A Love Letter to Central Park—From a 1947 Issue of Vogue
This story is part of a series, Past/Present, highlighting images and articles from Vogue that have personal significance to our editors.
Come April, Central Park starts to buzz as city folk abandon cramped apartments and head for its vast green lawns. This year the park remains open but there are new restrictions; in a sad sign of the times, it’s hosting a hospital ward. Still Frederick Law Olmstead’s masterpiece has withstood many trials and will continue to do so.
In 1947 Vogue published a love letter to Central Park written and illustrated by Marcel Vertès, one of the magazine’s most colorful contributors. Born in Hungary, Vertès served in the First World War before heading to Paris via Vienna. According to Annex Galleries, the budding artist supported himself by making forgeries of the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. This is highly ironic because in 1953 Vertès won two Academy Awards (for Best Costume and Best Production Design) for his contributions to the movie Moulin Rouge, which was based on the life of the French painter and chronicler of Parisian nightlife. (A year earlier the British Academy gave a joint best costume award to Vertès and Elsa Schiaparelli.) It’s been reported that the burlesque performer Gypsy Lee Rose had a room in her home dedicated to Vertès’s work.
Vertès also designed ballets for circuses, mainly “because they give him a good opportunity to draw men and women in form-fitting clothes,” explained Willa Gray Martin, in a 1943 interview she did for The Palm Beach Post. In it she describes Vertès as a man who “paints a world of perfumed women.” Maybe so, but they weren’t always innocents. In 1972 Vertès published a book of his “erotic perceptions” for his friends.
Impressionistic is how the artist described his work, and it’s true that he was able to capture essential information while leaving room for interpretation. His line seems as quick-witted as he must have been. That might be Vertès himself, in the trench coat with the collar up, walking his chien through le beau Central Park. His meditation on those daily promenades are reprinted below.
Le beau Central Park by Vertès
At rosy dawn in New York—just as at that blue hour preceding the fall of night—the great garden that is called Central Park is at its most beautiful. The tall houses framing it are no longer skyscrapers but the castles of ghostly giants—unreal and sublimely beautiful. In Central Park, the young girls roller-skate or just sit on the grass.
For the young girls of Central Park everything is casual—what they wear, their way of walking, the swing of their shoulders. Everything is casual except their hair, which by contrast is magnificent. Nowhere does one see such hair as in America. Someday a poet will write verses on the Botticelli angels in “jeans”.... The public of the park is charitable. Its generosity in peanuts has transformed the squirrels and pigeons into beggars. Shake a bag of peanuts and one is framed by flying pigeons...like a Biblical character.
The kisses seem shorter than those in the Bois de Boulogne. The girls in the Park do not seem like the feeble sex. They lean toward the sailors and ex-service men giving them frank, open kisses. On the lake it is the girls who handle the oars in the rowboats—particularly when they are in the company of sailors. Emancipation? …
There is only one carrousel in Central Park, but sadly enough it has been hermetically sealed in an obscure box of a building. The sculptured wooden horses are pale and sad— like miner’s horses. Someone should say a word to the Park Commissioner asking him to put the carrousel out in the open again, for everyone to see this brilliant souvenir of all childhood.... The most faithful customers of the Park are the babies and their nurses, the dogs and their masters.
On the paths of the Park which are near the great hotels of Central Park South many little dogs are walked by pale ghosts who seem to sleep standing up. But these forced outings are good for everyone’s health—dog and master alike. While walking a dog one can neither read a paper nor be called to the telephone. One is really alone with oneself. I invent all my designs during my hours in the Park—concentration on a single point was invented by Buddha who chose his umbilicus—I concentrate on the bouncing object at the end of the leash.
“Le beau Central Park by Vertès” was first published in the June 1, 1947 issue of Vogue.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
