Erté (Romain de Tirtoff) — designer (art deco) with roots in the Russian Empire
Erté was born Roman Petrovich Tyrtov in St Petersburg on 23 November 1892, at the Imperial Naval School, where his father, Admiral Pyotr Ivanovich Tyrtov, was posted. The Tyrtovs were an old family of naval officers, and his father expected him to follow them into the navy. Instead, he drew. After a first stay in Paris with his mother in 1907, he left Russia for good, arriving in Paris in February 1912 at the age of nineteen, against his father's wishes.
To spare his family embarrassment he signed his work with a pseudonym formed from the French pronunciation of his initials, R. T.: Erté. His first published drawings appeared under that name in the fashion journal Gazette du Bon Ton in May 1913. That year he went to work for the couturier Paul Poiret, designing dresses and costumes, including for the dancer Mata Hari and the actress Gaby Deslys.
In 1915 or 1916 he signed a contract with the American magazine Harper's Bazar, for which over the next two decades he produced some 240 covers, by one count, and thousands of drawings, his slender, stylised figures becoming emblems of the period later called Art Deco. From 1919 to 1930 he designed lavish costumes and sets for the revues of the Folies-Bergère in Paris, and also worked for the Ziegfeld Follies and George White's Scandals in New York. In 1925 Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for an MGM film called Paris; while its script was reworked he was given other assignments, including designs for Ben-Hur and La Bohème, but the stay was brief and, by his own later account, not wholly satisfactory. He also designed for opera and the theatre, and a 1926 exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier brought his work into French national collections.
His reputation faded after the Second World War, but the revival of interest in Art Deco in the 1960s brought him back. In 1967 an exhibition of his gouaches at the Grosvenor Gallery in London and New York was bought in its entirety by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which showed it the following year. At seventy-five he began recreating the designs of his youth as limited-edition serigraphs and in bronze, and his work entered collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Smithsonian. He published his autobiography, Things I Remember, in 1975.
He died in Paris on 21 April 1990, aged ninety-seven.
Tracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)
Born Roman Tyrtov in St Petersburg in 1892, the son of Admiral Pyotr Tyrtov, of an old naval family, he left for Paris in 1912 against his father's wish that he become a naval officer, and took the pen name Erté, from the French pronunciation of his initials, to spare the family.
.svg?width=900)
St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Elegance is not about being noticed. It is about being remembered."