Product Description
Curtis Moffat created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still-lifes and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early twentieth century. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design. This is the first book on his work Moffat was born in New York in 1887 and died in 1949. He studied painting there and then in Paris, and in 1916 married the English actress and poet Iris Tree, daughter of the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. While in Paris, Moffat collaborated with Man Ray, producing portraits and abstract photograms. Moving to London in the mid-1920s, Moffat opened an interior design company and avant-garde gallery in Fitzroy Square. The business sold Modernist furniture by some of the best designers of the day, as well as African sculpture. It was here, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, in the era of the “Bright Young Things”, that Moffat produced stylish photographic portraits of leading figures in high society, stage and theatre, and the arts, including Cecil Beaton, The Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Daphne Du Maurier. The enterprise closed in 1933, largely due to the Depression Moffat and his first wife divorced in 1932 and in 1936 he married Kathleen Allan. He returned to the US in 1939 and turned his attention again to painting until his death ten years later. In 2003 and 2007 Penelope Smail, daughter of Curtis and Kathleen Moffat, generously gave his extensive archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum. This book is drawn from that archive and includes digital reconstructions of colour images from original tri-carbro process black and white negatives. It reveals Moffat’s pioneering but hitherto little-known photography in all its depth and beauty.
