Seductive Jazz Age Vamp Lili Damita Vintage Kenneth Alexander Photograph 1928

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Thanks to all our eBay bidders! We are honored to be your one-stop, 5-star source for vintage pin up, pulp magazines, original illustration art, decorative collectibles and ephemera with a wide and always changed assortment of antique and vintage items from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Mid-Century Modern eras. All items are 100% guaranteed to be original, vintage, and as described. Please feel free to contact us with any and all questions about the items and our policies and please take a moment to peruse our other great eBay listings. All sell no reserve!ITEM: From the personal collection of Lili Damita and purchased at Abell Auction House in Los Angeles in the 1980s comes a fabulous collection of one of a kind photographs from the star's estate dating to the early years of her career, both from her start in European cinema and her transition into Hollywood films. All showcase her erotic and chameleon-like beauty. This stunning portrait photograph is by New York City theatre portraitist turned Hollywood photographer Kenneth Alexander and is a provocative and luxurious example of late 1920s glamour. Likely taken in 1928, when she was lured to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn, Damita's long tousled hair and vampish allure are on display in this passionately erotic portrait. Truly this is a remarkable photograph and beautiful piece of Hollywood history with great provenance. A rare treasure!Measures 8" x 10" with margins on a glossy, double weight paper stock.Photographer's ink stamp, actress's ink stamp, and studio ink stamp on verso.CONDITION: Very fine condition, as seen.********************Lili Damita (July 10, 1904 - March 21, 1994) was a French actress who appeared in 33 movies between 1922 and 1937.Born Liliane Marie-Madeleine Carré in Blaye, France, she was educated in convents and ballet schools in several European countries, including France, Spain andPortugal. At 14, she was enrolled as a dancer at the Opera de Paris.By the age of 16, she was performing in popular music halls, eventually appearing in the Revue at the Casino de Paris. She also worked as a photographic model. Offered a role in film as a prize for winning a magazine beauty competition in 1921, she appeared in several silent films before being offered her first leading role in Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925) by Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz. She was an instant success, and Curtiz directed her in two more films: Fiaker Nr 13 (1926) and Der Goldene Schmetterling (1926). Damita continued appearing in German productions directed by Robert Wiene (Die Grosse Abenteuerin; 1927), G.W. Pabst (Man Spielt nicht mit der Liebe; 1926), and British director Graham Cutts (The Queen Was in the Parlour; 1927).In 1928, at the invitation of Samuel Goldwyn she went to Hollywood, making her American debut in a film titled The Rescue. Leased out to various studios, she appeared with stars such as Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant, and James Cagney. Her films included the box office successes The Cock-Eyed World(1929), the semi-silent The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), and This Is the Night (1932).In 1935, she married a virtual unknown who would become Hollywood's biggest box office attraction, Errol Flynn, with whom she had a son, Sean Flynn (born 1941). Following the marriage, she retired from the screen. The couple divorced in 1942. (Barbara Hershey portrayed her in the TV film My Wicked, Wicked Ways [1985] based on Errol Flynn's autobiography.)While living in Palm Beach, Florida, Damita married Allen Loomis, a retired Fort Dodge, Iowa dairy owner, and spent part of each year living there.During the Cambodian Civil War (Khmer Rouge Reign), her son Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time magazine when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 6, 1970. Although Damita spent an enormous amount of money searching for her son, he was never found, and in 1984 he was declared legally dead. DNA testing was conducted on remains found in Cambodia and turned over to the U.S. embassy in March 2010. However, the results, released June 30, 2010 by JPAC, showed the remains were not those of Sean Flynn.Lili Damita died of Alzheimer's disease on March 21, 1994, in Palm Beach, Florida, aged 89. She was interred in the Oakland Cemetery in Fort Dodge, Iowa, her second husband's hometown.-- Biography From: Wikipedia********************Kenneth Alexander, NYC; HollywoodBiography By: David S. ShieldsKenneth Alexander was born in England in 1887, and began his training at age 12 in a large London photographic studio. He was sixteen when his family emigrated to New York in 1903. In New York City he continued his training as an assistant to the English-born photographer Ernest Walter Histed, an expert at dramatic portrait in low light settings.At age 19 he went independent, moving to Millville, New Jersey, and commencing a business doing "home portraiture." This meant hauling his 6 1/2 x 8 1/2 box camera and Dalmeyer 3D lens into a person's private residence, shooting the sitter and family in found light, and working up 8 of the 24 exposures into proofs, including images that remove the background and supply a hand-worked pattern painted or engraved directly onto the negative.Alexander's portraits earned national notice in 1907 when a print of painter Arthur W. Dow topped the portrait category in the Third American Salon at the Toledo Museum of Art and was featured in the annual volume of The American Amateur Photographer along with images by many members of the Photo-Secession. Alexander possessed a second skill that few in the profession had, facility with the pen. In addition to contributing articles to the photographic periodicals, his 1909 memoir of photographic apprenticeship in England and New York, published in Wilson's Photographic Magazine, is one of the most informative accounts of the different training methods employed in Great Britain and the United States in the early 20th century. Alexander became a United States citizen in 1914. He published portraits intermittently throughout the 1910s. His growing renown permitted him to redirect his business increasing from home photography to celebrity portraiture.During World War I, Alexander's contact with the theatrical world led to romance when actress Mollie King fell in love with him. They married in 1919, and he moved to New York City to accommodate her stage career. He won distinction in the crowded New York studio scene by advertising himself as a "Photographer of Women Exclusively," gender switching Pirie McDonald's famous motto about being a photographer of men. His first magazine sale in his new role was in 1921 to Theatre Magazine. Thereafter, he did steady magazine and newspaper work portraying theatre personalities, but the bulk of his earliest contract work was with film companies located in the New York metropolitan area. By the early 1920s, he became particularly well connected with United Artists studio.Alexander's life in Hollywood commenced when Lillian Gish convinced M.G.M. to contract Alexander to do the portrait work for her 1926 feature "La Boheme." After a gypsy period shuttling between coasts, he settled in California where Sam Goldwyn Productions employed him throughout the 1930s. He belonged to the Camera Pictorialists group in South California and exhibited in their salons at the Los Angeles Museum. In Hollywood he became a general studio photographer, doing stills, portraits, and costume shots. His daring as a still photographer, standing midstream to catch an action shot of a canoe capsizing, features prominently in John Wolfenden's prose portrait of Hollywood's still men published in the May 5, 1935 issue of the Los Angeles Times. Alexander valued his portrait work more highly than his stills, and sent them regularly to photographic salons around the world. He refused to do candid photos, a curious reversal of his early inclination toward home portraiture.NOTES: The American Amateur Photographer 19 (1907), 22, 25. Kenneth Alexander, "Home Portraiture as a Business," Camera Craft 17 (1910), 345-351. Kenneth Alexander, "Some Photographers," Wilson's Photographic Magazine 47 (1910), 224-226. Kenneth Alexander, "London Photography," Wilson's Photographic Magazine 46 (1909), 54-56. Theatre Magazine 30 (1919), 89. David S. Shields/ALSSpecialty: Kenneth Alexander's career divided into three phases. His early home portrait work, from 1905 to 1917, was inspired by the most pictorial of home photographers, H.H. Pierce of Boston, and the deeply toned and intensely modeled portraiture of E.W. Histed. His performing arts portraiture, from 1917 to 1926, combined the artistry of posing of his earlier work with the expertise at deploying artificial light in studio sittings of Baron DeMeyer. This finesse was retained in his Hollywood portrait work. His handling of outdoor still photography was derived from witnessing the protocols established by Clarence S. Bull for his crew in M.G.M.'s camera department.-- Biography By: David S. Shields c/o Broadway (dot) CAS (dot) SC (dot) edu******************** read more

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