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Lot Essay
The elegance, fine craftsmanship, and historically-inspired subject matter of these panels epitomize French Art Deco. They are part of a larger composition, The Birth of Aphrodite, one of four murals Jean Dupas designed for the Grand Salon of the SS Normandie, the most famous of the French transatlantic liners.
Normandie made her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York in 1935. Conceived with affluent travelers in mind and a benchmark of glamour in the era of ocean travel, she carried 850 first class passengers, with 670 and 340 respectively in second and third classes. She was the largest, fastest, and most lavish ship of her era.
Recognizing that liners could function as advertisements for the French “arts of living,” in 1912 the French government – eager to promote its national products – signed an agreement with the French Line (known in France as the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, sometimes abbreviated to CGT or Transat), to subsidize and build four new passenger-mail ships over the next quarter century for its most prestigious route, the North Atlantic.
The French Line aimed to seduce its well-off passengers – who paid not so much for transportation as for atmosphere – with extravagant décor, food, wine, and other on-board indulgences that might inspire purchases upon arrival in France. To this end, the CGT engaged the best-known French designers of the day to outfit the ship in the latest styles (usually avoiding nautical themes thought to contribute to seasickness), creating a sort of “Ritz-sur-Mer.”
The monumental scale of Normandie’s interiors was matched only by their theatricality. She was sometimes referred to as the “Ship of Light,” as much a comparison to the beauty of Paris – the so-called “City of Light” – as a reference to the abundance of dazzling decorative treatments used throughout her first-class public rooms: reverse-painted glass in the Grand Salon, gold lacquer in the Smoking Room, and massive slabs of green glass in the Dining Room. Such purposefully ambiguous surfaces did more than embellish walls; they reflected light and extended the impression of space, important factors in the confined interior of a transatlantic liner.
Normandie’s first-class Grand Salon was laid out by architects Richard Bouwens van der Boijen and Roger-Henri Expert and furnished under the supervision of the interior decorator Jean Maurice Rothschild. The dominant feature of the room, however, was the magnificent glass wall cladding. Designed by Jean Dupas, a fashionable French illustrator and painter, and executed by craftsman Charles Champigneulle, this multi-part mural – over twenty feet high – filled the four corners of the room with glittering reflections evoking a modern version of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.
Dupas chose The History of Navigation as the mural’s subject, but the profusion of quasi-historical vessels and miscellaneous mythical creatures was clearly not meant so much to tell a story as to create an atmospheric decorative effect. Each corner was assigned a nominal subject: The Birth of Aphrodite (from which these three panels come), The Chariot of Thetis, The Rape of Europa, and The Chariot of Poseidon (now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
The mural’s mirror-like brilliance was achieved using a centuries-old technique known as verre églomisé wherein portions of the pictorial scene were painted in black and various pastel colors on the reverse side of plate glass panels. Shimmering gold, silver, and palladium leaf were then laid on top of the paint, and a canvas backing was affixed. The panels were mounted with fronts facing the room.
By employing historical iconography and traditional technique, Dupas and Champigneulle count among the many French artist-designers of the Art Deco era who argued that history could provide important lessons on how to be modern. Furthermore, their mural typifies the seamless fusion of architecture and the fine arts which characterizes the best French Art Deco.
Normandie arrived in New York for the last time in August 1939; the outbreak of the Second World War prevented her from returning to France. In 1941, the United States commandeered the ship for conversion to a troop carrier. On February 9, 1942, sparks from an acetylene torch ignited life preservers piled in the Grand Salon; the fire burned overnight. Water pumped into the ship froze, causing her to capsize. Her burned-out hull was sold for scrap in 1946. Fortunately, however, many of her decorations – including the Dupas panels – had been removed before the fire.
These three panels come from the collection of Roberto Rojas (b. 1940), an American fashion designer. As a boy, Rojas encountered Normandie lying on its side in New York’s Hudson River. He would later learn about Normandie and Dupas in school, sparking a lifelong interest in the ship and its fittings, and leading him to acquire these panels in 1978.
According to Rojas, Dupas’s work directly inspired his own. In 1966, he created a full-length dress decorated with stripes of hand-stitched metal mesh (worn by Prudence Farrow to the opening performance of Mame on Broadway.) Rojas adopted Dupas’s glamourous gold-and-silver palette, and his repetitive pattern of waves provided a source for the garment’s horizontal banding. This dress would become a global sensation when, the following year, it was altered for the famous British model Twiggy; shortened to fit her diminutive figure and to accommodate the 1960s trend for mini-skirts, she wore it in a 1967 photoshoot with Richard Avedon.
This group of three panels depicts a full figure, a rarity since the Dupas panels were dispersed in 1942. The figure originally floated in the waves to the left of Aphrodite (emerging from a shell which can be seen on the edge of righthand panel). She holds a palm branch in her left hand and a scroll entwined with a serpent in her right and may represent one of the Erinyes (the Furies), deities born from drops of Uranus’s blood.
The panels beautifully encapsulate the luminous, otherworldly beauty of Dupas’s masterpiece from the SS Normandie.
– Jared Goss, Independent Scholar and former Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Normandie made her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York in 1935. Conceived with affluent travelers in mind and a benchmark of glamour in the era of ocean travel, she carried 850 first class passengers, with 670 and 340 respectively in second and third classes. She was the largest, fastest, and most lavish ship of her era.
Recognizing that liners could function as advertisements for the French “arts of living,” in 1912 the French government – eager to promote its national products – signed an agreement with the French Line (known in France as the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, sometimes abbreviated to CGT or Transat), to subsidize and build four new passenger-mail ships over the next quarter century for its most prestigious route, the North Atlantic.
The French Line aimed to seduce its well-off passengers – who paid not so much for transportation as for atmosphere – with extravagant décor, food, wine, and other on-board indulgences that might inspire purchases upon arrival in France. To this end, the CGT engaged the best-known French designers of the day to outfit the ship in the latest styles (usually avoiding nautical themes thought to contribute to seasickness), creating a sort of “Ritz-sur-Mer.”
The monumental scale of Normandie’s interiors was matched only by their theatricality. She was sometimes referred to as the “Ship of Light,” as much a comparison to the beauty of Paris – the so-called “City of Light” – as a reference to the abundance of dazzling decorative treatments used throughout her first-class public rooms: reverse-painted glass in the Grand Salon, gold lacquer in the Smoking Room, and massive slabs of green glass in the Dining Room. Such purposefully ambiguous surfaces did more than embellish walls; they reflected light and extended the impression of space, important factors in the confined interior of a transatlantic liner.
Normandie’s first-class Grand Salon was laid out by architects Richard Bouwens van der Boijen and Roger-Henri Expert and furnished under the supervision of the interior decorator Jean Maurice Rothschild. The dominant feature of the room, however, was the magnificent glass wall cladding. Designed by Jean Dupas, a fashionable French illustrator and painter, and executed by craftsman Charles Champigneulle, this multi-part mural – over twenty feet high – filled the four corners of the room with glittering reflections evoking a modern version of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.
Dupas chose The History of Navigation as the mural’s subject, but the profusion of quasi-historical vessels and miscellaneous mythical creatures was clearly not meant so much to tell a story as to create an atmospheric decorative effect. Each corner was assigned a nominal subject: The Birth of Aphrodite (from which these three panels come), The Chariot of Thetis, The Rape of Europa, and The Chariot of Poseidon (now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
The mural’s mirror-like brilliance was achieved using a centuries-old technique known as verre églomisé wherein portions of the pictorial scene were painted in black and various pastel colors on the reverse side of plate glass panels. Shimmering gold, silver, and palladium leaf were then laid on top of the paint, and a canvas backing was affixed. The panels were mounted with fronts facing the room.
By employing historical iconography and traditional technique, Dupas and Champigneulle count among the many French artist-designers of the Art Deco era who argued that history could provide important lessons on how to be modern. Furthermore, their mural typifies the seamless fusion of architecture and the fine arts which characterizes the best French Art Deco.
Normandie arrived in New York for the last time in August 1939; the outbreak of the Second World War prevented her from returning to France. In 1941, the United States commandeered the ship for conversion to a troop carrier. On February 9, 1942, sparks from an acetylene torch ignited life preservers piled in the Grand Salon; the fire burned overnight. Water pumped into the ship froze, causing her to capsize. Her burned-out hull was sold for scrap in 1946. Fortunately, however, many of her decorations – including the Dupas panels – had been removed before the fire.
These three panels come from the collection of Roberto Rojas (b. 1940), an American fashion designer. As a boy, Rojas encountered Normandie lying on its side in New York’s Hudson River. He would later learn about Normandie and Dupas in school, sparking a lifelong interest in the ship and its fittings, and leading him to acquire these panels in 1978.
According to Rojas, Dupas’s work directly inspired his own. In 1966, he created a full-length dress decorated with stripes of hand-stitched metal mesh (worn by Prudence Farrow to the opening performance of Mame on Broadway.) Rojas adopted Dupas’s glamourous gold-and-silver palette, and his repetitive pattern of waves provided a source for the garment’s horizontal banding. This dress would become a global sensation when, the following year, it was altered for the famous British model Twiggy; shortened to fit her diminutive figure and to accommodate the 1960s trend for mini-skirts, she wore it in a 1967 photoshoot with Richard Avedon.
This group of three panels depicts a full figure, a rarity since the Dupas panels were dispersed in 1942. The figure originally floated in the waves to the left of Aphrodite (emerging from a shell which can be seen on the edge of righthand panel). She holds a palm branch in her left hand and a scroll entwined with a serpent in her right and may represent one of the Erinyes (the Furies), deities born from drops of Uranus’s blood.
The panels beautifully encapsulate the luminous, otherworldly beauty of Dupas’s masterpiece from the SS Normandie.
– Jared Goss, Independent Scholar and former Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York