George Barbier

Barbier's career did not "take off" until he was thirty, but his drawings were so exceptionally good that his career could never said to have stopped going, even after his death. Barbier's drawings are still so popular that they continue to thrive in reprint form, and also on such varied objects as dishes, notebooks, stationary, and perfume bottles.

George Barbier's career "started", for all practical purposes in 1912. Three important new Paris fashion magazines began publishing in that year and Barbier was made the principal illustrator for two of them. One of them, the Journal des Dames et des Modes lasted only two years but served to establish Barbier as a designer, since the illustrations in the magazine were not copies of couturier models but designs Barbier did himself. This allowed Barbier to exert an influence on fashion without actually running a couturier house himself.

Classics and contemporary works illustrated by the leading artists of the day, often bound in lavish, specially designed bindings, were eagerly collected; societies of bibliophies were founded in the cities and towns of France so that subscribers could be sure of obtaining the latest publications, numerous enough to warrant a lengthy column in the magazine L'Amour de l'Art each month devoted entirely to the subject. Guy Arnoux, George Barbier, Leon Benigni, Benito, Robert Banfils, Pierre Bissaud, Brunelleschi, Etienne Brian, Georges Lepape, Charles Martin, and Andre Marty found a lucrative demand for contributions which brought a considerable amount of prestige. The first book of this kind done by Barbier, in 1913, was an album of drawings of Nijinsky, the dancer, done in his various roles in the Ballets Russes. Nineteen hundred and fourteen saw a similar album of Karsavina. These drawings were mostly in black and white, and it is in these pictures that the similarity to Beardsley's style is most evident. However, after these albums, Barbier seemed to pull away from this style, using more color and less outlining to make his graphic statements.

As a male French citizen of 32, it seems reasonable to assume that Barbier was drafted during the war. He might still have been able to continue to contribute drawings during his leaves, but the Journal folded in the same month the war started, and the Gazette suspended publication from 1915-1920. The last illustration Barbier did for the Gazette before 1920 was of a collection of dresses sent by the French government to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

While hostilities stopped in 1918, Barbier's regular job with the Gazette did not resume until 1920. Something to pay the rent was obviously needed, and found when Barbier took to theatre design. He designed a production of Cassanova, the plates of which now are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A number of other Barbier renderings are located there of costumes dating from 1919-1920. By 1923 Barbier was designing costumes for the The Folies Bergère through the costume house of Max Weldy. Weldy ran a huge operation where he held the rights to the costume designs so that when revues were staged at the Folies, duplicate sets could be made and sold to other theatres.

As the publication of limited editions added to Barbier's artistic prestige at home, this international design pooling added to his prestige abroad. Consequently both Barbier and Erte were asked to design for American movies in 1924. While Erte went to Hollywood to costume a number of movies, Barbier stayed in Paris and sent his designs for his movie project to New York.

Barbier had been hired by Rudolph Valentino and his wife/production designer, Natacha Rambova, to do costumes for their first film collaboration Monsiuer Beaucaire after they saw his designs for Casanova in 1923 while on their honeymoon.

While critics agreed that the film was visually beautiful, it was not a great box office success. Barbier continued to design for the Folies Bergere through the Max Weldy Studios. In 1923 Barbier designed the lavish "Crystal Cave" costumes to the revue In Full Folly. This was followed in 1924 by "The Nile Legend", "Paris During the Directoire", "Napoleon at Malmaison", and "The Victims Ball" for Hearts in Follyin 1926 by "A Fete at Versaille" and "On Change" for The Follies of the Day, and in 1927 by "A Hotel of the Reign of Louis XIII" and "The Same in 1927" for A Breeze of Folly.

Barbier was almost certainly influenced in his revue costumes by his more famous colleague, Erte, who also designed costumes for The Folies. Barbier composed the following description of Erte's style for a catalogue of an exhibition of Erte's work:

I appreciate him above all when on the stage of the music-hall he brings out of the earth a network of diamonds throbbing on nude bodies, when he unfurls curtains embroidered with fantastic birds, or when again he raises curtains woven with ostrich feathers and heavy with fur, or harems afire, or on eastern cities built of snow, of nacre or metal. It is no easy task to wrench the blasā spectator from his seat in the stalls or to carry him away on the magic carpet to a world of splendour...

Barbier's final show was Paris Shakes at the Casino de Paris with Josephine Baker. He designed the costumes and decor for the "Bird of the Forest" tableaux, probably also built by the Weldy Studio. The poster for the review, by Zig, another designer, shows Josephine Baker's "Bird" costume, as its headdress is very similar to a previous Barbier design for the "The Crystal Cave" of 1923. There are no other records of Barbier's designs after this. He died in 1932 at age 50.