Rago Auctions

Born and raised in Poland, Helena Rubinstein founded her eponymous cosmetics company, Helena Rubinstein Incorporated, around the turn of the 20th century. Her science-based yet glamorous approach to beauty, cosmetics, and skincare was an enormous success and she began expanding internationally in 1908, eventually opening salons throughout Australia, England, the United States, and France. A wealthy, well-traveled woman, Rubinstein divided her time between New York, London, and Paris. She was a patron and collector of the arts, becoming friends with, and even posing for, painters like Raoul Dufy and Salvador Dalí. Rubinstein’s interests extended to architecture and the decorative arts, and she made it a point to commission noted modern architects and designers of the time to build and furnish her salons and buildings.

Rubinstein commissioned a veritable who’s-who of the early modern era, including Jean-Michel Frank, Eileen Gray, and Pierre Chareau. Her salons were decorated with murals by Dalí, Modigliani, Marcoussis, Tchelitchew and Juan Gris, and she hired Miró, Marie Laurencin, Dufy and de Kooning to work on her publicity campaigns. The present table, seen in the lower left or right corner of the above image, was designed by Louis Süe and André Mare for her Helena Rubinstein Institute at 52 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, which housed a salon, treatment rooms, and her offices. Süe et Mare were some of the foremost designers of the period and helped to shape trends as tastes shifted throughout the early to mid-20th century. It is only fitting that the “empress of beauty”, as she was dubbed by Jean Cocteau, chose them to help craft her vision of luxury and modernity in one of her most important locales.