Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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Of all the British artists who went east in the 19th century only Lewis looked beyond colonial stereotypes to capture its true spirit.

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"Lewis's truth, expressed in colour and brushstrokes, was a truth about the spirit of the place."

Ahdaf Soueif

 

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At the simplest level, the world he shows is a happy one, filled with sunlight, people, animals, flowers, food.

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But something else is transmitted from his surfaces: empathy.

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Lewis lived in Cairo for 10 years, and "went native" in adopting Egyptian dress.

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He lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, and after his return to England in 1851 he specialized in highly detailed works showing both realistic genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealized scenes in upper class Egyptian interiors with little apparent Western influence.

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His very careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including Jean-Léon Gérôme in his later works.

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Unlike many other Orientalist painters who took a salacious interest in the women of the Middle East, he "never painted a nude", and his wife modelled for several of his harem scenes.

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After being largely forgotten for decades, he became extremely fashionable, and expensive, from the 1970s and good works now fetch prices into the millions of dollars or pounds at auction.

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Chamelion

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She was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” according to fashion photographer Richard Avedon.

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Vogue heralded her as “one of the great wonders of our time” and ran her on its cover 11 times.

 

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It’s no exaggeration to say that Veruschka changed ­fashion for good.

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She was the first superstar model of the Sixties. Her six-foot frame, with its improbably long limbs, was revolutionary, ­following as it did the more womanly shapes of the models that came before her.

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When the director Antonioni came to London in 1965 to film Blow-Up, the fashion movie that defined the decade, he cast Veruschka as the model who cavorts in front of the lens of the ­character based on David Bailey. Here I am. That was the only line she uttered.

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The part was only a cameo, lasting no more than five minutes, but it made her a superstar.

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The second of four daughters born to Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, Vera spent her early years at the family castle near what is now Kaliningrad, U.S.S.R. During World War II, when the region was part of East Prussia, the Count became a German army reserve officer. So horrified was he by Nazi atrocities that he helped stage the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. He was arrested the day after the conspirators’ bomb fails to kill the Führer.  “I have done this because I consider Hitler to be a murderer,” Von Lehndorff  told the court at his trial. He was convicted and hanged. Vera and her sisters were separated from their mother and taken to a labor camp. “You will change your names and Hitler will educate you and you will never see your mother again,” the girls were told. Vera was five, her eldest sister seven.

 

The story has been dramatized in [yet another] Tom Cruise vehicle, 'Valkyrie'.

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The hardships of Vera’s teen years were heightened when she reached her current 6′ at 14. “I was quite ugly,” she says. “I fell all the time because I had no control over my body.” Her passion for mimicry developed around that time. “My mother would see me going into the woods and embracing the trees. I thought if I held one very strongly I would merge into it.”

 

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During her late teens Lehndorff studied art for three years in Hamburg, then in Florence, where she was stopped on the street by a fashion photographer who asked her to model. In 1963, after only a few assignments, she decided to try the big time in New York.

 

Unable to get a job, she returned to Europe briefly, then hit New York again, this time with the name Veruschka and a more striking wardrobe of leotards, miniskirts and high boots. “I invented a whole story about this person Veruschka who comes from Russia,” she says. “Veruschka in Russian ironically means ‘little Vera.’ ”

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The make-over worked. She instantly impressed Diana Vreeland, then editor-in-chief of Vogue. “She was charming and had a great presence,” Vreeland recalls. “Her looks, of course, were superb.” Lehndorff’s poses were stark and dramatic; her assignments were sometimes odd. She once rode in a limo to Japan’s remote Snow Country to pose in silver fox and honey lynx next to a sumo wrestler. “I walked in a special way, very slow motion, like I was an animal,” she says. “Fashion isn’t about being beautiful. It’s about never being forgotten once a photographer has seen you.”