At Helena Rubinstein in New York and Paris
She was nicknamed by Jean Cocteau “the Empress of beauty”. Helena Rubinstein was one of the first self made woman of history and a source of inspiration in terms of decoration. Passionate about works of art, the businesswoman collected masterpieces.
January 1941. In the large living room of her apartment in New York, Helena Rubinstein is seated in an Empire-style armchair surrounded by works of art: an African mask placed on a Blackamoor-style coffee table, a Victorian statue and a canvas by Salvador Dalí.© Photo by Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
A collector’s triplex on Park Avenue…
Born in 1872 in Krakow, the high priestess of cosmetics Helena Rubinstein initially moved between Vienna, Melbourne (where she opened her first beauty salon), Paris, London and New York. Collector and patron of art, she imagines in her apartments precious and eclectic decorations, as in her penthouse on Park Avenue. “I fell in love with a castle in the sky”, she will say after having acquired this apartment with terrace, inhabited by masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí or even Amedeo Modigliani. Character business woman, we learn in the book Helena Rubinstein: the woman who invented beauty of Michèle Fitoussi that she described Marcel Proust as “an insignificant-looking boy who smells of mothballs and wears a fur coat that reaches down to his feet. »
In 1955, Helena Rubinstein poses under the lens of Slim Aarons with her husband the Georgian prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia in their penthouse in New York.© Slim Aarons/Getty Images
And another on the banks of the Seine, in Paris
In Paris, Helena Rubinstein buys a triplex located on the Quai de Béthune, on the Île Saint-Louis, and asks the decorator Louis Süe to arrange it with Empire furniture, Venetian mirrors and pieces of African art. With its panoramic view of the Seine and the Notre-Dame-de-Paris cathedral, the apartment is a haven of refinement where she likes to receive her friends. In 2019, the Museum of Jewish Art and History devoted an exhibition to this emblematic figure in the worlds of art and beauty. Helena Rubinstein dies at the age of 93 in New York; billionaire, she enjoys the title of princess and can boast of having built a veritable cosmetics empire. His group is present in more than 30 countries around the world and employs 32,000 people. Today, the brand is owned by the L’Oréal group.
2023-08-25 07:00:00
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