Large Edwin Bower Hesser Photograph Vintage Silent Film Star Lili Damita 1928
Item History & Price
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ITEM: This is a large format, vintage and original, fine art portrait by Edwin Bower Hesser of Samuel Goldwyn's latest Hollywood import, Lili Damita. Dating to c. 1928, Damita still retains her European beauty, not yet having undergone the full Hollywood glamour makeover. Her wavy tresses and sparkling eyes shine under a halo-like glow. Hesser has perfectly captured the dazzling and notorious silent film star in a breathtaking pictorialist style. This portrait comes from Damita's estate's personal collection and is stamped on verso by the photographer.
Measures 10.25" x 13.25" without margins on a matte, double weight paper stock.
Hesser's ink stamp on verso.
CONDITION: Fine condition with pinholes in the corners; light edge wear; minor, scattered printing imperfections; and light, general storage/handling wear. Please use the included images as a conditional guide.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
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Lili Damita was born Liliane Marie Madeleine Carré on July 10, 1904, in Blaye, France. As a child she studied ballet and attended school in several different countries. By the age of sixteen she was working as a professional model and dancer. In 1921 she won a beauty contest and was offered her first acting role. She appeared in more than a dozen silent films made in Europe. Lili married Hungarian director Michael Curtiz in 1925. They divorced just a year later. Producer Samuel Goldwyn saw Lili and offered her a part in the 1928 romantic adventure The Rescue. American audiences fell in love with the exotic beauty nicknamed "Tiger Lil". She appeared in a string of box office successes including The Cock-Eyed World and This Is The Night. Despite her thick accent she was easily able to make the transition to talkies. In 1935 Lili married actor Errol Flynn and decided to retire from the screen.
Her final role was in the 1938 French film Escadrille of Chance. Errol quickly became a superstar and Lili was now primarily known as his wife. The couple had a son, Sean, in 1940 but their marriage was tumultuous. Errol had many affairs and Lili divorced him in 1942. They would spend years fighting over custody and child support. Lili continued to stay out of the spotlight and focused on raising her son. In 1962 she married dairy farmer Allen R. Loomis and began living part-time in Iowa. Tragedy struck in 1970 when her son Sean went missing during a trip to Cambodia. Lili spent fourteen years and millions of dollars searching for him but he was never found. Sean Flynn was declared legally dead in 1984. By this time Lili was divorced from Allen and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She died on March 21, 1994 in Palm Beach, Florida at the age of eighty-nine. Lili is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The epitaph on her tombstone reads "She touched so many lives, brightened so many days."
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Elizabeth Ann
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Edwin Bower Hesser (1893 — 1962)
Biography By: David S. Shields
Hesser belonged to the generation of photographers who saw the marriage of image and performance as the future of the art. Born in New Jersey and apprenticed in photography in New York City, Hesser became smitten with the potentials of the art form.
Prior to World War I he toured northeastern theaters with J. Townsend Russell in a series of "picture readings" illustrating Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. Townsend recited the poems accompanied by a string orchestra while illustrative photographs were projected on the screen. In 1913, Hesser introduced Roald Admundsen, the first man to reach the south pole, to New York audiences, presenting motion pictures to illustrate the trek. On February 3, 1915, using family money, he incorporated the Hesser Motion Picture Corporation with a capitalization of $50, 000. Later in the year, he was in Atlanta opening the Hesser School For Motion Picture Acting.
With America's entry into World War I, Hesser joined the U. S. Army Signal corps with the rank of Captain and oversaw land photography. While in the service a scenario composed by Hesser, "The Freedom of the World, " was made in 1918 into a semi-documentary feature film by Goldwyn. After the armistice, Hesser decommissioned, set up a photographic studio in Manhattan employing as his assistant a talented Italian, Nino Vayana, to oversee production. He was drawn to the world of movies and worked as a contract photographer for numbers of silent stars based in New York, particularly Norma Talmadge, Irene Castle, and Marion Davies. A fire in 1922 destroyed his production facilities and his stock of early negatives. He began to make regular trips to the West Coast for photographic sessions with Hollywood stars, and finally moved his base of operations to there.
By 1923 he realized that the real money in photography lay in periodical publication, not in the service of film publicity offices or stage PR men. He saw particular opportunity in the subject which the 1920s stage explored with great daring, but the screen, even in pre-code days, could not pursue: female undress. Throughout the late 1920s, he published Edwin Bower Hesser's Arts Monthly, and other titles, exploiting the association betweens art and nudity, and sold it to an anonymous readership of "art students." The magazine published work by Alfred Cheney Johnston, John De Mirjian, George DeBarron, and Strand Studio.
Hesser's exploration of the netherworld of publishing brought him in contact with the Hollywood underworld. In 1928 he was arrested for suspicion of narcotics peddling, battery, and impersonating a police officer in connection with the death of starlet Helen St. Clair Evans, who was murdered by her husband Arthur. He was released, but the Depression shut down Hesser's successful exercise in niche publishing.
Fortunately for Hesser, his experiments with color photographic processes and his experience with mass reproduction of imagery made him attractive in the eyes of the New York Times, who hired him as a technician. Later in the decade he returned to California. Hesser continued to practice photography until the late 1940s placing occasional pieces with magazines. His photographic archive is stored in the special collections department of UCLA library. David S. Shields/ALS
Specialty:
Hesser was one of the few portraitist who regularly depicted sitters head on. His penchant for back-lighting so that hair seem lined with light, gave certain of his 1920s sitters a halo or aura. Hesser's plein air nudes of showgirls in natural light became the academic standard for art photographers in the 1920s, while his portraits of movie actresses and stage stars were greatly influential images of glamour from 1925 to 1930. Also an expert at landscape photography, Hesser combined these two skills--often photographing nudes in parks and glades.
Possessed of an inquiring and entrepreneurial mind, he developed and patented a color process, "Hessecolor, " that intrigued mass circulation publishers during the 1930s, but did not prevail in the marketplace.
— Biography By: David S. Shields c/o Broadway (dot) CAS (dot) SC (dot) edu
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