A 1922 article in Arts and Decoration, “Vitalizing the Silhouette, a new note in American Poster Work” (Vol. XVIII, No. 1) by Lida McCabe records Donner’s contributions in costume design. Here is the second installment on page 66 and 69:
“But, mark you, Young Aspirant, it is from an ancestry of Danish painters, sculptors, architects that she inherits what schools and masters are powerless to give – the creative brain! You have it or you haven’t, and there is an end of it. No dexterity of pencil, brush or palette, the fatality of modern art, notably French art; no scientifically deduced laboratory color formula can supplant the God given gift to create. Its possessor does not know its mystery or how it puts over to mortal ken intangible spirit, vision, dream.
The creator of the vitalized silhouette cannot recall when pencil, paper and scissors were not her medium of expression, and the theatre her inspiration. An Offenbach’s Grande Duchess doted on the military, this dynamic young artist dotes on the playhouse. It was original theatrical costumes designed while a schoolgirl that gave her first contact with producers and her earliest glimpse of the “back stage.” She introduced bare legs into the first Winter Garden show where heretofore silk tights held center.
Emboldened by the success of the “call back” to the childhood she had scarcely passed, she startled Impresario Ziegfeld with a costume that disclosed the entire back as Mother Eve sported it. Ziegfeld, wonderful to relate, had not the courage to use it and it remained for this day of flapper supremacy to legitimatize the bare back costume on and off stage!
More than half of the costumes that gave “Experience” its line color distinction sprung from Miss Donner’s fertile brain. This was the work of her first flush of creative impulse when she toiled through the night, dawn finding her at her studio with enthusiasm unspent. “Now I know better, and I work all day,” she laughs.
It is uncommon knowledge of historic costume that she brings to her dramatic interpretations. Every nations and period she maintains, and demonstrates, has its dominant color charged with character and feeling of the race. Pink and yellow, for instance, reflect the Eighteenth Century. In the theatres, cabarets and dance hall of Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, to which two years ago she gave nightly study, she found her costume and color deductions verified.
It was Chauve-Souris that brought her color sense to the vitalization of the old time static black and white silhouette. With bright yellow for flesh, a daring rarely attempted, and a like discard of rule and rote in her drawing, she interpreted the vivid color and elemental spirit of the Russian vaudeville.”
Last installment tomorrow!
