19^th-20^th century, French

Born in Ujpest, a small town near Budapest, this engraver and illustrator spent most of his life in Paris, the city that saw his rise as a multifaceted artist.

In 1907, his father enrolled him in the Academy of Fine Arts of Budapest, where he began his formal training. At a very early age he began to work as the illustrator for a comic strip that would very soon afterwards be censored due to its excessively liberal designs.

In 1920 Vertès travelled to Paris, where he earned a reputation as an illustrator for the magazines of the time. In 1922 he began to work at Académie Julian, in the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921).

Enthralled by the Quartier Latin and the nightlife of Belle Époque Paris, Vertès followed in the footsteps of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) depicting in his satirical and sensuous works the life of cabarets, dancing salons, cafés and also the circus at the time.

Book illustration was another of the artist’s most outstanding facets. His works were used to illustrate books by many well-known authors, often focused on the daily life of Paris’s 1920s bourgeoisie, sometimes with a mocking tone and other times with a more sophisticated approach. The silhouette of beautiful, delicate women always played a major role in his drawings. In this facet we could highlight his illustrations for Le Cirque (1929), by Ramón Gómez de la Serna; Chéri (1929), by Colette; Dames seules (1930), by Francis Carco, and Ombre de mon amour (1955), by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Equally successful were his incursions into fashion and advertising. He contributed illustrations to the world’s most famous fashion magazines of the time, including Vogue, Harper´s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. He also designed sets and costumes for plays, circuses and films.

In 1953 he won two Academy Awards for his work in John Huston’s film Moulin Rouge, based on the life of Toulouse-Lautrec: one for artistic direction, which he shared with Paul Sheriff, and the other for costume design, a job for which he relied on the collaboration of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973). It is worth pointing out that Marcel Vertès was the creator of all the drawings by Lautrec seen in the film. The hand of Lautrec making the drawings is, in point of fact, Vertès’s. He also designed the bottles and advertising for a line of perfumes created by Schiaparelli.

In 1937 he embarked on a second journey to America and had his first solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, the city where he spent the Second World War and where he accumulated one success after another in major publications, commissions and exhibitions. In 1946 he returned to Paris, remaining there until his death. However, even though most of his work focused on the French capital, his return there did not prevent him from continuing to pursue his international career.

Among his works in New York, it is worth underscoring his mural for the entrance to the private museum of the then vice-president of MoMA, Robert Lehman, in 1948, and his murals for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1953 and the new café at the Carlyle Hotel in 1955.