Roman Tirtoff ERTE * Number 3’’ ORIGINAL screenprint, signed by hand and justified

Erté : (1892–1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté (his real name is Romain de Tirtoff). He was a diversely talented 20th-century artist and designer who flourished in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor. He was born to an important family in Saint Petersburg. In 1907, he lived one year in Paris. In 1910–12, Romain moved to Paris to pursue a career as a designer. He made this decision despite strong objections from his father. Romain assumed his pseudonym to avoid disgracing the family. He worked for Paul Poiret from 1913-1914. In 1915, he secured his first substantial contract with Harper's Bazaar magazine, and thus launched an illustrious career that included designing costumes and stage sets. Between 1915–1937, Erte designed over 200 covers for Harper's Bazaar, and his illustrations would also appear in such publications as Illustrated London News, Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, and Vogue. Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period. His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognisable, and his ideas and art still influence fashion into the 21st century. His costumes, programme designs, and sets were featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923, many productions of the Folies Bergère, and George White's Scandals. In 1925, Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood. He designed for such films as Ben-Hur, The Mystic, Time, The Comedian, and Dance Madness. By far, his best known image is Symphony in Black, depicting a tall, slender woman draped in black holding a thin black dog on a leash. The influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times. His work may be found in the collections of several well-known museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); as well, a sizable collection of work by Erté can be found at Museum 1999 in Tokyo.
Screen print : Screen printing, also known as silkscreen, serigraphy, and serigraph printing - from latin "Sericum (silk) and greek "grapheion" (writing) - is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil to receive a desired image. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image into a substrate. It is possible to use different meshes, for different colors, and create multi-colored works. In the field of art, it is important to know how many prints have been made. The total number of prints is usually written on the print (e.g 20/200).