Helena Rubinstein Kraków, Poland, 1872−New York, 1965 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 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).
Helena Rubinstein's home in New York City in 1944 - showcasing her eclectic collections of classical and tribal art in a striking interior!
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