Bernard Boutet de Monvel

Book excerpt: Discover the work and life of artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel, a groundbreaking painter of the café society who was highly influential to the Art Deco movement. Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949), painter of sportsmen and dandies, was also an interior designer and iconic illustrator of masculine elegance for publications including Harper’s Bazaar. As early as 1909, he heralded the Art Deco style and became the favored portraitist of the American café society. Prominent international millionaires—W. K. Vanderbilt, Lady Mendl, Millicent Rogers, the Maharaja of Indore, and the Astor, Whitney, Frick, and Du Pont dynasties—paraded through his studios in New York and Palm Beach. A key Precisionism artist, he reflected the industrial and urban modernity of America’s machine age in his stunning landscapes. This monograph—the first to be published in English—sheds new light on the artist’s protean work and restores his place at the forefront of the history of French and American art.