Curtis Moffat – Silver Society
- This is the first publication on American artist Curtis Moffat who is known for his dynamic abstract photographs, innovative color still lifes and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early twentieth century.
This is the first publication on American artist Curtis Moffat who is known for his dynamic abstract photographs, innovative color still lifes and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early twentieth century. Moffat was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design and furniture. Living in London throughout the 1920s and early ’30s during the era of the “Bright Young Things,” Moffat produced stylish photographic portraits of leading figures in high society, stage, theater and the arts, including Cecil Beaton, The Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Daphne Du Maurier.
In 2003 and 2007, Moffat’s daughter, Penelope Smail, generously donated his extensive archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum. This book is drawn from that archive and also includes digital reconstructions of color images from original tri-carbro process black-and-white negatives. It reveals Moffat’s pioneering yet little-known photography in all its depth and beauty.
Curtis Moffat was born in New York in 1887. He studied painting in New York and Paris and collaborated with Man Ray, producing portraits and abstract photograms. In the mid-1920s, Moffat opened an interior design company and avant-garde picture gallery in London. He moved back to the US in 1939 and turned his attention again to painting until his death ten years later.