Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein was a Polish-American business tycoon and founder of Helena Rubinstein Incorporated, an international makeup and skincare company. She used her wealth to assemble a vast collection of art and antiquities that included modern art, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French furniture, murals by Salvador Dalí, sculpture by Elie Nadelman, and one of the earliest encyclopedic collections of African art. She organized her extensive collections into thematic rooms in her private homes in New York and Paris.

Rubinstein (neé Chaya Rubinstein) was the eldest of seven girls born to a working-class family in Poland. Her parents arranged for her to marry a much older, wealthy widower at the age of eighteen. Instead she escaped to Australia in 1890 and lived with her uncle’s family in Melbourne. She brought twelve jars of cosmetic cream with her, which she sold quickly, and in 1902 secured financial backing to open the Helena Rubinstein Beauty Salon in Melbourne. The success of her skincare line allowed Rubinstein to launch the Maison de Beauté Valaze in 1908 at 24 Grafton Street in London and a third salon in Paris in 1909 at 255 rue Saint-Honoré.

After moving to Paris in 1912, Rubinstein developed her passion for art collecting. Through the literary activities of her second husband, Edward W. Titus, Rubinstein became close with a circle of avant-garde writers and artists: Pierre Bonnard, Claude Debussy, Kiki de Montparnasse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and most notably, Misia Sert (wife of the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert). Sert invited Rubinstein to the salons held regularly in her home; there she met such contemporary artists and musicians as Sergei Diaghilev, Paul Reverdy, and Erik Satie, and learned of the latest art trends.

Rubinstein first encountered African art in the 1910s through sculptor Jacob Epstein. He and collector and dealer Charles Ratton would soon help Rubinstein amass one of the earliest European collections of African art (numbering over 261 objects). Key works included a Bambara dance headdress from the Segou region of Mali, a Fang reliquary head from Gabon, and a Kota reliquary from Gabon, all acquired from Georges de Miré around 1931. Four years later, she lent her African art collection to the African Negro Art exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Following the outbreak of World War I, in 1914 Rubinstein moved to New York, where she opened a fourth beauty salon at 8 East 49th Street. Titus remained in France to open a rare-book shop and publishing house in Montparnasse. Frequent business trips back to Europe allowed Rubinstein to add works of art to her growing collection. From the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, she purchased Joan Miró’s Seated Nude Holding a Flower (1917; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), while she acquired Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1927; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) directly from the artist. From Albert Loeb, in 1927 Rubinstein purchased Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1908; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Dryad (Nude in a Forest) (1908; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Two years later, from fellow collector, friend, and client, Marie Cuttoli, Rubinstein acquired Henri Matisse’s View of Collioure (1907; The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

After the dissolution of her marriage to Titus in 1928, Rubinstein turned her focus more fully toward her personal life and collecting. She married a Georgian noble, Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia in 1938, and became a Princess. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she added works to her collection by Dalí, Juan Gris, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Nadelman, and Georges Rouault. Although the details surrounding her acquisitions are not fully documented, Rubinstein never had an art advisor and tended to purchase work based on her friendships with artists and her own tastes. She also began commissioning works for her beauty salons and private homes in Paris and New York. For her New York salon at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, she asked Dalí and Miró to design rugs, tapestries, a powder compact, and other decorative objects in exchange for purchasing and exhibiting their works in her place of business. She similarly commissioned Dalí in the 1940s and 1950s to create the murals Dawn, Heroic Noon, and Evening for a Dalí-themed room in her New York penthouse apartment. Commissioned portraits of Rubinstein by artists as diverse as George Biddle, Raul Dufy, Laurencin, Marcoussis, Graham Sutherland, and Pavel Tchelitchew also adorned the walls of her apartments.

In 1959, she founded the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv to support contemporary artists in Israel. Following her death, the bulk of her vast collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s.