Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc.

Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display

Author(s): Marie J. Clifford
Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 38, No. 2/3 (Summer - Autumn, 2003), pp. 83-108
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655133
Accessed: 27/03/2010 18:31
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Winterthur Portfolio.

http://www.jstor.org

Helena
Fashion,

Rubinstein's

and

Beauty

Modernist

Salons,

Display

MarieJ. Clifford

Helena Rubinstein's exclusive beauty salons blurred the conceptual boundaries among fashion, art galleries, and the
domestic interior. This study examines the decor and art displays in Rubinstein's American salons from -915 to I937,
with a particular focus on her New York establishment. Rather than dismiss these sites as superficial venues devoted to
'narcissistic "female adornment, this study argues that precisely because the salons catered to women, they lend insight into
varying notions about modern \feminine" space and its audiences. Rubinstein's businesses deliberately strove to redefine
standards of taste and fashionable femininity by using selected examples of modernism, in terms of interior decoration and
art. The salons endorsed versions of modernism associated with the realm offashion, and they actively helped cultivate a
female public for certain types of new styles.

T FIRST GLANCE, there is nothing

especially unusual about two fashion

photographs published in the October
1941 issue of Vogue. The images feature models
posed for the camera in sumptuous evening
gowns, complete with requisite satin gloves,
elegant jewels, and affected expressions of ennui.
But the setting for this fashion shoot is peculiar.
An exaggerated, almost hyperbolic, emphasis on
decorative vocabularies coded as "feminine"
creates a scene that hovers between lush fairyland
and TechnicolorT movie set. One model occupies a room awash in shades of mauve and yellow,
a pattern that extends to the walls, carpet, and
sculpted cherub (fig. i). Bright pink curtains are
reflected in strategically placed mirrors, and rows
of yellow and white opaline glass complement the
Marie J. Clifford is assistant professor in the Department of
Art History at Whitman College.
Initial research for this article was supported by an ACLS/
Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. The author
is grateful to Diane Moss, who granted access to the archives at
the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, and to Elizabeth Waterman
for her generous and thoughtful assistance during visits to
the foundation. Roz Hammers and Ruty Wherland provided
invaluable help in myriad ways. For their excellent insights and
comments on earlier versions of this article, the author thanks
Albert Boime, Joan Clifford, Dennis Crockett, Melissa Dabakis,
Meredith Goldsmith, Eric Segal, and especially Cecile Whiting.
c 2003 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,
Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/03/3823-0001
$3.00

chairs painted in the same shades. Another

model is situated in a space given over to tufted
pink and blue satin (fig. 2). A robin's-egg-blue
chandelier hangs from the ceiling, matching
exactly the color of the vitrines displayed before
a central mirror. The wall resembles a display
case and includes an ornate decorative relief of
stylized floral patterns, bows, and ribbons. The
presence of fashion models in the photographs
enlists us to read these pastel environments as
not only modish backdrops but also complementary accoutrements to the models' attire and
accessories. In other words, the space actively
participates in the construction of fashionable
femininity.
The setting for the fashion spread was
Gourielli's, an apothecary salon newly opened
by Helena Rubinstein. The elaborate Herb Room
and Gift Room were only two eye-popping
features of what Vogue deemed a "fabulous new
shop."' Other themed rooms included paintings
from Rubinstein's personal collection as well as
examples of colonial American glass and furniture. Inviting Vogueinto the premises was clearly
a shrewd publicity stunt, allowing for an adver1"Scene at Gourielli's" and "Gourielli's New
Shop," Vogue98
(October i, 1941): 64-65, 118-19.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3

84

Fig. 1. Herb Room in Gourielli's Apothecary Shop.

From "Scene at Gourielli's," Vogue 98 (October i,
1941): 64. (Photo ? Cond6 Nast Archive/CORBIS.)

Fig. 2. Gift Room in Gourielli'sApothecary Shop. From

tisement of the space in the guise of a fashion

shoot. Yet the lavish setting, the unusual color
schemes, and the show of Rubinstein's own
artwork also serve to package this shop, or salon,
as a kind of art display, with the art acquisitions
symbolizing Rubinstein's entrepreneurial success
and the beauty services and goods for sale being
endowed with the status of art. Gourielli's was
only the most recent of Rubinstein outlets to
"sell" spectacular displays alongside beauty

introduced a line of "cubist" lipstick.2) Although

she owned an eclectic range of paintings, sculpture, and furnishings, it was her modern art that
she reserved for exclusive display in her commercial venues.
Born Chaja Rubinstein in 1871, the future
cosmetics tycoon spent the first part of her life
among Krakow's Jewish bourgeoisie. In 1894 she
emigrated to Australia to live with relatives. The
reason for such a drastic change remains obscure,
although it is possible the move was an attempt to

products

and services. From 1915, when she first

set up shop in New York on East Forty-ninth

Street, to 1937, when she premiered a palatial
Fifth Avenue salon chock full of artwork,
Rubinstein's exclusive salons blurred the conceptual boundaries among fashion, art galleries,
and the domestic interior.
Throughout her sixty-year reign as "Madame,"
the "Queen of Beauty," Rubinstein's fame as the
world's most successful businesswoman only
slightly surpassed her reputation as a voracious
collector. Her identity as an entrepreneur was
intricately intertwined with her investments in
artwork, especially modern art. (In 1929 she even

"Scene at Gourielli's," Vogue98 (October 1, 1941): 64.

(Photo ? Cond6 Nast Archive/CORBIS.)

2
Biographical information is drawn from Helena Rubinstein,
My Lifefor Beauty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965); Patrick
O'Higgins, Madame: An Intimate Biography of Helena Rubinstein
(New York: Viking, 1971); Maxine Fabe, Beauty Millionaire: The
Life of Helena Rubinstein(New York: Crowell, 1972); Elaine Brown
Keifer, "Madame Rubinstein: The Little Lady from Kracow Has
Made a Fabulous Success of Selling Beauty," Life 11, no. 3 (July
21, 1941): 45; T. F. James, "Princess of the Beauty Business,"
Cosmopolitan146 (June 1959): 38;Jo Swerling, "BeautyinJars and
Vials," New Yorker24,no. 22 (June 30, 1928): 20-23; Kathy Peiss,
Hope in a Jar: The Making of America'sBeauty Culture (New York:
Henry Holt, 1998); Lindy Woodhead, WarPaint: Helena Rubinstein
and ElizabethArden:TheirLives, TheirTimes, TheirRivalry (London:
Virago, 2003). The lipstick was advertised in Vanity Fair 31
(February 1929): 8.

Rubinstein's Salons
increase her marriage prospects. After working a
series of odd jobs, Rubinstein tried her hand at
selling cosmetics. She invented a cr6me called
Valaze that was so successful Rubinstein became
one of the continent's most famous businesswomen by 1905. With the fortune and reputation
she acquired in Melbourne, Rubinstein opened
establishments in Paris and London. While living
in London in 1908, she married an American,
Edward Titus, who in the 1920S would publish
This Quarter,a small literary magazine with ties to
the expatriate Americans and other artists who
inhabited the Left Bank in Paris. As Rubinstein
acquired fame and success in the pre-World War I
era, she began to collect art and to make the
acquaintance of a number of artists. In 1908 she
established her first Paris shop, inhabited Misia
Sert's renowned artistic salon, and increasingly
centered her collecting activities on modern art.
Escaping the war, Rubinstein and her family
moved to NewYork in 1915, where they remained
until 1920. For business purposes, Rubinstein
declared the United States her permanent home
and always maintained a house in Greenwich,
Connecticut, but during the 1920s she split her
time between Paris and New York, where she had
located her corporate headquarters. Titus and
Rubinstein divorced in 1932, and in 1938 Madame
married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia,
a
The
union
not
"supposed" Georgian royal.
only
allowed Rubinstein to adopt the title "Princess"
but also provided the name for a new line of
apothecary
shops that opened in New York in
3
1941.

Rubinstein first rose to prominence through

the specialized treatments she offered to upperclass women at her exclusive salons. But she made
her fortune by selling mass-produced cosmetics in
the 1920s, a moment when, as Kathy Peiss
observes, "Women linked cosmetics use to an
emergent notion of their own modernity." It
should be recalled that the beauty profession and
decorating were two of the few options available
to bourgeois women aspiring to professional
status in the early twentieth century. Already
conceptually conflated with femininity, such
careers allowed women a vehicle for their
ambitions even as they were forced to negotiate
a place in the male-dominated business world. As
Peiss persuasively argues: "In the early stages of
the cosmetics industry, from the 189os to the
1920s, women formulated and organized 'beauty
3

Woodhead, WarPaint, pp. 36-103.

85
culture' to a remarkable extent.... Handicapped
in pursuing standard business practices, they
resourcefully founded salons, beauty schools,
correspondence courses, and mail-order companies; they pioneered the development of modern
franchising and direct-sales marketing strategies."
Similarly, in the 191os, women such as Elsie de
Wolfe and Ruby Ross Wood parlayed women's
amateur decorating work into a profession,
designing interiors but also marketing their
services as consultants with specialized skills.4 I
approach Rubinstein's enterprise in this vein.
Rubinstein's salons constituted sites that symbolically allowed her to articulate her business savvy in
gendered ways, departing from reigning masculine models of executive authority.
In this article, I examine the decor and art
displays in Rubinstein's American beauty salons.
in
Although Rubinstein had establishments
here
focus
and
Los
the
Boston,
Angeles,
Chicago,
is on her New York salon, the flagship of her
entire business and the place where she devoted
the most attention. Because she used her art
collection to adorn her business spaces, and
because of her associations with the fashion
realm, Rubinstein's displays have received virtually no scholarly treatment. Admittedly, her taste
in art and furnishings was eclectic, but it was
neither dilettantish nor devoid of organizing
principles. Rather than dismiss her salons as
superficial venues devoted to "narcissistic" female
adornment, I argue that precisely because the
salons catered to women they lend insight into
varying notions about modern "feminine" space
and its audiences. Rubinstein's businesses, I
suggest, deliberately strove to redefine standards
of taste and fashionable femininity by using select
examples of modernism, in terms of both interior
decoration and art. Not only did the salons
4
Kathy Peiss, "Making Faces: Cosmetics Industry and the
Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890-1930," Genders7 (Spring
1990): 143. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, pp. 4-5. For a discussion of the
interior design profession, see Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the
France(Berkeley
Market:Envisioning ConsumerSocietyin Fin-de-Siecle
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Isabelle
Anscombe, A Woman'sTouch: Womenin Design from I86o to the
PresentDay (London: Virago, 1984); Peter McNeil, "Designing
Women: Gender, Sexuality, and the Interior Decorator, ca. 18901940," Art History 17, no. 4 (December 1994): 631-57; Cheryl
Buckley, "Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of
Women and Design," Design Issues 3, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 3-14;
Penny Sparke, As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste
(London: Pandora, 1995); Pat Kirkam, ed., WomenDesignersin the
USA: Diversity and Difference(New Haven: Yale University Press,
Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women'sCulture:AmericanPhilan2002);
thropyand Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991).

86
endorse versions of modernism associated with
the realm of fashion, they also actively helped
cultivate a female public for certain types of new
styles.5 Accordingly, I wish to contextualize the
salons as key social spaces that generated meanings about modern art and definitions of femininity during a period when neither was stable or
resolved.

The Domestic Interior, Fashionable Modernism,

and "Womanly" Enterprise
Throughout her career, Rubinstein consistently
tied her collection and interest in interior
decoration to her enterprise. Recalling the years
in which she first set up shop in London and
Paris, she emphasized that her fascination with
new decorating schemes and vanguard art was
initially motivated by her professional desire to
modernize her beauty parlors, unlike the majority of bourgeois women who adorned their
homes as a sign of womanly but amateur
accomplishment. In fact, the two endeavors of
interior decor and business were so closely allied
in her mind that she referred to her beauty
business as "exterior decoration."6 Since Rubinstein's establishments acted as a liminal space
between home and business, it is not difficult to
see how such a concept extended to the beauty
salon.
Even as Rubinstein marked her entry into the
world of modern decor as a business tactic, she
nevertheless outfitted her salon spaces to evoke
the domestic interior. Rubinstein's first New York
salon, opened in early 1915 as the Maison de
Beaut6 Valaze, resembled a chic bourgeois apartment. Indeed, without accompanying text to
inform the reader otherwise, the photographs of
the site that were featured in the May 1915 issue
of Vogue might easily be confused with any
5 For
analyses of gender and modernism, particularly how
women artists deliberately embraced the "feminine" in their work
and public personae, see Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace,
Women Artists and Writers:Modernist (Im)Positionings (London:
Routledge, 1995); Lisa Tiersten, "The Chic Interior and the
Feminine Modern: Home Decorating as High Art in Turn-of-theCentury Paris," in Christopher Reed, ed., Not At Home: The
Suppressionof Domesticityin ModernArt and Architecture(London:
Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp. 18-32; Gill Perry, WomenArtists
and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Manchester, Eng.: University of
Manchester Press, 1995); Anne Wagner, Three Artists (Three
Women)(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997).

6 Helena
Rubinstein, "Exterior Decoration," Arts and Decoration 18, no. 3 (anuary 1923): 52, 56.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3
number of the fashionable interiors the magazine
regularly published (fig. 3). The salon was
organized around brilliant color programs-deep
blue walls, rose baseboards and moldings in the
main reception room, and green velvet carpets
and red tables in smaller antechambers. One
small room attached to the main reception area
displayed an orientalist theme and was outfitted
with "exotic" gold sofas, Chinese wallpaper,
embroidered pillows, and black tables.7
In this sense, the space differed dramatically
from the majority of American beauty "parlors" of
the day. Although the decor of most salons
ranged according to the class of clientele, overall
they took on the trappings of the vacation resorts
or expensive office buildings in which they were
located. Generally, top-of-the-line spaces were
designed to promote regimes of health and
hygiene, as was the case with Budman's Beauty
Parlor in Chicago, where patrons undertook
beauty treatments in a space that included nine
large rooms with iron dressers and tables but
little other embellishment. The only salon in
Rubinstein's league was Elizabeth Arden's Salon
D'Oro at 673 Fifth Avenue, which was adorned to
emulate the mansion interiors of her nouveau
riche neighbors, a decorating scheme quite
different from Rubinstein's.8
The conceptual overlap between the decorator and the beauty specialist figured in the
promotional material surrounding the debut of
Rubinstein's 1915 salon. Announcing her arrival
in New York, Vogue presented an image of a
woman of society who was busily setting up her
American home, a picture of "womanly" conduct
that would have been familiar to its readersreassuringly domestic, somewhat upper crust,
and, above all, respectable. As if to emphasize
Rubinstein's leisured domesticity rather than her
status as a businesswoman, the magazine simply
referred to her as a "woman specialist," devoting
more attention to the decor and furnishings
found in the salon than to the beauty services
offered. At the same time, special note was made
of her professional activities and the fact that she
"works tirelessly."9
/ Valaze, the name of Rubinstein's first cosmetic product, was
a French-sounding made-up word. "On Her Dressing Table,"
Vogue45 (May 15, 1915): 82, 84.
8 Budman's is
profiled in Anne Hard, "The Beauty Business,"
American Magazine 69 (November 1909): 84-85. Alfred Allan
Lewis and Constance Woodworth, Miss ElizabethArden (New York:
Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1972), p. 87.
9 "Dressing Table,"
p. 84.

Rubinstein's Salons

87

Fig. 3. Helena Rubinstein's 1915 salon, East Forty-ninth Street, New York. From "On Her
Dressing Table," Vogue 45 (May 15, 1915): 82. (Photo ?

As indicated in the salon's inaugural advertisement, which features a portrait of the

beautician by French painter Paul Helleu,
Rubinstein's role as proprietor and businesswoman was translated into the image of an
elegant society hostess (fig. 4). Such a projected
air of cosmopolitan
refinement
promoted
Rubinstein and her facility as models of fashionable femininity. By holding herself up as a paragon
of fashion, Rubinstein embarked on a career-long
practice of turning her image, tastes, and personality into a marketable entity, packaged to signify
social and cultural values. At the same time, this
publicity tactic provided maneuvering room to
signify a kind of "womanly" business acumen,
where Rubinstein's professional skills become
analogous to the social conduct and lifestyle of
upper-class women, clearly her intended clientele.
The choice of introducing her new salon with a
Helleu portrait reinforced such an impression.
The French painter was an international celebrity and a member of the haute bourgeoisie.

Vogue, Conde Nast Publications Inc.)

Upper-class patrons would have been aware of his

work by virtue of his cosmopolitan stature in Paris,
where he associated with John Singer Sargent.0l
Nevertheless
a recent immiRubinstein,
a
one
at
that-did
not go so
Jewish
grant-and
far as to portray herself as a member of American
high society, most likely due to the period's pervasive anti-Semitism as well as Elizabeth Arden's
popularity among New York's elite social class. As
an example of how socially sanctioned antiSemitism affected Rubinstein's self-presentation,
it is worth noting that she had originally intended
to open her first salon on Fifth Avenue but was
barred because the building she chose prohibited
Jews. This exact situation would recur in 1939
when she was searching Manhattan for a new,
grand space for her American residence. Having
10On the
relationship between Sargent and Helleu and
cosmopolitan portraiture, see William H. Gerdts, "The Arch
Apostle of the Dab-and-Spot School: John Singer Sargent as an
Impressionist," in Patricia Hills, ed.,John SingerSargent(New York:
Whitney Museum of Art, 1987), p. 131.

88

Winterthur Portfolio 38:2/3

A FAMOUS EUROPEAN
"HOUSE OF BEAUTY"
AMDAMEHELENA RUBINSTEIN,

Announces the Opening

of its Doors in New York

who is the accepted adviser in beauty

matters to the Royalty. Aristocracy and
the great Artistes of Europe: whose position

as a scientificBeautyCulturistand whose
unique work on exclusive lines have created
for her a world-wide Fame; whose establishments, the Maison de Beauit Valaze, at 24
Grafton Street, Mayfair. London, and at No.
255 Rue Saint Honore. Paris, are well-known
landmarks in the itinerary of the ladies of high
society of both Continents; whose "Valaze"
specialties have been found essential to the
maintenance of their complexion beauty by
the world's most beautiful women announces
the opening of her American

de

MAISON
BEAUTE VALAZE

at Ao. 15 EAST 49th STREET

CITY
NEW
YORK
*7.jiwiT"

This establishment,
equippedin much the

't
8i

7~i*~

same manner as Madame Rubinstein's London

and Paris houses. In itself radiates the Spirit

,'
AC,!

\<

';''1P~~~~~~~~~~
.
'
ff.;',{/

Beautv.
0~of
same famous beauty treatments that have
~~~The

~~

a, the admiringgratitudeof uncounted

wvon
numbersof women abroadare now being
administered here; and for ladies who, owing
to distance or other reasons, find it inconvenient or impossible to come to see her in person,
carefully individualized home-treatments will
be devised by Madame Rubinstein herself.
* '

MADAMEHELENARUBINSTEIN
iF,,. ...h.l.yb ,.Htlu

While Madame Rubinstein would naturally

prefer to meet her clients face to face, yet she
wishes to impress upon all those who are prevented From calling on her, that by writing to
',
her freely on the needs and condition of their

complexionsthey will not be callingin vain

upon the fund of her great experience.
ubinstein does not pretend to "wizardry" in her beauty-work- this being the charming compliment paid her by
Madame
one of the most beautiful women of now so unhappy France, Madame Jeanne Faber of the Comedie FranTaise-but she
does kno- the ins and outs of a woman's beauty requirements. And what is more to the point. she can fully satisfy
these requirements in her own uniquely unfailing way.
Madame Rubinstein's knowledge and unequalled expertness are now at the disposal of the women of New York and sister cities.
A visit to her sanctum or an inquiry by letter solves many a little heartache that may be due to some shortcoming in appearance.

Fig. 4. Advertisement for Helena Rubinstein's 1915

salon featuring Paul Helleu's etching, MadameHelena
Rubinstein.From "On Her Dressing Table," Vogue45
(May 15, 1915):

82.

decided on a triplex apartment on Park Avenue,

she was informed that building did not allowJews
to live there. To circumvent this rule-and, by
extension, the symbolic WASP power structureshe purchased the entire building.11
To distinguish her salon from its American
counterparts, Rubinstein traded on a certain
European cachet. She negotiated a niche for
her business and herself by claiming her "difference" and defining it to her advantage. Further,
because some beauty businesses of these years
were known for dubious characters and specious
products, Rubinstein used publicity to cast herself
as both legitimate and novel by virtue of her
Parisian experience and her expert knowledge of
art and home design. For instance, the text that
accompanied the Helleu portrait in her advertisement aggrandized Rubinstein as a cosmopolitan
adviser to European royalty and the "great
11For a
comprehensive examination of anti-Semitism in early
twentieth-century America, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism
in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Artistes of Europe." She presided over not a

commercial establishment but a "sanctum" that
"radiates the Spirit of Beauty." In the early days of
the salon, the beautician used her proximity to
European collections of art as a metaphor for her
business proficiency, highlighting how her expertise was inseparable from an artist's skill and the
discerning eye of an art connoisseur-an
age-old
convention that conflates female and artistic
beauty. Playing on the shared vocabulary between
art and beauty products, Rubinstein presented
herself as the only beautician conversant in both:
"Cosmetiques really call for a study of art. To
understand the matching of tones, and to get a
clear conception of the great artists' ideals of
beauty, I made a long tour through Europe's most
famous picture galleries. Without this I don't
think I should ever have realized how subtle is the
matter of coloring, and what a variety is needed in
all that beautifies." Rubinstein's advertisements,
published in journals such as Vogue and Vanity
Fair during the 1920S further cemented her
connection with art. "Helena Rubinstein Cosmetics
Exclaim the Artist!" proclaimed one; another
waxed poetic about the beautician's flair for
"cosmetic masterpieces." 12
In the 1920S the Helleu sketch created a public
face for Rubinstein that conjured up images of
beautiful society women of the Gilded Age, an era
that was more than a decade-old memory. Given
Rubinstein's lifelong custom of commissioning
self-portraits, it is particularly noteworthy that she
announced her arrival in New York with an artistic
rendering of herself by a French society painter
and used this particular portrait in her American
advertisements for at least seven years. One 1921
notice reproduced the portrait to fill nearly half a
page, and the text expressly pointed to the image
before addressing Rubinstein's services. It let
Rubinstein's customers know that the artist
rendered the picture in the beautician's Paris
salon, effectively transposing her beauty parlor
with the artist's studio. The caption stresses
Rubinstein's Paris connections and reads: "The
image here reproduced is that of Madame Helena
Rubinstein by the great Parisian artist, Helleu, now
12Peiss discusses the
early association of cosmetics with
hucksters and con artists in Hope in aJar, pp. 21-22. Advertisement in Vogue45 (February lo, 1915): 10. Helena Rubinstein,
"Beauty-A Real Definition," Arts and Decoration19, no. 1 (May
1923): 86-87. It is probable that the text was a printed version of
the series of lectures that Rubinstein delivered to the public at
department stores; she recounts those appearances in My Lifefor
Beauty, pp. 61-63. See advertisements in Vanity Fair 32 (April
1929): 121; VanityFair32 (March 1929): 107.

Rubinstein's Salons

89

visiting this country. The portrait was made several

years ago in Madame Rubinstein's world-famous
salon in Paris."13 Although Helleu's portrait
eschewed any hint of a modernist visual vocabulary, Rubinstein's salons swiftly developed a
reputation for advancing new styles.
Credited as an innovative setting for "modernism in art," Rubinstein's New York beauty
salon, as Voguewas quick to point out, did not foist
any nauseating "ultra-modern" work on its
patrons but rather featured the work of a
"theorist [whose] theories do not ruin his art."
The unnamed "theorist" (code for artists whose
work incorporated aspects of abstraction and
modernist form) was sculptor Elie Nadelman,
with whom Rubinstein had a special relationship.
In 1911 she had commissioned a large bas-relief,
Autumn: Four Female Figures with a Horse, for the
billiard room of her London Putney Lane house.
Ultimately she would purchase more of his work
than did any other collector-including
Gertrude
Stein. Sculpture by Nadelman was found throughout Rubinstein's 1915 salon. A bas-relief entitled
Two Nudes (1915) dominated the area over the
mantelpiece, with a smaller bronze figure adjacent to it. A hollow terra-cotta figure, mounted on
an electrical outlet like a light fixture, also
originally executed for Rubinstein's London
home, glowed from the far left wall of the salon.
(Perhaps this was a visual pun; one of Stein's 1911
"word-portraits" about Nadelman played on
14
qualities of light.)
13

Vogue 57 (May 1921):

107.

"14Dressing Table," p. 82. According to Lincoln Kirstein,

Rubinstein encountered Nadelman during his 1911 Paterson's
Gallery show: "Madame Rubinstein, [Nadelman's] compatriot
[from Poland], did not encourage him by a token purchase: she
bought his entire exhibition outright. This was the most generous
patronage of his career. She mounted many pieces in handsome
establishments in London, Paris, BoSton, NewYork, Buenos Aires,
Melbourne; they became her trademark for the quasi-scientific
beautification of modern womanhood" (Lincoln Kirstein, Elie
Nadelman [New York: Eakins, 1973], p. 193). It is probable that
Rubinstein first became acquainted with Nadelman in Paris, prior
to this show, through mutual friends Louis Marcoussis and Alice
Halicka. Gertrude Stein purchased Nadelman's work in 1913 and
displayed it in her famous apartment at Rue de Fleurs; see
Barbara Haskell, Elie Nadelman:Sculptorof ModernLife (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003). In the 1930s
Rubinstein would again associate herself with illuminated home
furnishings, becoming famous for a shining Lucite bed designed
by Ladislas Medgyes-a sign of the modern. The word-portrait
"Nadelman" was not published until 1927. Stein depicted
Nadelman as "the one looking like this one was one feeling
light being something being existing" and "He was one feeling
light being existing. He was one completely thinking about
expressing light being existing" (as quoted in Ulla E. Dydo, ed.,
A Stein Reader [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1993], pp. 144-45).

Rubinstein clearly used her business venue to

showcase Nadelman's art and perhaps echo the
decor of her own living quarters. Equally important, her choice of artist (rather than, say, Pablo
Picasso) signified a taste for an accessible yet
sophisticated brand of modern art. As Vogue's
critical assessment of the sculptor suggests,
Rubinstein's salon provided its clientele with a
middle ground between incomprehensible abstract work and outmoded artistic styles-a compromise that points to a conceptual split between
a more palatable form of modern art versus its
notorious "radical" versions, especially from an
American perspective.15
Rubinstein's New York beauty parlor opened a
mere two years after the famous 1913 Armory
Show, a "blockbuster" exhibition that introduced
European modernism to a broad American
public. Generally regarded as a landmark in
American art history, the display was publicized
as an enormous spectacle, akin to world's fairs.
Despite nationwide critical condemnations of
European vanguard form, a number of small
exhibitions of modern European work proliferated across the country, establishing a stable
(though not extensive) market for the new art.16
Yet the Armory Show's association with massive
publicity and promotional schemes almost certainly affected the broader public's viewing
expectations. By casting the new art as a fascinating cultural event, the show's organizers inadvertently inserted modernism into the realm of
consumerism-a significant factor in understanding how Rubinstein could shape her beauty salon
as a legitimate venue for looking at modern art.
Nadelman was represented in the Armory
Show by two plaster sculptures (Head of Man and
Nude, n.d.), both rendered in the schematic
classical vocabulary that had brought him notice
in Paris. However, following his immigration to
New York in 1914 (Rubinstein paid his passage to
New York and donated a studio space) he
favored fanciful wood figures:
increasingly
dancers, fashionable women, and dandified
men. It is thus not surprising that both avantgarde and more mainstream art communities
embraced him, although he did remain a
controversial figure among conservative critics.
For example, he exhibited at Stieglitz's 291
Gallery in 1915 and 1916 yet reserved his better15

"Dressing Table," p. 84.

16The standard account of the Armory Show is Milton
Brown, The Storyof the ArmoryShow, 2d ed. (New York: Abbeville,
1988).

Winterthur Portfolio 38:2/3

90

publicized American debut for the wealthier Scott

and Fowles Gallery in February 1917. This second
show not only sold out but also generated a group
of wealthy patrons who "swamped" the artist for
portrait commissions. VanityFair, a magazine that
helped disseminate the vogue for modern art,
especially touted his work, publishing at least
eight reviews from 1917 to 1918.17 Rubinstein's
choice of his imagery to decorate her salon, then,
publicly linked her taste to that of Nadelman's
other American collectors.
In addition to the displayed artwork, the 1915
salon incorporated modern ideas about home
decoration. Given Rubinstein's professed interest
in "exterior design," it is not surprising that the
establishment's arrangement and decor brought
together two contemporary schools of thought
about the "proper" adornment of domestic space
and modified them to signify a new kind of
"feminized" interior. First, Rubinstein's theatrical color schemes and amusing items such as
Nadelman's illuminated wall piece suggest a view
of the interior as a scripted environment, a place
for social performance and carefully contrived
arrangements of furnishings, art, and so on. Such
ideas were in vogue during the 191os due to the
influence of Elsie de Wolfe's best-selling decorating manuals. De Wolfe viewed spatial environments as not necessarily a true picture of the
personality of the decorator. Rather the domestic
interior was more of an elaborate stage set to
display and act out standards of taste. In contrast,
as Karen Halttunen has pointed out, the reigning
impulse behind modern interior design was that
furnishings, color schemes, and other accoutrements expressed personality-the
taste that
underwrote a space's decor was a revelation of
the unique individuals who lived within its walls.
De Wolfe, who saw decorating as a stage, also
insisted, however, that rooms acted as spatial
autobiographies. Hence Rubinstein's richly hued
decorative scheme was distinctive but not a
radical departure from the standards of the day.
It encapsulated de Wolfe's claim that "love of
color is an emotional matter." Vogue approvingly
noted the "gay colors" and Nadelman's "spirited
17Brown, ArmoiyShow,p. 298. For more on his immigration
and portrait commissions, see Museum of Modern Art, Elie
Nadelman (New York: By the museum, 1948), pp. 33-36. See
Kirstein, Elie Nadelman,p. 329, for the citations of the VanityFair
reviews; Haskell, Sculptor of Modem Life, pp. 73-85. For a
fascinating discussion of Nadelman's later career, see Wanda
Corn, The Great American Thing (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1999).

figures," attributing the design to the force of

Rubinstein's modish exceptionalism,
asking:
"What of the personality which this setting
suggests? The woman who is the moving spirit
of the establishment is obviously as continental
and as chic as her charming individuality and
Poiret costumes can make her."18
The theatrical presentation was deliberate and
certainly alluded to Rubinstein's own taste, if not
her autobiography. She claims in her memoirs to
have based her color schemes on those of the
Ballets Russes set designs. More significantly, she
identified her encounter with the famous troupe
as the inspiration for her interest in modern
artistic styles and decor, a lifelong pursuit that
played out within her salons. When her first
husband learned that she wished to update her
salon decor to appear more modern, he suggested she view a Ballets Russes performance. The
visit had a profound effect on Rubinstein.
What thrilled me
Leon Bakst and
to the sweet-pea
combinations of
black and gold,

as much as the dancing were the ddcors of

Alexandre Benois. Accustomed as I was
pastel stage sets of the times, the electric
purple and magenta, orange and yellow,
excited me beyond measure! Warm,
colors,
they were as far removed from my
passionate
virginal whites and noncommittal
greens as anything
could be.... After the ballet, late as it was, I went straight
back to the salon and tore down my white brocade
curtains. Next day I gave orders for them to be replaced
with the brilliant color schemes I had fallen in love with
the night before, and over the years they have been seen
in Rubinstein salons everywhere.19

In essence, when the beautician incorporated

her encounter with the Ballets Russes into her
business practices, she turned her salon into a
display venue on par with the services it offered. It
became a space that acted on the body, transforming clients in ways that exceeded a simple
makeover. As can be expected in the beauty
business, whenever an establishment refurbished
its decor, the new organizing principles were
premised on and helped produce new definitions
of the female body. Scholars such as Katherine C.
Grier and Beverly Gordon have argued that the
very concept of domestic space assumed a
18Elsie de
Wolfe, TheHouse in GoodTaste (New York: Century
Co., 1914). Karen Halttunen, "From Parlor to Living Room:
Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality," in Simon J. Bronner, ed., ConsumingVisions:Accumulation
and Display of Goods in America, i88o-I920
(New York: W. W.
Norton, 1989), PP. 157-90. De Wolfe, House in GoodTaste,P. 71.
"Dressing Table," P. 82.
19Rubinstein, My Lifefor Beauty,pp. 38-39.

Rubinstein's Salons
corporeal character, consistently portrayed by
decorators as a female body in need of adornment and fashionable attire. If the salons of the
accented a "natural" body in need of
19oos
healthful revitalization and restoration, the industry in the 1920S and especially in the 1930S
emphasized a new imperative to shape the body
to accord with modern form. As one writer put it
in making a case for salon modernization, "The
streamlined girl of today demands her beauty
services in a shop harmonious with her own
modernity." Vogue's reading of Rubinstein's site
indicates that the rooms were approached as
personifying the owner herself, and, by implication, the fashionable modern interior would
sculpt its clients to match her modish cosmopolitanism. In this way, Rubinstein's stylish salon and
its decor were especially appropriate to a beauty
business, for this was a space that was literally
designed to improve women's physical appearance and turn them into consumers of European
chic and modernist space.20
Rubinstein, by tethering her decorating acumen to her role as a beauty entrepreneur, amalgamated two "feminine" professions into one,
effectively creating an innovative format for publicizing her enterprise. As a successful beauty professional and up-to-date interior decorator, she
was positioned to act as a mediator for new styles,
shaping American audiences' taste and expectations about how modern art could be fashionable. Such a stance was novel in the 191oS, but
during the interwar years new understandings
about the fashion and beauty industries would
shift the public's understanding of modernism
and Rubinstein's salon.

The Beauty Business, Fashion,

and Modernization
In 1928 Rubinstein moved her salon from East
Forty-ninth to East Fifty-seventh Street. The
20For more on the
relationship between concepts of the
body and nineteenth-century interiors, see Susan Sidlauskas, Body,
Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century
Painting (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). Domesticity and femininity
are outlined in Ethel Davis Seal, TheHouse of Simplicity(New York:
Century Co., 1926); Beverly Gordon, "Woman's Domestic Body:
The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the
Industrial Age," WinterthurPortfolio 31, no. 4 (Winter 1996):
281-301. Katherine C. Grier, Cultureand Comfort:People,Parlors,
and Upholstery,i850o-930
(Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum,
1988). As quoted in "Annual Equipment and Design Section,"
Modern Beauty Shop 23, no. 2 (February 1937): 67. "Dressing
Table," p. 82.

91

building that housed the salon had been owned

by railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington and was
known among Manhattan's social elite for its
long, slender staircase. According to the New
Yorker, Rubinstein purchased the building in
order to acquire this staircase, decreeing, "I must
make everything in this building as beautiful as
this stairway." Indeed, the staircase remained, but
the rest of the building was entirely renovated.
Characterizing the new salon as a "real monument to her taste and sense of decor," the
magazine declared the establishment the "most
beautiful of her shops," citing its modernist
furniture and sculpture as particularly noteworthy. Rubinstein's stated enthusiasm about the
staircase signified her embrace of the moderne,
or art deco, aesthetic. As epitomized in Le
Corbusier's spiral staircase designed for Charles
de Beistegui's Paris apartment, by the end of the
1920S elaborate stairways had become standard
fare in the stylized geometric vocabulary of art
deco.21
At this point in her career, Rubinstein
modeled her salon along the dictates of the kind
of modernity espoused by the increasingly influential fashion industry rather than that seen in
interiors of chic living quarters. It should be
recalled that in the days before a definitive
paradigm of modern art existed, most Americans
learned about new styles from fashion magazines,
department stores, show rooms, and industrial
design. Mode and modern were so intertwined
that in 1928 Raymond Loewy, writing on behalf of
Bonwit-Teller, asserted that "true modernism is
good taste! Bonwit-Teller are modernists in that
they interpret in dress that which the age
expresses in art."22
To further distinguish her space from that of
her few American competitors, Rubinstein drew
on decorative schemes found in European fashion houses-establishments
that highlighted elaborate murals and artwork. As early as 1909, for
21

Swerling, "Beauty in Jars," p. 20. The art deco aesthetic is

discussed in Stephen Calloway, Baroque baroque:The Culture of
Excess (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), pp. 77-83.
22As quoted in Terry Smith, Making the Modern (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 361. Rubinstein worked
with designers such as Julia Sert, Jean Lurcat, and Louis
Marcoussis in Paris. Her New York apartment included the
Lucite furniture by Medgyes and decorative schemes by Louis
Sue. Her deliberate alliance with modern design is seen by her
patronage of Donald Deskey and Paul Frankl, who was
commissioned to install furniture in her early New York salon;
see Alastair Duncan, American Art Deco (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1986), p. 43.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3

92
example, the world famous couturier Paul Poiret
refashioned his own home into a showpiece for
displaying his art and furnishings to best promote
his exclusive designer gowns. Rubinstein was well
aware of the establishment, as she had purchased
numerous Poiret designs and in the early 1930s
even used Poiret's interior designer, Louis Sie,
for the redecoration of her Paris apartment. In
the 1920S the French fashion industry reinvented
itself around aggressive marketing strategies and
consumer-oriented products. In 1921 Parisian
designer Jeanne Lanvin branched out into interior decorating, claiming her knowledge of fashion and femininity as the logical basis for her new
art. Around the same time Madeleine Vionnet
opened her elaborate maison at 50 Avenue
Montaigne. Attracting so many tourists that one
writer felt the building ought to be declared a
national monument, Maison Vionnet featured
Lalique stained-glass windows and a mural frieze
in which women promenaded in Vionnet gowns.
As evidenced by a 1932 Fortuneprofile of Parisian
couturiers, by the end of the 1920s, each French
fashion house arranged itself as a kind of
consumer product, "selling" distinctive settings
for the display of art and furnishings alongside
the latest mode. The interiors of three salons
(Vionnet, Schiaparelli, and Champcommunal)
were featured juxtaposed in Fortune to indicate
the range of decorative strategies, but the journal
celebrated their status as business spaces rather
than as the rarified cultural enterprises of
previous years.23
At the same time, American audiences expected to encounter the latest in modern art and
design in commercial venues such as department
stores. Establishments like Saks Fifth Avenue and
Lord and Taylor put on displays of modern art
and design in the mid-g92os, effectively coupling
new merchandising trends with the promotion of
23
Nancy J. Troy, "Domesticity, Decoration, and Consumer
Culture: Selling Art and Design in Pre-World War I France," in
Reed, Not At Home,pp. 123-26; NancyJ. Troy, CoutureCultures:A
Study in ModernArt and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003);
Albert Boime, "Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century
France," in Edward C. Carter III et al., eds., Enterpriseand
in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century
France(Baltimore:
Entrepreneurs
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 158-60. For the
relationship with Sue, see Rubinstein, MyLifeforBeauty,p. 48. The
French fashion industry is discussed in Tag Gr6nberg, Designs on
Modernity:Exhibiting the City in i92os Paris (Manchester, Eng.:
Manchester University Press, 1998). Lanvin is discussed in Leo
Randole, "An Artist in Dress and Decoration," Arts and Decoration
15, no. 6 (October 1921): 384A.Jacqueline Demornex, Madeleine
Vionnet(NewYork: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 43, 49. "The Dressmakers of
France," Fortune6, no. 2 (August 1932): 21.

modern art. Therefore, Rubinstein's displays were

hardly out of line with other contemporary
approaches to modern art as key to manufacturing new consumer tastes.24
Aligning her practice with haute couture
distanced Rubinstein's salons from models of
domesticity. However, while the shops were
distinct in the American market, after the crash
of 1929 they also became out of sync with the
beauty business in general. On the one hand, by
the late 1920S and 1930s, American beauty salons
were increasingly dedicated to a modern look. On
the other, the favored style was unabashedly
mechanomorphic. Establishments catering to a
more middle-class constituency almost uniformly
adopted an art deco vocabulary. In this sense, the
key word modernizationconnoted sleek, schematic
decor, emulating the industrialized sheen of a
Norman Bel Geddes design. Above all, the new
salon was a space of efficiency and productivity,
arranged around sleek but simple decor without
ornament. Chrome trim and furniture, oval and
triangular mirrors, and stenciled wall murals
depicting abstract flower imagery all supplanted
the wicker chairs and tables, objects d'art and
bric-a-brac, massive floral arrangements, and
Louis XIV vocabularies

of the early 1920s.25

Although turn-of-the-century salons concentrated their promotional efforts on the services

they offered to regenerate good health and
hygiene, during the 1930S the industry almost
exclusively focused on modernization of space,
loosely defined in terms of new interior decor,
furnishings, and up-to-date equipment. The
specialized trade journal Modern Beauty Shop
zealously devoted itself to the cause. Each year it
published a comprehensive review dealing with
design issues and regularly featured profiles of
successful new venues, tips on display and
publicity, and technophilic praise for such recent
inventions as air-conditioning, refrigeration, and
24 For commercial
strategies for selling modern art in venues
like department stores, see Marie J. Clifford, "Working with
Fashion: Art, Taste, and Consumerism in Women's Professional
Culture, 1920-1940," American Studies 44 (Spring/Summer
2003):
5-29. These issues are further explored in Marie J. Clifford,

Built by Beauty:Helena Rubinstein'sArt Collection,Fashion, and the

American Reception of Modern Art (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
25 A number of Modern
BeautyShoparticles stress the aesthetic
of sleek but simple; see Max Hoefer, "From Frills to Efficient
Simplicity," ModernBeautyShop21, no. 11 (November 1935): 8o81, 163; Josephine Scott, "Beauty Treatment via Modernization,"
ModernBeautyShop24, no. 5 (June 1938): 66-68, 118. I base my
description of these changes on a variety of features published in
ModernBeautyShopfrom 1930 to 1940.

Rubinstein,'sSalons

93

Fig. 5. Elizabeth Arden's salon, 691 Fifth Avenue, New York, 1930. From "Elizabeth Arden:
Queen," Fortune 11, no. 2 (August 1930): 40.

intercom systems. An embrace of modernization

was seen as the key to success and profitabilitybusiness objectives that were a constant dilemma
throughout the Great Depression. Readers, who
were salon proprietors and other workers in the
beauty business (mostly women), encountered
such urgent injunctions as "there seems to be one
answer [to succeed], and a very simple one...
MODERNIZE!" and "Get on the bandwagon now
and put your shop in the front ranks of the
modernization parade!" Given their professed
emphasis on constant renovation, these outlets
encapsulated the dynamism of the modern mode
itself: reconfigured female bodies, reconstructed
identities, restructured views. They crucially
bridged the apparent, though not necessarily
real, gap between culture and industry and
of modern style with
equated consumption
"feminine" space.26
As "beautiful" as Rubinstein's salon may have
been, by the early 193os her use of interior decor
would no longer sustain her establishment's
26As quoted in "Annual Equipment and Design Section,"
Modern Beauty Shop 21, no. 2 (February 1935): 72. For a thorough
investigation into the complex relations between 1930s industrial

and culture industries, see Smith, Making the Modern.

reputation for chic. Fortune magazine's 1930

profile of Elizabeth Arden is a case in point.
Observing that Rubinstein's (now) archrival was
"the vogue of the moment," the periodical
lavished praise on her new salon, especially its
combination of hard-edged industrial forms and
"ultra-feminine" pastels. For instance, Arden's
famous red-doored salon at 691 Fifth Avenuewhich gave the trademark name Red Door to her
establishments and products-engulfed
its public
in a virtual sea of abstract, geometric forms. As
evidenced in the exercise room decor, the interlocking clean-edge patterns of the pink and green
satin curtains and chairs assumed the look of a
three-dimensional
Georgia O'Keeffe painting,
from whom Arden would later purchase a work
for display in this very room (fig. 5). Additionally,
the beauty parlor featured jade-green glass walls,
crystal lights, and five floors worth of similar
moderne imagery. Fortune magazine, the most
authoritative voice of the business press, approvingly declared that "chic ... pervades the rarefied
atmosphere and the pastel corners of her
salon. 27
27 "Elizabeth Arden: Queen," Fortune 11, no. 2
(August 1930):

40. For a contemporary view of beauty parlor modernization

94
When Fortune noted the "black and white
modernism" of the shop, it also affirmed the
geometric, machinelike forms that dominated
corporate advertisements, logos, and building
designs. Arden validated the success of this
aesthetic in a commercial setting but nonetheless
reassuringly translated it into proper "feminine"
form. According to Arden's biographers, she
wholeheartedly embraced modernization, renovating her showpiece establishment to rid it of its
former rococo-like decor.28
Further, the Fortune article hinted at the
identity of the consumers for the Red Door salon,
happily listing a virtual social roster of Arden's
most prestigious patrons. This praise is not
surprising given that Arden worked tirelessly to
accommodate the tastes of "Junior League" types
(a social faction synonymous with "good taste"),
including employing a doorman for her Fifth
Avenue salon and tailoring her services and
products to debutantes and the "well-born." By
comparison, Fortune conceded that Rubinstein
was once "the first great lady of the salons" but
presently
the Rubinstein salons have passed their days of chic,
[though] the Rubinstein business is still most probably
the biggest of its kind... But she offers her advice
indiscriminately, not seeking selected outlets. Her
demonstrators have appeared in such socially dubious
locations as the NewJersey State Convention of School
Teachers (chalk dust is bad for the complexion) and
the MarieAntoinette (ladies') Room of the Paramount
Theatre in New York.... Buxom, swarthy,addicted to
smartlyexotic dress, she has a husband named Edward
Titus who sells books in a stall by the Seine.29
What under different circumstances could appear
as marketing savvy, such as selling cosmetics to
professional women, is here reproached for a lack
of taste and distinction. Not unsubtly, the text
further associates this deficit with coded references to Rubinstein'sJewishness, contrasting only
a sentence apart a (literally) chalky complexion
with the beautician's "swarthiness" and her
"exotic" dress.
While it is difficult to reconstruct the exact
class of clientele for Rubinstein's salons, as seen
as a tool for publicity, see Charlotte Miller, "Style Shows
Modernization: A Two-Part Publicity Program," Modern Beauty
Shop 24, no. 3 (March 1938): 92-93, 158.
28Arden
reportedly shouted at her designers, "Tear it down,
dear! I never want to see the dump again" (Lewis and
Woodworth, Miss ElizabethArden,p. 142).
29 "Elizabeth Arden:
Queen," p. 37; Lewis and Woodworth,
Miss ElizabethArden,p. 89. "Elizabeth Arden: Queen," p. 92.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3
in the quote above, there is evidence that by the
1930s she attempted to cultivate a new market
middle-class women,
among career-oriented,
more than, say, among the established social elite.
In publicity statements, Rubinstein had made a
point to address "stenographers, clerks, and even
little office girls" and portrayed herself as an
advocate for women's rights. This is especially
apparent in the ways she marketed her cosmetics.
For example, she alone among cosmetics entrepreneurs sent representatives to the National
Association of Business and Professional Club
Women's biennial convention inJuly 1933, where
they presented talks and demonstrations on the
subject of "Beauty for the Business Woman."
Trading on her own business identity, she
attempted to build patrons from this group by
emphasizing her status as a successful female
entrepreneur; she provided a point of identification as an exemplar, even pioneer, of a type of
modern femininity. In a book outlining women's
career choices, Rubinstein had voiced the sentiments of many when she observed, "The cosmetic
business is interesting among industries in its
opportunities for women. Here they have found a
for
field that is their own province-working
women with women, and giving that which only
woman can give-an intimate understanding of
feminine needs and feminine desires."30 Such a
tactic directly confronted Arden's pretensions by
associating Rubinstein's products with women's
professional aspirations and ambitions more so
than with the elite class status of Manhattan
debutantes.
Fortune's discomfort with Rubinstein was not
simply about anti-Semitism. She had long insisted
that her business was intertwined with women's
modernity, particularly in terms of careers. In
short, she offset the "feminine" qualities of her
enterprise by skirting dangerously close to feminism. Obviously, this stance met with a different
reception in certain women's publications. Independent Woman, for one, did not set Arden
against Rubinstein; instead it interpreted both
their successes in feminist terms, observing,
"Beauty cultivation is probably the outstanding
example of a field in which women may actually
30 Helena
Rubinstein, "The Beauty Specialist's Place in the
Community," Beauty 1 (December 1922): 31; Allison Gray,
"People Who Want to Look Young and Beautiful," American
Magazine 94 (December 1922): 32-33; CareerWomenin America
(New York: Cultural Research Publishers, 1941), p. 55; Peiss, Hope
in aJar, p. 80. Helena Rubinstein, "Manufacturing-Cosmetics,"
in Doris Fleischman Bernays, ed., An Outline of Careersfor Women
(New York: Doubleday, 1928), p. 331.

Rubinstein's Salons
own and operate their own businesses to advantage," citing the figure that 90 percent of salons
were conducted "under feminine regime." Using a
set of evaluative criteria similar to those exercised
by Fortunewhen it found Rubinstein outdated and
less than discriminating, Independent Woman substantially differed in its final assessment. Deeming
her (then Fifty-seventh Street) salon "handsome,"
the journal noted that Rubinstein
is one of the few women who is president of her own
organization, and owns and manages its affairsherself.
She employs mostly women and has over 2,000 in her
American personnel, including department store
demonstrators who are on her payroll. Five of her
salons are entirely managed by women. She is intensely
interested in her employees and encourages them to
come to her with their own problems, no matter how
personal... It was Madame Rubinstein... who first
employed women as traveling sales representatives.
The beauty counselor lectures before women's groups
and over the radio, conducts demonstrations in
department stores and holds consultations with women
on individual beauty problems.
However, even if the text heralds qualities viewed
disdainfully by Fortune,it nonetheless shares some
of the latter's assumptions about the "innate
femininity" of the beauty business, arguing, "We
all feel the urge to cultivate and improve; it is part
of feminine psychology to realize the necessity of
elemaking the most of one's appearance-an
mentary urge. And right in that thought lies the
secret of the natural gravitation of women toward
the field of beauty work. It is part of their nature;
they like it; they are adapted to it." As if
conceding to Fortunemagazine's model of success,
Independent Woman was careful to put the accent
on Rubinstein's executive status rather than her
association with fashion; nowhere is there a
mention of her art collection or her salon's
modernism.31

In fact, Rubinstein's investment in art and

artists associated with the French fashion world
had become problematic. Critiques of modernism
first launched in the 1930s highlighted the
relation of modern art to fashion, primarily to
devalue modernism as feminine. Surveying the
cultural landscape in 1931, critic Forbes Watson
noted one small glimmer of hope for American
artists in the otherwise dismal economic climate.
The Great Depression, he asserted, had expedited
the downfall of the "Franco-maniacs," collectors
and poseurs who, during the previous decade,
31Hazel L. Kozlar, "Making a Job of Beauty," Independent
Woman12 (April 1933): 132, 154.

95
idolized everything and anything produced in a
Parisian atelier. Watson composed his picture of
the deleterious effects of the "Paris Art Bourse"
with a repertoire of gender-specific images that
serve to this day as shorthand for the consumer
indulgences

of the 1920s.

If the new-found

success

of French modernism had spawned a commercial

version of mere "Paris-art," which the critic
likened to "international dress-maker painting,"
the fault lay squarely with those "flapper-minded"
art patrons whose pursuit of fashion and novelty
had corrupted the art market, opening the door
for unscrupulous "get-rich circles" to manipulate
and undermine national culture. He elaborated:
Those particular Paris dealers who were blinded by
money craving, and ignorant of the sayings of no less a
person than Abraham Lincoln, continued to send to
America

[in the

1920s]

vast and indiscriminately

selected stocks of fashionable picture products and

some sculpture. These were thrown helter-skelterupon
the American art market and created a double
confusion, for simultaneously wiser and more experienced dealers were shipping to us many of the best
contemporary French pictures.... What a parade....
All kinds of hooks with all kinds of bait were tossed into
that ocean of dollars that the less traveledtrade in Paris
thought of as the whole of America.32
Watson linked economic stability to authentic
national culture, charging that both had been
crucially undermined by the "feminine" pursuit
of fashion. The notoriously right-wing critic
Thomas Craven went further. The alliance between fashion and modernism, he asserted, had
transformed a whole generation of male artists
into decorators and stylists-in
essence, into
female impersonators:
The artistis losing his masculinity.The tendency of the
Parisiansystemis to disestablishsexual characteristics,to
merge the two sexes in an androgynousthird containing
all that is offensive in both. If you doubt the growing
effeminacy of the artist, you have only to examine the
performancesof the modern Ecole de Paris.The school
is fundamentally sexless, from Picasso to Laurencin
and Dufy.In exteriors, it often appearsharsh and brutal,
but the harshness is factitious-the acid face and dominating toughnessof theprofessionalwoman[my italics]. In
essence, it is an emasculatedart,an artof fashions, styles,
and ambiguous patterns.
Obviously, Watson and Craven's texts rely on
metaphors of sexual difference to suggest national artistic distinctions, contrasting the "femininity" of French modernism with the implied
32

Forbes Watson, "The Star Spangled Banner," Arts 18, no. 1

(October 1931): 45.

96
"masculinity" of American art. In raising the
specter of fashion, each had a particular kind of
femininity in mind. The dressmaker, the flapper,
and the "dominating" professional woman all
point to patriarchal anxieties about the careeroriented New Woman and the impact of her
tastes on cultural production.33
Both artists and businesspeople conceded that
Paris had undoubtedly set the tone for modern
style. The dilemma they faced was to modify
American art and fashion production into modern form while continuing to profit from French
exports. The editor of Women'sWearDaily, Morris
Crawford, suggested in The Waysof Fashion that his
tastes were ultimately tempered by his national
viewpoint. Yet he equivocated: "I hope [I have
not lacked] sympathy for an understanding of
France or her great industries of fashion. It is my
belief that neither in culture nor in industry do
we compete with France, but we are component
parts of the same basic culture and draw our
technologies and our arts from the common
funds of a basic civilization." Edward L. Bernays, a
guiding force in modern public relations, noted
that one of his clients, Cheney Silk company, sold
its designs by appealing to Parisian cultural
cachet. However, part of the tactic involved
educating American consumers about more
accessible brands of modern French art. Thus in
1927, Bernays arranged a traveling exhibition
featuring School of Paris artist Kees van Dongen,
circulated prepackaged reviews of his work, and
encouraged competing designers to manufacture
goods inspired by the painter. Importantly, the
company sponsored a show of von Dongen's
paintings at the Anderson Galleries, where each
picture was draped with an analogous Cheney
silk.34
Yet from the outset of the Great Depression,
the American business community balked at
French style leadership, especially its ties to
modernism. Late in the 1930S Fortune magazine
summed up the French influence on American
show windows in the 1920s as a plethora of
"grotesque mannequins,... cubist props [and]
33Thomas
Craven, ModernArt: The Men, the Monuments, the
Meaning (New York: Halcyon House, 1934), p. 29. For a
comprehensive analysis of the New Woman and art, see Ellen
Wiley Todd, The "NewWoman"Revised:Painting and GenderPolitics
on FourteenthStreet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993).
34M. D. C. Crawford, The Ways of Fashion (New York:
Fairchild, 1940), p. 289. Edward L. Bernays, Biographyof an
Idea: Memoirsof Public Relations Counsel,Edward L. Bernays (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 308.

WinterthurPortfolio3 8:2/3
gaga designs." American women working in
fashion careers pointed out, however, that they
contrasted with their Continental cousins because they viewed fashion as more of a profession
than a matter of self-adornment. The American
Commissionaire in Paris (who worked for a
women's professional organization called the
Fashion Group) declared, "French women think
chiefly about clothes and love, and chiefly about
clothes.... The American woman has something
in her head besides fashion ... because most of us
have jobs ... it's smart to have jobs." In 1929 the
fashion reporter for the New YorkTimeshad acidly
contrasted a Parisian-driven revival of belle
epoque fashion with a supposed American penchant for practicality. Her words eerily presaged
Watson's castigation of the "Paris Art Bourse":
"Under the combined attack of couturiers and
corset makers, manufacturers of silks and velvets,
advertising artists, stylists, window decorators and
fashion magazines, women are to be made
'feminine,' no matter what the cost to comfort
or to bank accounts. And 'feminine' is defined in
its narrowest and most thoroughly traditional
sense. Not what American women are in 1929,
but what French women are supposed to have
been before they were contaminated with modern
ideas."35
Well past sixty years of age at this point,
Rubinstein was still identified with a sense of style
specific to the 191os (the Ballets Russes color
schemes, the Poiret gowns). Modernist vocabularies that had once been hailed by her American
public for their modish chic now seemed dated
and anachronistic. Paradoxically, even as Fortune
contrasted Arden's modernity to Rubinstein's
ostensible antiquity, it celebrated the beautician's
cosmetics corporation for its marketing skill and
product design.36 Obviously, as this purposeful
differentiation illustrates, Rubinstein's cosmetics
corporation was considered both up-to-date and
"American," but the woman herself and her
salons were figured as foreign and increasingly
unfashionable. While Rubinstein would always
trade on her "exoticism" and Parisian reputation
3' "Window
Display," Fortune 15, no. 1 (January 1937): 92.
Anita Chace, speech delivered to the Fashion Group, November
24, 1933, cited in Victoria Billings, "Altered Forever: A Women's
Elite and the Transformation of American Fashion and Work
Culture" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1990),
p. 210. Mildred Adams, "Revolt Rumbles Fashion World," New
York Times, October 27, 1929.
36 "Cosmetics: The American Woman
Responds," Fortune11,
no. 2 (August 1930): 30-31.

Rubinstein's Salons
to generate an aura of glamour about herself and
her products, during the early days of the Great
Depression the symbolic capital manufactured by
this identity had diminished in light of increasing
nativism in the realms of business and the arts.

Brand Name Modernism: Art Publicity

and Consumer Spectacle
In the disquieting climate of the early 1930s,
Rubinstein reinvented her American image. As
David Nye argues in his study of early-twentiethcentury "image worlds," modern corporate imagery
was increasingly predicated on self-representation; that is, on marketing a picture of a business
itself, equally as vital to sustaining the health of a
company as the promotion of goods and services.
Corporate publicity increasingly relied on the new
tool of public relations, which worked by mediating the very construction of social and cultural
identities, actively shaping values and beliefs on
multiple fronts. Because Rubinstein always insisted that her own image was her business, her
beauty parlors, her public persona, and her
collecting activities all couched her enterprise in
cultural terms. This tactic is most evident in her
new, extravagant 1937 salon, which she designed
as a publicity machine. Upon her purchase of the
building at 715 Fifth Avenue and the subsequent
move of her salon from East Fifty-seventh Street,
Rubinstein hired Harold Sterner to renovate the
facade in accord with the sleek appearance of art
deco exteriors, as can be seen in the Bauhaus-like
signage all rendered in lower case.37 Rubinstein
retained her practice of using the space for
displays of her own collection as well as modish
interior decoration, but she also added consumer
spectacles and staged events so that the establishment itself took on the aura of celebrity.
Rubinstein thus participated in the new phase of
public relations in which the salon and all it
contained became a marketable entity, packaged
for consumption on a number of levels-as a
fashion outlet, alluring consumer spectacle, and
gallery-like showcase for her own collection.

37David Nye, Image Worlds: CorporateIdentities at General

Electric, I890-I930
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). See Roland
Marchand, Creatingthe CorporateSoul: The Rise of Public Relations
and CorporateImageryin AmericanBig Business (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). The 1937 salon is
described in Woodhead, WarPaint, p. 237.

97
Rubinstein had also begun to ante up her
cultural capital via more conventional artistic
venues, making her collecting activities better
known to her American public. As early as 1932
she had lent her collection of Nadelman sculptures for a display at Marie Sterner's International
Gallery in New York. This show was immediately
followed by a small exhibition dedicated to her
entire collection. In 1935 she collaborated with
the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by lending a
substantial number of her African sculptures to
the museum's African Negro Art exhibition. And
eventually she would lend items to MoMA's 193637 show of portraits by Salvador Dali as well as its
exhibitions
featuring the work of Candido
Portinari, Nadelman, and Pavel Tchelitchew.
However, Rubinstein never became affiliated with
a particular museum nor did she ever work to
build her own, as did other female collectors like
Isabella Stewart Gardner, Gertrude Whitney, and
Peggy Guggenheim.38 Instead she contrived her
own set of exhibiting tactics, primarily reserved
for spaces-like her salons-in which she would
have the most control over how her collection was
represented.
When the seven-story salon at 715 Fifth
Avenue opened in January 1937, Life anointed it
Rubinstein's "toniest."39 In the coming years, few
would refer to the establishment without accompanying adjectives like "swank." The beauty
parlor was featured in New York City tourist
guides (the only other one earning inclusion was
Arden's) and set a new standard for the industry.
As if to blur the line between her cosmetics
company and her salon, Rubinstein also located
her corporate headquarters in the building's
upper three floors, decorating the space in shades
of pink and including framed studio photographs
of herself in almost every office.

38

"Beauty Specialist Displays Her Nadelmans," Art Digest 6

(April 15, 1932): 15; Marie Sterner, The Collection of Helena
Rubinstein(New York: International Gallery, 1932); Edward Alden
Jewel, "Artin Review," New YorkTimes,May 16, 1932. AfricanNegro
Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935). The catalogue
does not discuss Rubinstein, although her works are reproduced
and identified as part of her collection. An earlier profile of this
collection appeared in 1929; see Marya Mannes, "African Art in
the Rubinstein Collection," InternationalStudio 92, no. 384 (May
1929): 55-56. On the MoMA show, see Rubinstein, My Life for
Beauty, p. 103. Anton Gill suggests that Rubinstein did want to
found an institution that would rival New York's Museum of
Modern Art; see Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy
Guggenheim (New York: Harper Collins, 2002),

pp. 208, 210.

39 "The Business of Beauty is the Business of Rubinstein," Life

2, no. 9 (March i, 1937): 39.

WinterthurPortfolio3 8:2/3

98

i:
:?
--d'
r;

Fig. 6. Reception Room in Helena Rubinstein's 1937 salon, 715 Fifth Avenue, NewYork. From

"TwoNew Scenes in Modern Decoration," Artsand Decoration45, no. 5 (January 1937): 38.

As evidenced in the salon's treatment rooms,

each resembling a boudoir, and the waiting area,
which mimicked a living room, the domestic
interior continued to factor obliquely in the
design of Rubinstein's establishment. But the
signs of domesticity were secondary to the display
of art. The main reception area contained the
Nadelman bas-relief from the 1915 salon surrounded by new items like African sculpture, a
Ferdnand Leger rug, and an Amedeo Modigliani
silhouette entitled Caryatide (n.d.). Gazing over
the entire ensemble was Tchelitchew's sequined
portrait of Rubinstein (fig. 6). Portrait busts by
Malvina Hoffman and murals painted by School
of Paris artist Alice Halicka were located in the
salon's health bar and treatment rooms. Finally,
the usual assortment of colorful decor consisting
of pink mirrors, purple curtains, and gold
cabinets glittered alongside the artwork.40
From the "feminine" color scheme to the
actual artists on display, Rubinstein once again
relied on the image of fashionable femininity to
sell her space. Certain parts of the interior were
clearly designated for consumption as tasteful
fashion. Photographs and profiles of the salon
were reproduced in style magazines such as Arts
and Decoration and House Beautiful, and artists
40 "Two New Scenes in Modern
Decoration," Arts and
Decoration 45, no. 5 (January 1937): 38.

such as Hoffman, Halicka, Nadelman, Leger,

Tchelitchew, and Modigliani would have been
familiar to the salon's clientele as exemplary of
the fashionable modernism promoted by upscale
magazines.41
The decor in the 1937 salon also suggests
thematic organization. While physically absent,
Rubinstein's
is signified
presence
by the
Tchelitchew portrait. Her head turned to face
left, Rubinstein looks out over the entire arrangement in the room. Nadelman's bas-relief calls to
mind the stylized classicism popular in the late
191os. Modigliani's linear female form is economically rendered and schematic, fitting well
within the conventions for art deco. Conversely,
Tchelitchew's surrealist image of Rubinstein is a
swirling wash of brilliant greens, blues, and golds.
The entire surface is covered in thick gold sequins,
creating the impression of either a glamorous,
41 In 1943 Hoffman collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli on an
antiwar exhibition entitled Men of the Worldand was chosen to
create the trophy for the Coty award, a prize for excellence in
design. Halicka, firmly affiliated with French couture, developed
a unique type of collage based on affixing rich swaths of fabric to
painted figures. She spent 1935 to 1938 in the United States and
had exhibitions at the Harriman Gallery and the Julien Levy
Gallery in 1937. On Hoffman, see Pamela Hibbs Decoteau,
"MalvinaHoffman and the Races of Man," Women'sArtJournal o1
(Fall/Winter 1989-90): 7-12; Palmer White, Elsa Schiaparelli
(New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 200. On Halicka, see "Playthings of
Childhood Are Realities of Art," Vogue60 (July 15, 1922): 65;
Perry, WomenArtists,pp. 152-53.

Rubinstein's Salons

99

Fig. 7. Mala Rubinstein in Helena Rubinstein's 1937 salon, 715 Fifth Avenue, New York.
(Helena Rubinstein Foundation; photo C Paul Thompson.)
sparkling halo or a series of golden pimples. In
another publicity photograph, Rubinstein's faTwoNudes, Modigliani's
vored pieces-Nadelman's
and
Tchelitchew's
portrait-form
Caryatide,
the backdrop to an image of Mala Rubinstein
(Helena's niece) instructing employees in facial
massage (fig. 7). As the young women examine
themselves in the tilted mirrors, they would have
seen these examples of Rubinstein's collection
along with their own reflections. In the mirror
closest to the viewer in the lower right foreground,
we can discern the abstract forms of Louis
Marcoussis's La Recontre (1937). Set up for the
purposes of promotion, the salon's display afforded Rubinstein the opportunity to imagine her
place in the recent history of modern style. Thus
the works of art present a small-scale chronology
of accessible styles critical to marketing modernism within the fashion arena. But such a visual
chronicle can only be seen within Rubinstein's
establishment, not in a gallery or museum.
That Rubinstein constructed her space to
amplify the work of artists who were associated
with fashion is best seen in her patronage of
Marie Laurencin, from whom Rubinstein commissioned three paintings. Her choice of artist is

significant. As scholars have argued, Laurencin

built a lucrative career for herself in the 1920S by
consciously emphasizing "feminine" vocabularies
like rococo ornament and decorative color. The
artist, more so than, say, Georgia O'Keeffe,
deliberately aligned herself with the fashion
realm, producing portraits of modish women that
were often consumed as fashion illustration. One
of her distinctive modish femmes graced the
August 1923 cover of Vogue. Indeed, American
audiences were best acquainted with her painting
only through the fashion arena. Such was her
association with modish imagery that one writer
could refer simply to a "Marie Laurencin palette"
while another used her name as an adjective for
fantasy paintings. In 1927 VanityFair would credit
her with founding a whole new school of art,
placing the artist in its coveted Hall of Fame
because "her work has influenced the world of
fashion as well as that of the galleries."42

42According to art dealer Ren6 Gimpel, "[Laurencin] is

preparing three canvases for Helena Rubinstein, the purveyor of
beauty products, who will have reproductions done for her salon"
(Diary entry, March 16, 1938, as cited in Ren6 Gimpel, Diary of an
Art Dealer, trans. John Rosenberg [New York: Farrar, Straus and

Winterthur

100

Portfolio 38:2/3

v-L
I

Es

;?;??-

Fig. 9. Georgia O'Keeffe,Jimson Weed, 1936-37. Oil on

linen; H. 831/2",W. 70". (Indianapolis Museum of Art,
gift of Eli Lilly and Company; photo ? 2003 Georgia

O'Keeffe Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York.)

Fig. 8. Marie Laurencin, Helena Rubinstein Wearing a

YellowShawl, ca. 1934. Oil on canvas; H. 33", W. 27".

(Helena Rubinstein Foundation; photo ? 2003 Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,Paris.)
Laurencin's 1934 portrait of Rubinstein portrays the beautician in the artist's characteristic
style of softly blended pastels and diffuse form
(fig. 8). Resembling so many of Laurencin's other
portraits of fashionable figures (such as Coco
Chanel), Rubinstein's body melds into the fabric
of her pink gown; blobs of white and teal form an
enormous necklace and earrings. The beautician
is portrayed with the doe-eyes and stylized painted
lips commonly found among Laurencin's female
Giroux, 1966], pp. 427-28). I have been unable to determine
exactly what these paintings were, since none of the Laurencins
included in Rubinstein's estate have dates that correspond to the
diary entry. However, it is possible that at least one of these works
may have been Laurencin's Portraitof Helena Rubinsteinin a Yellow
Shawl (ca. 1934). Bridget Elliott, "The Strength of the Weak as
Portrayed by Marie Laurencin," Genders24 (1996): 69-109. Perry,
WomenArtists,pp. 109-17. Margaretta Byers, Help Wanted-Female:
Careersin the Field of Fashion (New York: Julian Messner, 1941),
p. 285; Allene Talmey, "No Progress No Fun," Vogue 107
(February 1946): 192. As cited in Cleveland Amory and Frederic
Bradlee, eds., VanityFair:A Cavalcadeof the 920os and I93os (New
York: Viking, 1960), p. 139.

imagery. Already well into middle age when

she commissioned the portrait, Rubinstein was
rendered to resemble not so much a physiognomic appearance (or even a fantasy version
of her youthful guise)-rather,
it is a version of
Rubinstein as inflected in one.of the most popular
styles of decorative modernism. Rubinstein inserts
herself within Laurencin's modernism, metaphorically demonstrating her identification with
an artist who epitomized "feminine taste" and her
literal self-construction through its vocabulary.
the opening
of
Only months following
Rubinstein's new outlet, Elizabeth Arden mounted
O'Keeffe's enormous Jimson Weed in her Fifth
Avenue salon (fig. 9). Large schematic flowers
stenciled on beauty salon walls had become standard decor for such establishments as the industry
waged a campaign of "modernization" in the
1930s.

Aspects

of Arden's

decor

and O'Keeffe's

canvases were deemed "ultra-feminine"-a term

that evokes essentialist definitions of femininity as
well as the avant-garde, which was often termed
"ultra-modern." By hiring the nation's bestknown female artist to do the wall-size painting,
Arden strategically modified the kind of publicity
her salon would receive. She anointed the room
where the painting was hung the "Gymnasium
Moderne" and placed O'Keeffe's creation along
the wall so that it would be reflected in the room's
mirrors (fig. o). When performing rhythmic
dance or poise exercises, the clientele could look

Rubinstein's Salons

Fig. io. Women exercising in front of Georgia

O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed,Elizabeth Arden's salon, 691
Fifth Avenue, New York.From "IAm a Famous Woman
in This Industry," Fortune 18, no. 4 (October 1938): 60.

(Photo ? Arthur O'Neill.)

at themselves as they moved before the blossoms

hovering in the background. In this instance,
Arden indeed molded bodies to accord with
modern form, but the form in question is
O'Keeffe's cascading petals and buds. The installation was celebrated for its artistic significance and transformed the redecoration of
Arden's business into an exhibition premiere.
The occasion was simultaneously publicized as a
celebrity event, equally significant as a public
coalition between two well-known stars-one
associated with fashionable femininity, the other
artistic modernity.
with women's
Unlike
Rubinstein, whose salon openings became theatrical galas, Arden unveiled her newly redecorated
exercise room with a special tea. However, she was
careful to invite photographers, posing for the
camera with O'Keeffe.43
43 On the use of stenciled
flowers, see ModernBeautyShop20,
no.12 (December 1934): 63; Modern Beauty Shop 23, no. 5
(May 1937): 76. One year after Arden installed O'Keeffe's
painting, the journal advocated the use of flower decorations; see
"Furniture and Equipment Section," ModemBeautyShop24, no. 2

101

Arden's public identification with O'Keeffe

was highly strategic. By turning her salon into a
venue for viewing the artist's flower painting, she
clearly strove to counter the enormous publicity
Rubinstein generated with the founding of her
own Fifth Avenue salon earlier that year. Further,
Arden's move allied her business with an artist
who was an American modernist associated with
femininity. If Rubinstein promoted a largely
Parisian brand of modernism within her commercial sites and business enterprise, then Arden
offered a homegrown product that subtly pointed
to her archrival's foreignness. Unlike Rubinstein,
however, Arden limited her involvement with
interior design to choosing a suitable decorator;
she had little hands-on input but did maintain a
small collection of modern paintings by female
artists such as O'Keeffe, Laurencin, and Mary
Cassatt. Arden also commissioned portraits of
herself from Augustus John and purchased
sculpted busts of "famous Parisian beauties" by
fashion photographer Baron Hoyningen-Huene.
According to Margaretta Byers, these she "exhibited widely." This collecting activity appears to
have been a response to Rubinstein's, since Arden
only began to acquire art once Rubinstein had
defined her own beauty salons through art
display. Arden clearly had shifted her views since
1930, when Fortune magazine took approving
notice of her "chaste gray and silver apartment"
and complimented her for moving away from
"the lacy, chi-chi kind [of decor]."44
Arden's efforts to publicize the new look of
her salon were no match for Rubinstein's
"stunts." Although the artwork mounted within
Rubinstein's new interior showcased the beautician's "good" taste, most observers focused on the
overwhelming spectacle of the entire environment. "From across the street her salon is a
luxurious facade," observed Harper's Bazaar in
1937. "Once inside the door it is a gigantic and
splendid boudoir." Voguewas more effusive:
Chirico's white horses. Ladies sunning under artificial
sun. Halicka panels in the health bar. Milk baths.
Treatment rooms like dressing-rooms.Miniaturerooms
in shadow boxes. Malvina Hoffman's sculpted heads.
Your own head looking well coiffed. These are no
(February 1938): 67-110. "Beauty is Fun," Town and Country92
(April 1937): 152. The painting is briefly discussed in Jonathan
Weinberg, Love and Ambitionin ModernAmericanArt (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 121-22.
44For more on Arden's
collection, see Lewis and Woodworth,
Miss ElizabethArden, p. 130. Byers, Help Wanted, pp. 243-244.
"Elizabeth Arden: Queen," p. 40.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3

102

surrealistbabblings; they are the first, exciting impressions you receive in Helena Rubinstein's brand-new
beauty establishment.
As the reference to "surrealist babblings" indicates, Rubinstein premiered the new salon at the
end

of MoMA's

1936-37

Fantastic

Art, Dada,

Surrealism show. Clearly striving to capitalize on

the exhibition,
the publicity surrounding
Rubinstein acquired Man Ray's painting of
female lips, Observatory Time-The Lovers
and displayed
(1932-36),
it-appropriately

colossal

enough-as a backdrop for a show window selling

her own lipstick. The painting had previously
been featured in a fashion spread published in
Harper's Bazaar in 1936 (fig. 11), suggesting

how

Rubinstein's trompe l'oeil engaged multiple

publics. The MoMA show, while critically panned,
utterly fascinated the viewing public, who approached the array of fur cups, parrots mounted
on mannequin legs, and bizarre landscapes as if
the exhibition were an amusement park. Already
enthralled, audiences witnessed an explosion of
surrealist imagery in the commercial realm, from
store windows, merchandising
displays, and,
above all, fashion magazines. That she used Man
Ray's work as an expedient advertisement but
never intended to add the painting to her
collection was made clear when Rubinstein swiftly
returned the piece to the artist.45
Just two months after the Man Ray escapade,
Rubinstein again alluded to spectacular surrealist
displays when her salon's shop window was
transformed into a stage set where live models
stepped into a gilded frame for fifteen minutes at
a time, creating a tableau vivant of such paintings
as Edouard Manet's The Balcony (1869) and
Picasso's

Woman in a Blouse (figs.

12,

13).

So

many passersby stopped to view the living window,

or, as Life put it, "Rembrandt and Manet and
Picasso a la Rubinstein," that Fifth Avenue's other
businesses ordered Rubinstein to dismantle her
star attraction, conveniently resulting in more
publicity for the outlet.46
45 Carola de Peyster Kip, "Worn Out and Repaired," Harper's
Bazaar 71 (February 1937): 102; "It's a Beautiful Day," Vogue89
(January 15, 1937): 74. For more on surrealism, see Dickran
Tashjian, A Boatloadof Madmen:Surrealismand theAmericanAvantGarde, 1920-I950

(New York: Thames and Hudson,

Fig. 11. Model wearing beach coat in front of Man

Ray's ObservatoryTime-The Lovers, 1932-36. (Photo c
2003 Man RayTrust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP,Paris.)
The extent to which Rubinstein staged commercial spectacle at the Fifth Avenue venue is
seen by the fate of the fashionable interior decor
that had once played such an important role in
defining the space of her earlier salons. "Domesticity" itself became entertainment. One floor of
the beauty parlor was devoted to miniature
dollhouses, set within the walls of the establishment and viewed through small windows (fig. 14).
A small, historically themed diorama, the dollhouses reduced fashionable interiors from different moments in history into neat consumer
packages, and they linked Rubinstein's salon to
current trends in fashion display. For example,
New York's influential Fashion Group, the premier organization of female fashion professionals,
had held a symposium on the topic of window
displays in 1935, with participants pointing to
surrealist-inspired show windows as essential to
garnering viewer attention. Added one stylist, "It
is easier for people to look at little windows than
big ones." Thus, by the late 1930S the miniature
fit nicely with surrealist spectacle but was also
promoted as a particularly modern merchandising strategy.

1995); Lewis

Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous:MarcelDuchamp, SalvadorDali,

and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001); Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York:
Rizzoli, 1987). Man Ray, Self-Portrait(London: Andre Deutsch,
1963), pp. 257-58.
46 "Business of
Beauty," pp. 39-40.

47 The dollhouse dioramas drew on another fad for miniature

houses prevalent in the Great Depression, best typified by actress
Colleen Moore's 1935 nationwide department store tour with her
little domiciles. In the fall of 1937, the Art Institute of Chicago
mounted a display of specially designed dollhouse period rooms,
which featured hand-crafted reproductions of famous artwork.

Rubinstein's Salons,

Fig. 12. "Living model" in the window of Helena

Rubinstein's 1937 salon, 715 Fifth Avenue, New York.

From "Mme. Rubinstein's Living Art Blocks Fifth

Avenue Traffic," Life 2, no. 9 (March 1, 1937): 40.

(Photo ? Charmante Studio.)

There can be no doubt that Rubinstein's show

windows and amusements were bald efforts to
generate publicity. In contrast, her placement of
African sculpture in the salon constituted a public

The dollhouses on display at Rubinstein's salon had been publicly

exhibited in a gallery at least once. Assembled by Rubinstein over
the years, the rooms were outfitted by professional decorators as
accurately as possible; see Leslie Paris, "Fairylandfor the Nation:
Colleen Moore's Dollhouse Charity Tour and the Spectacle of
Childhood, 1935-1939," paper presented at the California
American Studies Annual Conference, Berkeley, Calif., May
1997; Charles Fabens Kelly, "The Miniature Period Room at
Chicago," ArtNews36, no. 2 (October 9, 1937): 14; Charles Fabens
Kelly, "Setting a Doll Up in Her Own Furniture," Arts and
Decoration 40 (April 1934): 54-55. In the 192os Florine
Stettheimer and her sister Carrie constructed elaborate dollhouses, which included removable facades and whole galleries
featuring examples of modern art, re-created in miniature. More
mainstream salons sometimes used cabinets that contained
miniature scenes, such as panoramic vistas of mountains; see Dana
Wolf, "Built-InDisplays:Space Saversand Silent Salesmen," Modern
Beauty Shop 23, no. o1 (October 1937): 8o-81, 174, 176.
"Symposium on Window Display," Bulletin of the Fashion Group
(January-February 1939): 3, Archives of the Fashion Group
International, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript
and Archives Division, NewYork Public Library,box 144, folder 11.

103
relations strategy in its most nuanced form. More
than her Nadelman, Marc Chagall, and Modigliani
works, these were the objects that drew the
attention of such forces as Andre Breton and
MoMA.48 Knowledgeable salon patrons would
have immediately recognized the set of African
art on display as representative of the work
Rubinstein had lent to MoMA's 1935 African
NegroArt show. With such legitimating attention
paid to this aspect of her collection, Rubinstein
gained a valuable publicity tool. The work served
as a reminder of the hallowed cultural spaces in
which she moved, heralded her sophisticated eye
for accumulating such a collection, and disguised
her commercial interests through the edifying
power of "high brow" taste.
In a publicity photograph from 1935, Rubinstein strikes an imperious pose as she holds
up a mask from the Ivory Coast (fig. 15). Depicted
by fashionable photographer George MaillardKesslere, Rubinstein timed the photo's release to
the nation's press to coincide with the MoMA
show. Although the image adheres to established
visual codes of authority and possession, it also
subtly suggests a fashion reading. Rubinstein
balances the mask in hands adorned with black
velvet Chanel gloves, distinctive for their bellshape cuffs made of straw, subtly framing the art
object as a fashion accessory. Gloves also evoke
the careful touch of the art expert, like a
conservator. Rubinstein presents the artwork in
a way that traverses the fetishized handling of
objects ascribed to both consumer desire and
curatorial expertise. With thin "painted on"
eyebrows and cupid lips, a hairstyle composed of
a single braid, and her rigid, upright stance,
Rubinstein herself seems as stylized as the linear
ornaments incised on the mask's face. This
juxtaposition between white femininity and the
racially coded blackness of the mask alludes to
established visual codes in modernist representations. Found in paintings and fashion photography, such imagery invited the spectator to make
equivalences between sexual and racial difference, conflating femininity with otherness, and
likened the modernity of the fashionably made-up
face to the "primitive" schematic, geometric
forms ascribed to non-Western aesthetics.
Rubinstein, however, circumvented the limitations of this possible interpretation of her
image. Unlike modernist representations that
48
Rubinstein also entertained Marxist poets and artists in her
home; see Tashjian, Boatloadof Madmen,pp. 40, 164.

Winterthur Portfolio 3 8:2/3

104

Fig. 13. Crowd looking at the "living model" in the window of Helena Rubinstein's 1937
salon, 715 Fifth Avenue, New York. From "Mme. Rubinstein's Living Art Blocks Fifth Avenue
Traffic," Life 2, no. 9 (March 1, 1937): 40. (Photo ? Charmante Studio.)

picture frequently nude and anonymous models

with African art, Rubinstein, in her business suit
and pearls, accentuates her professional status.
Her outfit differs dramatically from the exotic
gowns in which she was photographed in other
publicity portraits. Her career-oriented clothing
alludes to signs of women's modernity that
contrasts with the "primitiveness" of the African
mask. In a lengthy press release that accompanied
this photograph, Rubinstein similarly appropriated the language of primitivism. Casting herself
as an exotic explorer, the text recounts how
Rubinstein searched remote and exotic lands for
beauty elixirs:
[The] collection of these weird objects which appeal to
this beauty expert because of their "strangecharm and
beauty of expression," was gathered by Helena
Rubinstein with infinite pains during the past fifteen
years of her traveling about the world in search of new
ingredients and formulas for her well-known beauty
products.... They have a strange beauty all their own.
Such well known modern artists as Picasso, Matisse,
Modigliani, Epstein, Zadkine, and others owe an

admitted debt to the newly discovered sculpture of

darkest Africa, having been inspired by the original
arrangement of lines, masses, colors, light and shades
to be found in these carvings of bygone eras.49
in African art is inflected
by her
while
the
enterprising pursuit,
significance of her
is
associated
with
a
roster
of esteemed
enterprise
modernists and their co-opting of African art to
"regenerate" painting and sculpture.
When recounting her attraction to African art in
her memoirs, Rubinstein followed an "official"
narrative that so-called primitive African art was
insofar as it launched
important
avant-garde
experimentation.
Pointing out that English sculptor Jacob Epstein had first introduced
her to
African art in the 19 1 s, she noted:
Her interest

As my collection grew, few of our friends cared for it.

"How strange," they would say, "to think of someone
who has dedicated her life to beauty, buying such ugly
things." It was not until years later, when the paintings
49Typescript of undated press release (ca. 1935) in the
archives of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, New York.

Rubinstein, Salons

105

Fig. 14. Madame Rubinstein's miniature rooms in her 1937 salon, 715 Fifth Avenue, NewYork. From
Vogue89 (January 15, 1937): 116. (Photo, Anton Bruehl ? Vogue,Cond6 Nast Publications Inc.)
of Juan Gris, Picasso, and Modigliani began to receive
world-wide recognition, that African primitive sculpture came into its own as a source of inspiration. How
wisely Jacob Epstein had advised me. I had always
favored the unusual, and when I followed such sound
advice as his, as well as my own "inner eye," my

purchases were invariablygood.50

Without doubt, in her own mind her acquisition

of African sculpture gave her impeccable vanguard credentials and distinguished her taste
from that of her colleagues in the beauty business.
However, it is much more likely that Rubinstein's
interest

in non-Western

art began

in the 192os

(when she began collecting it), a time when

fashion designers, magazines, and designers
embraced African art with all the fervor of the
newly converted.
In the years between the wars, European and
American fashion venues became key sites for the
appropriation of non-Western motifs and images,
50

As quoted in Tashjian, Boatloadof Madmen,pp. 50-51.

helping to produce exotic fantasies of primitivism. No doubt inspired by Parisian negritude,

American fashion venues such as Bonwit-Teller
displayed examples of African art alongside
models adorned in "African-inspired" fabrics. In
one photograph from 1923, the white models are
arranged before Congo masks, textiles, and
sculpture (fig. 16). These mannequins have been
lit in such a way as to cast shadows, creating the
impression of warriors holding spears and figures
with elaborate headdresses. Even as the text exalts
the "need of a new and vigorous note in contrast
to the over-elaboration of the European periods
which have dominated our textile art for the past
fifty years," concepts of "savage" African culture
and people quite literally shadow the show of
modern fashion. Bonwit-Teller's Estelle Hamburger, who was the driving force behind the
store's display, recalled in her autobiography of
1939 how she met up with the Brooklyn Museum's Stuart Culin, who introduced her to the
institution's African collection: "We would make

io6

Winterthur Portfolio 38:2/3

Fig. 15. Helena Rubinstein with African mask, ca. 1935.

(Helena Rubinstein Foundation; photo ?

Maillard-Kesslere.)

George

Congo art a fashion!... But none of us foresaw,

with the vision of Mr. Culin, that in the smooth,
sculptured planes of the ebony heads and masks
created by savage artists, was the first inspiration
for an entirely new movement in decorative design
which would come to be known as 'Modern."'
Echoing modernist claims that non-Western art
was a regenerative source for Euro-American
imagery, fashion sites such as Bonwit-Teller
validated the very claims later made for African
art by esteemed institutions like MoMA. The store
took note of non-Western art purely for its
supposedly fresh style: "Art, history, and fashion
collaborated to revive the vogue of figured
fabrics, lifting the veil of ancient civilizations
from Peru to Persia, scouring the wide world
from Java to Japan in quest of beauty in design,
and evolving the Renaissance of the gown of
simple lines with pattern its only adornment."
Following the International Colonial Exposition
of Paris in 1931, one American fashion writer
effused: "I predict a profusion of colonial
fabrics, of colonial themes, of colonial forms in
hats and gowns, and decorations. The colonial
influence will extend to necklaces, bracelets,

Fig. 16. Model posed with African artifacts, 1923. From

"Dress Decorations Inspired by Native African Art,"

Arts and Decoration 19, no. 2 (June

1923):

52.

combs and jewels."51 Such commentary serves to

this day as shorthand for the excesses of
imperial culture and the commercial spectacle
of primitivism.
51 "Dress Decorations
Inspired by Native African Art," Arts
and Decoration 19, no. 2 (June 1923): 52. The displays were
on view at Bonwit-Teller. The previous month the magazine
published an article by Morris Crawford profiling the collection
of African art in the Brooklyn Museum, examples of which are
reproduced in the fashion spread; see M. D. C. Crawford, "The
Art of the Boshongo Craftsmen," Arts and Decoration19, no. 1
(May 1923): 28-29, 54. In the late i91os, the Brooklyn Museum's
Culin and Crawford collaborated with fashion venues to promote
non-Western art; see William Leach, Land of Desire (New York:
Vintage, 1993), pp. 164-70. Estelle Hamburger, It's a Woman's
Business (New York: Vanguard Press, 1939), pp. 139-40. The
Bonwit-Teller interest in non-Western dress can be seen in an
undated advertisement cited in Hamburger, It's a Woman's
Business, p. 140. Undated press clipping (ca. 1931), cited in
Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress
Expositions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 81.

Rubinstein's Salons
It is not surprising that leaders in the world of
fashion were also avid collectors of non-Western art.
In addition to Rubinstein, Frank Crowninshield of
Vanity Fair (who, like Rubinstein, also acquired
modern art) assembled a prolific collection of
African art, which he displayed in the pages of his
magazine and living quarters, lit "by special equipment designed to enhance their exotic forms and
gleaming surfaces."52
Rubinstein's display, then, evoked African art
in a manner that parallels MoMA's organizing
principles insofar as the museum manufactured
the idea that non-Western art seeded vanguard
experiments and regenerated the whole of Western art. However, she used her African art as an
extension of her reputation for fashion. Her
highly publicized taste also positioned her at the
intersections of modern art, fashion, and museum
constructions of non-Western art as "modern"
form.53 Due to the high visibility of African art in
Paris art and fashion circles, the display of such
objects in her salon helped infuse the space with
Parisian ambience, even as these items evoked
everything from a museum setting to a commercial display.
As we have seen, beginning in the late 1930s
Rubinstein increasingly turned her business venues into exhibition sites, justified at the time as
philanthropic shows for war relief. The 1941
opening of the new apothecary called the
Gourielli shop was staged as a two-week-long
exhibition of American and Mexican folk paintings for the benefit of China's war effort.
Rubinstein deliberately used her salon as a
symbolic site of national relations, holding a
52 "Primitive or Classic?"Art
Digest 16 (July i, 1941): 18. For
examples from Crowninshield's collection published in Vanity
Fair, see "African Art," Vanity Fair 44 (December 1935): 89;
"BlackArt," and "AfricanArt Captures New York," VanityFair 44
(June 1935): 9, 39-40. Obviously, these reproductions were
linked to MoMA's African Negro Art show, which featured a
number of works from Crowninshield's collection. Unlike
Crowninshield, Rubinstein never had any involvement with the
Harlem Renaissance's Africanism.
53
Given Rubinstein's presence in Paris during the 1920S, a
full investigation of her interest in African art would deal more
thoroughly with the French context for her acquisitions.
Rubinstein's second husband, Prince Artchil Gourielli, is a
shadowy figure in every published account of Rubinstein's life,
including her memoirs. Rubinstein's new title of "Princess"
carried considerably more cachet in America than in Europe,
where, presumably, it was recognized for the dubious claim that it
was. Significantly, whenever Rubinstein attempted to market
grooming aids to men, she used this name. In the 1950s she
briefly experimented with a masculine line of products and men's
boutique called the House of Gourielli, which failed miserably;
see Rubinstein, My Lifefor Beauty,p. 103; for a more entertaining
account, see O'Higgins, Madame,pp. 203-6.

107
reception to honor Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.
All the images on display were of children,
suggesting that Rubinstein at this time of national
crisis invested in more conventional signs of
respectable femininity like philanthropy (the
reception was meant to raise funds for charity
projects) and motherhood. This activity additionally served to place her beauty business squarely in
legitimating discourses of patriotism and smooth
over any potential doubts about her "Americanness." Similarly, in the spring of 1942 the entire
second floor of the Fifth Avenue salon was briefly
incarnated as the Helena Rubinstein New Art
Center, with proceeds intended for the Red
Cross. For the admission price of 25 cents, viewers
could see a historical survey of seventy nonobjective modernist paintings and sculpture,
some owned by Rubinstein but many on loan
from Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century
Gallery. One reviewer for the New YorkTimesfailed
to even mention that this new exhibition space
was set within a beauty parlor: "In attractive large
galleries, the lighting arrangement of which will
doubtless be perfected as time goes on, we find a
diverse survey that carries us back as far as French
cubism and that includes some of the most recent
exploits of artists both European and American."
It is also possible that the name was simply a
convention to attract notice to the art show
during its run, distinguishing it from the exclusive
salon. The admission price would suggest a venue
open to the general public. Of course, holding an
art show for charity within the salon space had the
added advantage of luring potential customers
into the establishment.54
In subsequent years, Rubinstein would be
condemned for her spectacular presentation of
artwork-of using "pure" art to advance her
business interests. However, because the modern54For photographs of this social evening, see "Prince and
Princess Gourielli Give a Party for China," Harper's Bazaar 74
(November 1941): 50. For descriptive reviews, see "Art by
Americans to be Put on View," New YorkTimes, September 24,
1941; "Among the Local Shows," New YorkTimes,September 28,
1941, sec. 9. It should be noted that the market for folk art was
especially strong at this time, and Rubinstein may have regarded
this genre as a more modish inroad to collecting home-produced
art than, say, contemporary American painters. Guggenheim's
gallery primarily presented surrealist artwork-all drawn from her
own collection-as part of a larger art installation, rather than
discrete paintings viewed individually; undated New YorkJournal
clipping and details of the installation can be found in Melvin
Paul Lader, Peggy Guggenheim'sArt of This Century:The Surrealist
Milieu and the American Avant-Garde, 1942-I947
(Ann Arbor,
Mich.: UMI, 1981), pp. 129-30. Edward AldenJewell, "ManyArt
Shows Aiding War Relief," New YorkTimes,March 31, 1942; "At
the Galleries," New YorkTimes,April 5, 1942, sec. 8.

WinterthurPortfolio38:2/3

108

ist canon was yet unfixed, this was a time when

commercial displays readily overlapped with
gallery or museum exhibitions. Even MoMA
recognized the need for popularizing certain
types of modernism in commercial venues, like
department stores, to create a viewing public for
the more "difficult" work within its walls. At the
precise moment when institutions such as MoMA
and the Boston Museum of Modern Art championed the Parisian avant-garde of the 191os as the
instrumental force shaping the nature and
"heroic" progression of modern art, Rubinstein's
salon offered audiences an alternative interpretive framework. Her displays prioritized interior
decorating, fashion decor, designs, and commercial merchandising that had accompanied the
popularization of modern art since the 191oS.
Not incidentally, such venues were associated with
femininity and the marketable forms of modernism that invited such derision among influential
critics like Clement Greenberg.55
Citing such examples as Rubinstein's collection in his recent discussion about 193os fashion
and surrealism, Dickran Tashjian concludes that
while fashion figures and magazines mediated
between the avant-garde and the larger, consumeroriented public, they also "simplified" and
"domesticated" revolutionary movements. Certainly it is true that Rubinstein, herself a member
of a privileged elite, never consciously endorsed
political or oppositional brands of modern art.
Like the fashion world in which she moved, she
acted as a popularizing force for more accessible
forms of modernism. Yet are the ways she used
her collection any less innovative than those
proposed by the "radical" avant-garde? In addition to contributing to how modernism was
marketed to female audiences, Rubinstein also
devised new strategies of promotion and public
relations. While taste transplanted from the home
into the marketplace may have carved out an
55For one of the few
scholarly discussions about the relationship between American museums and the department store in the
early twentieth century, see Carol Duncan, "Museums and
Department Stores: Close Encounters," in Jim Collins, ed., High
Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment(Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell, 2002), pp. 129-54; see also Neil Harris, "Museums,
Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence,"
in Ian M. G. Quimby, ed., MaterialCultureand theStudyof American
Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 140-70. The most
famous example of this presentation of modern art's lineage is
Alfred Barr's chart for the catalogue, Cubismand AbstractArt (New
York: Museum of Modem Art, 1936), frontis. For a denigration of
art deco, see Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Gardeand Kitsch," in
Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The CriticalDebate (New
York: Harper and Row, 1985).

enabling space to signify "womanly" business

acumen in a previous era, self-staging as a
celebrity validated female fashion entrepreneurs
according to another set of "modern" skills, such
as the manipulation of one's own image in
consumer culture. Similar strategies were devised
by couturiers like Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco
Chanel, who publicized their work as a product of
celebrity rather than, say, corporate leadership.56
When Rubinstein used her Fifth Avenue salon
as an exhibition venue for selected items of her
art collection, she was, in effect, constructing a
brand-name modernism. Like International Business Machines and the Container Corporation of
America, the beautician used artwork to advance
a cultural understanding of her enterprise.57 At
the same time she distinguished her salon as a
space that did not reflecttrends in modernism but
actively contributed to discourses surrounding
competing modernisms and their definition. The
eclectic display at the Fifth Avenue salon, with its
miniature rooms, "living" paintings, and blend of
School of Paris imagery alongside surrealist pieces
and African sculpture confounded easy classification as commercial venue, gallery space, or
publicity gimmick. Ironically, Rubinstein's salon
and "feminine" art styles associated with fashion
may have factored into critical efforts to forge a
coherent paradigm that explained modernist
production. Rubinstein's visibility in 193os visual
culture, among other factors, generated a sense of
urgency among critics and museums to draw the
lines separating commercial imagery from disinterested "high" art, the "minor" modernists versus
the major figures, and the streamlined, genealogical view of vanguard stylistic "evolution" from
social and political
forces that factored
into modernist imagery. In the final analysis,
Rubinstein's exhibiting practices and the design
of her salon spaces shed light on a contested and
contradictory history of modernism and its
reception in America.
56
Tashjian, Boatload of Madmen, p. 69; see pp. 66-90 for a
survey of the fashion world's use of surrealism.
57 For analyses of the Container Corporation of America and
its use of art in promotional campaigns, see James Sloan Allen,
TheRomanceof Commerce
and Culture:Capitalism,Modernism,and the
Chicago-AspenCrusadefor Cultural Reform(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983); Michele H. Bogart, Advertising,Artists, and
theBordersof Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.
259-69. IBM's art acquisitions are discussed in A. Deirdre
Robson, Prestige,Profit, and Pleasure:The Marketfor ModernArt in
New York in the I94os

and 1950s

(New York: Garland,

1995);

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Art Inc.: AmericanPaintings

from CorporateCollections(Montgomery, Ala.: Museum of Fine Arts,
1979).