Articles from Vanity Fair Hall of Fame
Just prior to the death of Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917), the Welsh poet and essayist, Arthur Symons
AUGUSTE RODIN PRIS SUR LA VIE at once a document and a living thing. The main interest lies in the exactitude with which it records the actual words of Rodin, much as he must have spoken them y
VANITY FAIR critic James Huneker(1860 – 1921) had a few words regarding the Italian Futurist painters. Huneker stated that he had been following their progress since he first attended a 1912 Futurist exhibit, and in the subsequent years had gained a familiarity with their 1910 manifesto, which he summed up for this articleVanity Fair critic James Huneker(1860 – 1921) had a few words regarding the Italian Futurist painters. Huneker stated that he had been following their progress since he first attended a 1912 Futurist exhibit, and in the subsequent years had gained a familiarity with their 1910 manifesto, which he summed up for this article.
Writing for one of the earliest issues of VANITY FAIR, playwright and culture critic Mary Cass Canfield slammed some nails into the Futurist coffin a wee bit prematurely in this critical essay titled The Passing of the Futurists.
British fighter pilot in the Great War, Lieutenant E.M. Roberts, gave this account of the deadly game of Boche-hunting above the clouds:
I noticed he was going down a little, evidently for the purpose of shooting me from underneath. I was not quite sure as yet that such was really his intention; but the man was quick…he put five shots into my machine. But all of them missed me.
I maneuvered into an offensive position as Quickly as I could, and I had my machine gun pelting him…The Hun began to spin earthward.
Some witty words on the topic of butlers; what to expect from butlers, the treatment of butlers and how exactly one should be butled
It is not easy to butle, but it is still more difficult to be butled to…
The Conde Nast cartoonist Ann Fish wanted her swank readers to know that she was another Brit who recognized the reoccurring formula that young Hollywood relied on all too often and even though the film business was still in it’s infancy, there was such a thing as a typical American movie.
Here are seven drawings by Henry Raleigh (1880 – 1944) that depict the sorts of silent film characters that were likely to be seen in the 1920s W.W. I movies. These sketches are accompanied by a few dry remarks by the Vanity Fair editors:
No matter how much we may wish to lose sight of the war, it can’t be done. There will always be reminders of it. You suppose that, just because a little thing like peace has been declared, the playwrights, the theatrical managers, and the moving picture producers are going to let a chance like the war get by? Since we have become accustomed to German spies, Red Cross nurse heroines, and motor corps vampires, we could never go back to the prosaic mildness of innocent little country heroines, villains in fur-lined overcoats and cub reporter heroes. No actor will ever again consent to play a society role in evening clothes with flap pockets and jet buttons, when he can appear in a war play wearing an aviator’s uniform and going around in a property airplane.
This 1918 silent movie was certainly mocked for its predictability…
Later in the century there would be many ink-slingers to gush over the talents of D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930); but in 1913, the writer would simply have to bide his time and suffer the reviews that were printed in the society pages.
It emphatically is not a book for the ‘young person’, and it is certainly a book that will make the older conservative wince a bit…nevertheless it is a study that was worth doing, and D.H. Lawrence has done it well. He has dealt with very real things in a way that leaves a distinctness of impression unequaled by nine books out of ten one picks up nowadays.
The editors of VANITY FAIR saluted the eighty year-old painter Claude Monet, praising him as
the only remaining member of a little group of painters – Degas, Manet, Renoir and several others – known as the Master Impressionists.
By the time this item appeared in print, the Balkan War (1912-1913), was over however some of the swells of Europe put their crowned heads together and collectively came up with the best Medeival plan they could think of in order to insure the promise of peace. The plan was to have:
• the Czar’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga (1895 – 1918), would wed Serbia’s Crown Prince Alexander
• the Czar’s second daughter, Grand Duchess Tatiana (1897 – 1918), was promised to Rumania’s Crown Prince Charles (1893 – 1959)
• All concerned agreed that Rumania’s Pricess Elizabeth (1894 – 1956) and Crown Prince George of Greece (1890 – 1947) would make a simply splendid couple (they divorced in 1935).
Prohibition has been pretty rough on everybody, but there is no class of people which it has hit so hard as the theater-goers. The Federal Amendment has completely wrecked their evenings. It isn’t so bad while the show is going on; the blow falls between the acts. In happier times the intermissions were the high spots of the evening…
With pin-point accuracy, Vanity Fair was able to identify the new minority-victim class that emerged from America’s unfortunate experiment with Prohibition: Broadway theater enthusiasts (It might be argued that the real victims were American bar tenders, many of whom high-tailed it over to Europe where they established a number of American-style bars).
The attached page from the magazine can be classified as humor and is illustrated with six great sketches by Edith Plummer.
Read other articles from 1919.
A few cartoons by the illustrator George Wright (1872 – 1951) depicting the American Third Army during it’s 1919 occupation of Germany.
Shortly after the death of William Michael Rossetti
(1829 – 1919), Welsh poet and essayist Arthur Symons
(1865 – 1945) wrote this essay remembering the man, his brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the friendship that the two shared with poets George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Art alone survives the earthquake shocks of revolution, and Russian art has been doubly secure because of it’s deep-rooted imagination and it’s passionate sincerity.
That was the word from Oliver M. Sayler writing from Moscow as it starved during the Summer of 1919. Sayler, known primarily for his writings on Russian theater from this period, wrote enthusiastically about the Russian Suprematist Casimir Malyevitch, Futurist David Burliuk and The Jack of Diamonds Group; believing deeply in the Russian Revolution, he wrote not a word about how the Soviets mistreated the modern artists of Russia.
In order to mark the New York arrival of Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1924), VANITY FAIR’s editors chose to run this anecdote concerning the 1884 creation of the work as well as a reproduction of one of the pencil studies for the profile head of the sitter, Madame Gauterau.
This article,Photography’s Notable Part in the War was written by an active participant in the aerial reconnaissance arm of the Royal Flying Corps, Captain Henry A. Wildon. He reported that both sides in the conflict recognized early on that intelligence gathering by way of camera and aircraft was a real possibility:
Our first airplanes in France were not supplied with photographic equipment. It was not until the beginning of 1915 that the importance of of photography became apparent, and was made possible by improvements in the type and general stability of the airplane.
The attached article is yet another among the several tongue and cheek essays that the French composer Eric Satie (Alfred Éric Leslie Satie 1866 – 1925) contributed for the amusement of the fun-loving readers of VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE. Published just three years prior to his death, it is beautifully illustrated, and stands as one solid page of pure silliness in which Satie considered the place of art in the animal kingdom, and concludes that of all the arts, architecture and music are the only two creative endeavors that the creatures of the field ever seem able to embrace:
I know of no literary work written by an animal – and that is very sad.
