The American dancer and movie actress Gilda Gray with the French artist and designer Drian in his Paris studio, 1930; behind them is a folding mirrored screen painted by him and depicting her. Photograph by James Abbe, from JAMD.
Often I find myself wondering—sometimes aloud, which has observers questioning my mental equilibrium—why doesn't a book about this artist or this designer or this stylish soul exist? Recently I said as much about Drian. Yes, Drian. Let me enlighten you.
Fashion illustration of a gown by Paquin.
Born into a peasant family in the French province of Lorraine, Adrian Desiré Etienne (1885-1961) took the name Drian during his time at Académie Julian, the august Paris art school. In his youth he became known for his facility for painting images of women, mainly in fashion illustrations. They were, critics said, rather too idealized, "des poupées ou à des idoles sans personnalité, d'une beauté banale, sans réalité physique" ("dolls or idols without personality, of banal beauty, without realistic physique"). Fair enough, given the early evidence.
Asian-inspired fantasy costume, 1914.
But as Drian matured, so did his work. By the 1920s, he developed a talent for sketchy, vital portraits, among them a rather famous circa-1940 painting of the Duchess of Windsor—she and her husband owned the artist's former country house, La Moulin de la Tuilerie, in Giffe-sur-Yvette—in which Drian employed a striking combination of colors: aquamarine dress, lavender gloves, dark-green banquette.
The Duchess of Windsor, an oil portrait by Drian.
Even better were Drian's excursions into the world of interior design. Especially beautiful were his mirrored screens and rooms, entirely covered with sheets of glass that had been decorated on the reverse with exotic imagery.
Drian's mirrored dining room for fashion designer Capt. Edward Molyneux, Paris, circa 1937.
For the beautiful Audrey James, a British heiress whose husbands included the American mercantile magnate Marshall Field III, Drian painted a fantastic mirrored screen depicting a band of black jazz musicians. (It was later owned by James's friend Eleanor Lambert, the founder of the Best-Dressed List.) For the fashion designer Edward Molyneux, Drian created a dining room whose mirrored walls depicted a handpainted panoply of exotic birds, from flamingoes to cockatoos. Similarly magnificent was his humorous painted ceiling for the library of Elsie de Wolfe's country house, Villa Trianon; executed in the 1920s, it shows the interior decorator leaping across the Atlantic between her beloved France and her natal America.
A particularly toothsome Drian project for Countess Carlo Dentice di Frasso is mentioned, tantalizingly but without illustration, in Allyson Hayward's new book Norah Lindsay: The Life and Art of a Garden Designer, a biography of the British landscape magician. Lindsay's projects included a garden at Villa Madama, the magnificent Roman villa of Countess di Frasso, née Dorothy Cadwell Taylor of Watertown, New York, a fascinating American gal whose bosom friends included numerous high-ranking Nazis and whose lovers included the mobster Bugsy Siegel and the actor Gary Cooper—the latter's affair with the countess was so heated that Tallulah Bankhead once said that the handsome young actor appeared to be "worn to a frasso."
While visiting Villa Madama in 1929, Norah Lindsay wrote: "Drian, the French decorative painter, had just left after finishing a marvellous bathroom for Dorothy. It was as big as my bedroom at home with the marble bath in an alcove and all the walls were looking glass in big sheets evidently glued on as I saw no nails showing. On this Drian had painted fascinating scenes in two colours only, black and red—black and red peacocks, apes, balconies, draperies, etc. and in one corner a tiny white dog like the one Dorothy has."
If I ever find a photograph of that, I shall post it straightaway. But a fleeting glimpse of this marvelous room can be seen at the end of this virtual tour of Villa Madama.
But tell me: Don't you think Drian is worth a book?
Iron-and-mirror étagère, one of a pair attributed to Drian and available at Alan Moss.
