Jean-Gabriel Domergue

Inventer of the pin-up

Jean-Gabriel Domergue was a glorifier of women. His canvases, like Boldini’s, shimmered with sensuality and joie de vivre; he was not an artist of the darker register. He may have been rooted in a Belle Époque world of opera boxes and champagne suppers, but his subjects were streamlined for the Art Deco age. With their wand like necks, long arms and artfully posed hands, his snub nosed, cherry-lipped beauties held the viewer’s gaze, alert to life’s possibilities and pleasures.

Domergue was born in Bordeaux in 1889. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts, won second prize in the prix de Rome, and graduated from painting landscapes (and recording German atrocities in World War 1 in Le Livre Rouge), to depicting ‘The Modern Eve’. As early as 1912 he claimed to have invented the pin-up. Traversing the worlds of society and fashion with aplomb (he designed clothes for Poiret and, improbably, Lenin was briefly his major-domo), he was also an accomplished poster artist, had a neat line in Erotica and painted over 3000 portraits. His sitters came to him not for an inner (or outer) likeness, but to be seen through his eyes.

In 1926, Domergue bought a tract of land in the hills above Cannes and built a lavish villa (now known as Villa Domergue and bequeathed to the town) which became the backdrop for his most extravagant parties and fêtes. He spent his last years curating exhibitions at the Musée Jaquemart-André, highlighting the work of the artists he revered. He died in 1962