Dirty Girl Things
Friday, October 19, 2007
Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Nine
Imprints of Joy
Half past five at the Embassy. I wait for my “parasol” from last night. I need a whisky. I’m very shy deep down, and ready to be furious if she doesn’t show up. It’s my curiosity that would be most disappointed..
Five thirty-five. There she is! Can it really be her? Ravishing, tall, slim, with a small mouth and full lips, and dark porcelain eyes. She casts aside her fur coat in a gust of warm perfume. We’re going to dance. Mexican? Cuban? Her very small head sits on a very long neck. She is tall; her mouth is at the level of my chin. When we dance my mouth is not far from her mouth. Her hair brushes against both.
“Romanian. My name is Renée P… I was a model at Doeuillet...” Delicious. She takes off her gloves. Long, little girl’s hands. Something in my mind starts dancing at the thought that one day perhaps she would agree to paint the nails of those hands…
---Diary, Paris, March 7, 1930.
Jacques Lartigue, the famous French photographer & artist, met Renée Perle in Paris in March 1930. He was soon won over by the grace and elegance of this Romanian-born professional model. For a period of two years she was both his companion and his favorite model for paintings and photos.
“ . . . . From the beginning, this obsession with bodies in motion is matched by an eye for beauty and glamour, and Lartigue begins taking what are now called society portraits before he reached his teens. ‘Women - everything about them fascinates me,’ he records in his journal. ‘Their dresses, their scent, the way they walk...’
He married his first wife, Bibi, in St Tropez, and, as with every glamorous woman he subsequently encountered, he was entranced by her beauty. He photographs her in bed, in the bath, and, daringly for the time, on the lavatory. She stares back at his lens, accepting and at ease. The Hayward has included some of his early 3D stereoscopic images here - the viewer has to look through binocular lenses fitted into a wall - and the sense of intimacy in some of them is extraordinary.
By 1919, Lartigue had established himself as a society photographer and was moving with the season along the Riviera and Côte D’Azur, in search of the glamorous and exotic. His intoxication in the presence of female beauty is transferred to the viewer in image after image of the wondrous Renée Perle, his lover in the early Thirties. ‘The small mouth with the full parted lips! The ebony black eyes!’ he enthuses in his journal, but it is the images that truly capture the languid beauty of one of the great muses of the 20th century. . . . ” from “A machine for trapping beauty” by Sean O’Hagan, The London Observer
“John Galliano calls Renée Perle, the inspiration behind his fall show, “a kittenish Parisian coquette.” Jacques Henri Lartigue, who immortalized her in his pictures, had another term: angel. The revered photographer met his muse in 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, but he guessed wrong; Perle was Romanian, and a model once employed by the French dressmaker Doeuillet. “She is beautiful,” Lartigue told his diary. “The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck.” The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue’s camera always at the ready. In the “shadowless heaven” of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle’s lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. “Around her,” Lartigue wrote, “I see a halo of magic."”
—Laird Borrelli, Style magazine
Postscript: All that’s generally known about Renée Perle, is from her time with Jacques Henri Lartigue and the photos he captured of her during their two years together. He, the photographer; she, the model, muse, and mistress. Beyond that, she’s an immortal memory and a mystery.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©