Author: waszut_barrett@me.com

This is the final excerpt in 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. Page 69:

“Sure that I had struck a new note, I took my Chauve-Souris silhouettes to a foremost art publication. The editors enthused, recounts Miss Donner, “Too bad the color debars them from our use. They will not photograph.” “Yes, they will photograph,” I persisted, but they turned them down.

Did the new generation scout abide by the decision of the old guard and hide her under the light under the proverbial bushel? She did not. With a Brownie camera I photographed the Chauve-Souris and on the following day brought a composition, clean cut as an etching, to the cock-sure editors. In the next number of the periodical, they reproduced it under the caption “Something New.”

“Experience,” says Miss Donner (she is all of twenty!), “has taught be not to accept adverse opinion of my work as final until I have proved it wrong.” Too often, she declares, she has had original ideas rejected as impossible, impractical, and a month or a year later seen them exploited.

To thrash out an idea with astute men of affairs is her especial joy.

I love to work over an idea, to see from how many angles it can be developed, how many times it can be profitably turned over; for ideas I have found are like Wall Street properties, dry goods, jewelry, and marketable staple; they can be turned over and over with varied artistic and monetary results. How to do it is the big thing!” Encouraged by her first victory, the Chauve-Souris silhouettes were brought to a famous producer of spectacular drama.

“Great! Just what I’m looking for. Come with me tonight to the theatre,” he said. I went and we selected the subjects.

“What will you pay me?” I asked.”

“Pay?” he cried. “Nothing!“

“You would have my labor and my art for nothing?”

“Big advertisement for you young lady.”

“And for you, Mr. Produce!”

“For both of us,” he finally conceded, but not a penny would he pay.

“Original! New! Practical!” The great producer had said it.

“If it’s all that, it’s worth money,” reasoned the artist-flapper, and to a metropolitan newspaper she lied. It reproduced four silhouettes in color and paid for them – her first real money? The subjects were from current costume plays. After newspaper publication, each silhouette was framed and personally conducted to the producer of the respective dramas.

“Fine! Ripping! But we’re not buying picture.”

“They’re not for sale. Hang them in the lobby of your theatre. That is all I ask.” And they did.

“Something for nothing!” gurgled the merry young artist.

Doris Keane shortly after tripped through one of the lobbies and ran amuck one of the silhouettes. It took her breath. A new face! Forever the perennial cry of the playhouse and the public!

Here was no face, in the accepted form; but color flaming, action in incandescence! Miss Keane’s manager sent for Miss Donner, with the result that the actress takes on her road production of “The Czarina” a stand of silhouettes for lobby display and a sixteen-foot silhouette poster in colors of crescendo choral joy. With flesh of solid orange and in scarlet coat with pink cuffs and pink jabot, the lover holds in his arms the Czarina of bright yellow skin in flowing gown of vivid green and blue, the whole seemingly detached yet harmoniously in tune with a background of rich maroon – a masterpiece in elimination. Without a supçon of the ageworn trappings of royalty – jewels, ermine, scepter – “The Czarina’s” sovereignty dominates. With an uplifted hand in the embrace, it pulsates with pent up passion!

After the manner of the black and white silhouette artist, Miss Donner cuts her designs with scissors out of paper, preferably the rich, decorative colored papers of China, Japan or France. Mental vision of the character or scene to be delineated is her sole guide in the scissoring. No pencil drawings, no preliminary composition. On a pasteboard background of carefully studied color, the bits of cut-out paper are assembled. Each figure is built up, as in low relief sculpture, until substantial form, vital outline, a pulsating entity is achieved. Cold type is as inadequate to convey the singing color, the uncanny action of the pictorial innovation as is the photograph to portray the fine, spiritual quality of the young artist’s personality. The vitalized silhouette is for the physical eye, through which the appeal is to the imaginative soul.”

Attached are a few more images her art that were with the article. I have been unsuccessful at finding any color versions of her work from this period.

Her 1922 images seem so be so far ahead of her time!

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!

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 first installment on page 17:

“The still-born black and white silhouette of early Victorian conception has come to life! Charged with dynamic color and vibrant line, significantly it interprets restless Now, and is America’s latest contribution to the poster art. As an eye-arrestor, imagination-stimulator it promises to go far. For happily, it credits “the man in the street” with vision beyond the physical eye. Daringly colorful, vibrantly active, it conveys an impression of the human face without defining its features, yet, never misses recognition.

This pictorial innovation is the work of Miss Vyvyan Donner. How this clever American girl conceived, developed and “put it across” is the story of the misunderstood younger generation, fearless of the unconventional defiant of the old order. Miss Donner’s vitalized silhouettes materialized last March. Before summer’s wane they held up the lobby of three New York theatres, and are now the talk of the art and theatrical worlds. In the fine or graphic arts, as in every medium of expression, there is a right time to bob up, a right time to disappear as Gilbert and Sullivan tunefully emphasized. To the one who bobs up opportunity and full-fledges, a thousand come too soon or too late, and with little more than a bonne disposition fumble along, often in the wake of false leads, and pass out with dreams unrealized, their efforts seemingly a cipher in the world’s work.

Fortunately, it is to an America awakened to the value of color in life and art that Miss Donner was born. This color awakening, however tardy, is our aesthetic recompense from Uncle Sam’s indiscriminate hospitality to Old World undesirables! Hers is a sense of color inherent and highly sensitized. It is through color that she sees, feels and realizes form. Had she come to the America that produced “The White City” of the Chicago World Fair (1893) – our art naissance – this priceless gift would doubtless have lain dormant, inarticulate, or if expressed, been a waste upon the desert air, so remote was the public from today’s color riot. Three month’s study at Cooper Union, three months at the Art Student’s League, drawing from life, cover Miss Donner’s academic training.”

And there will be more tomorrow!