun at Columbia University) on the theatrical works of Alexandre Dumas. She earned her doctorate
in just two years (the youngest person and only the fourth woman to do so).
Torn between an academic career and promoting Franco-American cultural relations, Bonney turned to journalism to support herself, serving as correspondent for newspapers in Britain and the U.S. It may have been her stint as Paris fashion
correspondent for the New York Times (1923-1928) that led her to try modeling or it may have been her friendships with fashion designers Jeanne Lanvin and Sonia Delaunay. At any rate, word reached her hometown where the Syracuse Herald reported that Bonney had been "acclaimed the most perfect da Vinci model in the world."
Among her
circle of friends were several artists who painted her portrait: Robert
Delaunay, Alicia Halicka, Raoul Dufy (three times) and Georges Rouault (six
times!). Bonney snapped Tamara de
Lempicka touching up a portrait of her husband Tadeuz, possibly an insider's
joke at the rumors that Bonney affixed her name to work done by other
photographers. (How many women creators have seen their efforts attributed to others, namely men). In another photograph Boney captured the impish Italian caricaturist Paolo Garetto in an uncharacteristically
somber pose, framed by his creations that wink and roll their eyes as a signal
to the viewer that they know better.
Bonney often
liked to shoot from curbside, calling streets the “true democratic
museum.” Among her memorable street
shots are Jean Carlu's decorated soap truck and the sign for the emporium L'escargot
d'or (The Golden Snail). Her sensitivity to what made something
'moderne' extended to the effects of artificial light. Which is the more surprising discovery: that
the bar of the Hotel de Ville is transformed into bottle of booze or that the Citroen showroom in the rue Marbeuf
looks like a parking garage?
“Our furniture and our homes are of the past, ” Bonney lamented of homegrown American design. In the New Yorker Robert McBride she found a publisher for a series guidebooks including Buying Antique and Modern Furniture in Paris, A Shopping Guide to Paris, Guide to the Restaurants of Paris, and French Cooking for Americans. .This last anticipated Julia Child
by decades. For the New York department store Lord & Taylor, Bonney would
arrange an exhibition Modern French Decorative Art in 1928, followed by
a number of traveling exhibitions that appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Therese
Bonney donated 4,000 of her photographic prints to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in
the late 1930s, while she and Louise, an industrial designer, were involved in the planning for the 1939 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows. In 1985 the museum presented the exhibition Paris Recorded based on the Bonney collection. It surveyed her work from the 1920s documenting the evolution of interior design following the watershed Exposition Internationales des Arts Decoratifs held in 1925. Therese also served as an official of the 1937 Paris World's Fair. She had never been busier and more in demand.
Addendum: 03/24/2015. I note with dismay that the Shaffer Art Gallery at Syracuse University, on its Facebook page, misidentifies a photo of Therese Bonney, taken in 1942 for the New York World Telegram while she was covering WWII in Europe, as being the image of Margaret Bourke-White. The woman who received awards from the Sorbonne, the Belknap Award from Harvard, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d'Honneur from the French government, still can't get any respect in her hometown!
For further reading:
The Invention of Chic: Therese Bonney and Paris Moderne by Lisa
Schlansker, New York, Thames & Hudson: 2002,
Images:
1. Therese Bonney - Grand Bazaar of the Hotel de Ville, 1920, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.
2. Therese Bonney - Models wearing outfits designed by Sonia Delaunay pose in front of concrete trees at the World's Fair, 1925, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.
3. Therese Bonney - Paolo Garretto and his desing for the Nestle Copnay, c.1929, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
4. Therese Bonney - Citroen showroom in the rue Marbeuf, c.1928, Bibliotheque nationale de France.
5. Therese Bonney - A corner of Tamara de Lempicka's maison-studio in the rue Mechain, Mediatheque, Charenton-le-Pont.
6. Therese Bonney - Living room designed by Elise Djo-Bourgeois, no date given, Mediatheque, Charenton-le-Pont.
7. Therese Bonney - L'escargot d'or insigne (sign of the Golden Snail), Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.
8. Lee Miller - photograph of Therese Bonney, British Vogue, April 1942, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.
