The Story of Famous Geisha Teruha (aka Chishō Takaoka) and Her Lesbian Love Affair in the USA

Her real name was Tatsuko Takaoka. She was born in Osaka in 1896. It is unclear how, or under what circumstances she made her way to Tokyo but at the age of 13, after a brief training period, she became a Shimbashi Tokyo Geisha, and took the name Teruha [shining leaf].

In 1920, after years of several teenage love affairs, and being a Geisha mistress to at least one of her patrons for 5 years, Teruha got sick of the dead-end road she felt was ruining her youth, and jumped at the chance to marry a stock broker. Thus ended Teruha’s days as a Geisha, at least for a while.

In the spring of 1920, they went to the United States where she ended up making friends with Hollywood actor Sessue Hayakawa. Teruha and her husband traveled all over the country, and it was an exciting time for her. However, the un-exciting part was that her new husband dumped her at whatever hotel they were staying in, and spent his nights out on the town with his buddies –– getting drunk, and chasing women. At least once, he didn’t even come back to the hotel for several days.

But it was Teruha’s fame, and not her husband’s, that preceded her all the way to the ‘Big Apple’. When she arrived in New York City, the people there had prepared a big welcome party for her in a cabaret. Broadway choreographer Michiro Ito hosted the party for Teruha. After the party, 24-year-old Teruha got tired of living at her New York City hotel with a husband who just wanted to go out drinking and womanizing while she was left alone.

Having been a self-educated woman since becoming a Maiko, she decided to take advantage of her stay in America. She left her carousing husband to his wine and women, and headed off on her own, eventually landing at a “Domestic Science School” somewhere out in the suburbs of New York. Teruha stayed in the school dorms while taking courses (and probably learning a lot of English). She also met a very nice girl, and took up something else –– becoming a lesbian. Her lover’s name was Hildegard, and for most of the nine months that Teruha studied, lived, and loved in America on this first trip, it was the love of a woman –– and not a man –– that sustained her.

Portrait of Chishō Takaoka (a geisha and, later Buddhist nun) with her lover Hildegard in New York City, ca. 1920.

Teruha would eventually return to Japan with her husband who didn’t care about her lesbian affair. However, Teruha soon found a man to cheat with to get back at her own cheating husband. She did so with revenge in her heart for all of the womanizing and affairs he was constantly involved in.

However, as all Japanese men know, married men can have all the women they want, but their wives can have nobody but them. That is to say, when he found out about Teruha’s affair with another man, he made life a living hell for her, leading to at least two failed suicide attempts to escape life altogether.

The still married Teruha went back to the USA. From there, she went to London where she once again met up with her old friend, the popular movie star Sessue Hayakawa –– who just “happened to be there.”

What happened between them is not written in words, but Hayakawa told her that she should go and live in Paris. She took his advice, and went to France, where she gave birth to an little girl. Suffice it to say, her husband was not the father. Teruha was now 28 years old.

Amazing Photos Show Interior Design of Dutch Houses in the 1920s and ’30s

The first architecture exhibitions in the Netherlands were held from about the middle of the 19th century, a result of the growing professionalization of architecture. The driving forces behind this were the architectural society ‘Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Bouwkunst (Society for the Promotion of Architecture) and the ‘Genootschap Architectura et Amicitia’ (The Architectura et Amicitia Society). They soon discovered the propagandistic and educational value of exhibitions. The emergence of large-scale, international exhibitions towards the end of the 19th century led to a demand for a centrally headed ‘representative Dutch delegation’.

Interior design of Dutch houses in the 1920s and 1930s

To meet this demand, the ‘Tentoonstellingsraad voor Bouwkunst en verwante kunsten’ (The Exhibition Council for Architecture and Related Arts) was set up around 1920, with the aim of organizing exhibitions to ‘promote the flourishing of the arts‘. Representatives of various societies in the field of architecture as well as in the ornamental, artisanal and applied arts served on the council.

In the period between 1925 and 1935, a collection of photographs was built up to draw attention to the cream of the crop of Dutch architecture. The collection was used in countless exhibitions, including the World Fairs in Paris in 1925 and Brussels in 1935. The photographs of the Council were intended to paint an ideal picture: they emphazise the artistic and aesthetic manifestations of architecture.

This set of amazing photos from Het Nieuwe Instituut is part of the Exhibition Council collection that shows interior design of Dutch houses in the 1920s and 1930s.

Country house 'De Luifel' interior, Wassenaar, 1924

Country house interior, Wassenaar, 1926

Zonzij house interior, Rotterdam, 1926

Dining room wainscot, Borne, 1927

Park Marlot country house interior, Den Haag, 1928

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40 Amazing Vintage Posters in the 1920s and ’30s by Jean d’Ylen

Born 1886 in Paris as Jean Paul Beguin, French posterist Jean d’Ylen manifested his special talents for design at the age of twelve and won gold and silver medals from the Ville de Paris in 1898.

Posters in the 1920s and ’30s by Jean d’Ylen

In 1914, d’Ylen got married and joined the 279th Infantry Regiment. He then joined the Cartography Department of the Army. After the war, he quickly opted for a career in poster design. Vercassson were keen to sign him up and he joined the firm in 1919. They presented his work at the Salon de la Publicite. He had an exclusive contract with Vercasson for about thirty posters.

d’Ylen designed posters for Waterman, Ripolin, Jacquemaire, Shell, Bally and Sandeman’s Port. The posters were on advertising hoardings all over the walls of France. Soon his creations were scattered over Europe, England (by Weiner), Sweden, Holland, USA, Canada and Australia.

From 1934, a dispute with Vercasson, led him to work directly for Weiner in London. d’Ylen designed for Esso, BP, the Daily Herald, Power Ethyl and was widely recognized as a leader in his field.

In 1938, d’Ylen died prematurely, at the height of his career. His defining comment was in 1921, when he said, “A poster must be expressive, colorful and have an attraction which captures the attention of a passer by”.

Here is a set of amazing posters designed by Jean d’Ylen in the 1920s and 1930s.

Craven A, Cork Tipped Virginia Cigarettes, circa 1920s

Danse de Moscou, 1920

Krema, Le Meilleur Bonbon au Beurre, circa 1920s

Ripolin paints, circa 1920s

Fiorino Asti Spumante, 1922

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Screaming Baby Dolls From the 1920s

These screaming baby dolls made from bisque porcelain by German doll maker Kestner from the 1920s.

Johannes Daniel Kestner, Jr., began producing high-quality dolls with papier-mâché heads and peg-jointed wooden bodies in 1805 in Waltershausen, Thuringia. By 1845, his J.D. Kestner doll manufacturing company had become a success. Following these wood-and-paper dolls, the company produced dolls with composition heads and cloth bodies.

Kestner, was an early proponent of porcelain heads, so he added porcelain and bisque doll heads to his line in the 1850s. Around this time, the German dollmaking industry was exploding, with doll factories of every sort—some made only heads, some made only bodies, and some assembled doll parts made by others.

Five years after Kestner died in 1858, his grandson Adolf Kestner took over. In 1860, he purchased a porcelain factory in Ohrdorf to make doll heads, which Kestner then attached to composition or stuffed-cloth or leather bodies. These heads were also sold to other doll makers around the country.

Like every doll maker, Kestner produced a version of the universally popular “Dolly Face” head, which has the rounded, slightly double-chinned face of a toddler or baby. These dolls could be identified as a girl or a boy and featured an open mouth showing teeth, as well as inset, or sleeping, eyes. But the company also put out a wide variety of doll heads—some with long faces like Jumeau dolls, others with chubby square faces like Bru dolls, and yet others with character faces.

One of Kestner’s innovations was an expensive leather body with riveted joints that allowed the limbs to move naturally. Kestner was one of the few German dollmakers that produced complete dolls all the way to the wigs and the fashion. These Kestner dolls were exported as far away as the United States.

In 1902, Kestner had a runaway hit in Boston high society with its “Lady Betty Modish,” a bisque dolly face doll with a jointed composition body. She came with an attached satin ball gown of the highest fashion, complete with satin rosebuds and curled ribbons, delicate jewelry, and a blond human-hair wig.

In the nine years she was produced, the most posh doll accessories imaginable were made for her, including a tiny deck of 52 playing cards, a miniature nail set made with ivory, a silk damask knitting bag with a knitting-in-progress project inside, and a velvet wintercoat trimmed with satin and rabbit fur.

The Kewpie doll, based on Rose O’Neill’s illustrations for “Ladies’ Home Journal,” was modeled by New York dollmaker Joseph Kallus and sold by his employer American doll manufacturer George Borgfeldt, who patented the design in 1913. However, the earliest all-bisque Kewpie dolls were produced by Kestner for Borgfeldt, their trademark paper heart stamped with “Germany” under the Kewpie logo.

Kestner company first registered for a patent for its bisque heads in 1897, and the incised model numbers like “162” are often accompanied by “Made in Germany,” whereas bodies tend to have a red “Germany” stamp. The company finally closed its doors in 1938, 20 years after Adolf’s death.

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Sublime and Atmospheric Photos By Léonard Misonne

Léonard Misonne (1870 – 1943) was a Belgian pictorialist photographer. He is best known for his atmospheric photographs of landscapes and street scenes, with light as a key feature, and as a pioneer of pictorialism. According to the Directory of Belgian Photographers, “Misonne’s work is characterised by a masterly treatment of light and atmospheric conditions. His images express poetic qualities, but sometimes slip into an anecdotal sentimentality.”

 

Misonne would often photograph things that were strongly illuminated from behind, producing a halo effect. He would also retouch the lighting effects in his photographs, experimenting with and using many techniques, such as the Fresson process and later the bromoil and mediobrome processes. “If I were asked what I have learned during my forty years as a photographer,” said Misonne, nicknamed “the Corot of photography”. “I should reply – the most important thing I have learned is to observe the beautiful effects of atmosphere and light.” He also invented the “flou-net” and “photo-dessin” processes.

Take a look through these extraordinary photographs taken by Misonne:

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Amazing Vintage Photographs of Fountain of Ice on Washington Boulevard in Detroit From the Early 20th Century

One of the unique features of Detroit in winter is the famous ice fountain on Washington Boulevard. Several jets of water are allowed to play all winder, and the result is a massive berg of ice which sometimes reaches a height of nearly thirty feet, and contains many tons of the crystal.

The tradition of forming ice sculptures in the city dates back to at least the early 1900s. These amazing vintage photographs show winter scene on Washington Boulevard in Detroit from between the 1900s and 1920s.

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Stunning Autochrome Pictures of Petra, Jordan From the 1900s to 1940s

Petra is a historic and archaeological city in southern Jordan. It is adjacent to the mountain of Jabal Al-Madbah, in a basin surrounded by mountains forming the eastern flank of the Arabah valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system, Petra is also called the “Red Rose City” because of the color of the stone from which it is carved. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985 and has been described as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage” Petra is a symbol of Jordan, as well as Jordan's most-visited tourist attraction.

These stunning autochrome pictures of the ancient Nabatean stone city were taken by the photography department of the American Colony from between the late 1900s to the 1940s. Take a look:

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Vintage Photos of an Ancient Roman Bridge in Iraq

Described by the Hungarian-British archaeologist Aurel Stein as “the bold rainbow-like arch surviving from a bridge thrown across the Wadi al Murr near Eski Mosul,” these photographs of a Roman bridge in Iraq were taken from between the 1920s and 1930s:

The Romans began organized bridge building to help their military campaigns. Engineers and skilled workmen formed guilds that were dispatched throughout the empire, and these guilds spread and exchanged building ideas and principles. The Romans also discovered a natural cement, called pozzolana, which they used for piers in rivers.

Roman bridges are famous for using the circular arch form, which allowed for spans much longer than stone beams and for bridges of more permanence than wood. Where several arches were necessary for longer bridges, the building of strong piers was critical. This was a problem when the piers could not be built on rock, as in a wide river with a soft bed. To solve this dilemma, the Romans developed the cofferdam, a temporary enclosure made from wooden piles driven into the riverbed to make a sheath, which was often sealed with clay. Concrete was then poured into the water within the ring of piles.

20 Stunning Portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was a 20th century American painter and pioneer of American modernism best known for her canvases depicting flowers, skyscrapers, animal skulls and southwestern landscapes.

Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas.

O’Keeffe mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916.

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists seeking a distinctive view of the nation. In the 1950s, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. She painted and sketched works that evoke the spectacular places she visited, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. At the age of seventy-three, she took on a new subject: aerial views of clouds and sky. Suffering from macular degeneration and failing vision, O’Keeffe painted her last unassisted oil painting in 1972. However, O’Keeffe’s will to create did not diminish with her eyesight. In 1977, at age ninety, she observed, “I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.”

Late in life, and almost blind, she enlisted the help of several assistants to enable her to continue creating art. In these works, she drew on favorite motifs from memory and her vivid imagination. Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

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Rarely Seen Childhood Photos of Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks’ artistry is her gift to the world. She led a remarkable life, one filled with as many twists and turns as there were ups and downs. She possessed ravishing good-looks, plenty of talent, and smarts — and could have achieved so much more… but because of a knack for self-defeating behavior, she would end up snatching obscurity from lasting fame. Brooks was something of a lost soul. She once said, “Somehow I have avoided being found.”

Mary Louise Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas on November 14, 1906. She was the second of four children, the daughter of Leonard Brooks and Myra Rude. Cherryvale was a small town of only a few thousand residents. Nevertheless, it produced another noted entertainer, the slightly younger Vivian Vance. She was one of Brooks’ childhood friends, and years later went on to play Ethel Mertz, Lucille Ball’s sidekick on the TV sitcom I Love Lucy.

Brooks’ mother was a cultured woman, a participant in Chautauqua (a popular self-improvement and educational movement), as well as a pianist who played Debussy and Ravel for her children. Above everything, Myra inspired in little Louise a love of books and the arts. Her upbringing, as well as her father’s large library, had a profound influence on Brooks’ lifelong love of reading. In fact, Louise read voraciously from a young age. As a teen, her favorite magazines were Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. In each she could envision a life beyond Kansas.

Louise also loved the movies, which were then called “flickers”. She and her brother went to the local movie theater to watch westerns, serials and melodramas starring the likes of cowboy actor Tom Mix, vamp Theda Bara, and serial star Pearl White. Young Louise was especially enthralled by young Gloria Swanson, the most exciting new actress of 1915.

Brooks’ life was profoundly shaped by something else that happened when she was young. When Louise was about 9 years old, a neighbor known as “Mr. Flowers” sexually abused her. The assault left its indelible mark on Brooks’ psyche. In later years, she commented that she was incapable of real love and that this man “must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure.” None of her two marriages or many affairs ever lasted long.

In 1919, at the age of 13, the Brooks family moved 10-miles south to the larger Independence, Kansas. With her bobbed-hair, captivating looks, and a personality that turned heads, boys began to focus their eyes on Louise. In 1920, the Brooks family moved again, this time to nearby Wichita, Kansas, a larger and more metropolitan town. There, her father expanded his law practice and pursued his ambition of becoming a United States District Judge. Meanwhile, Louise pursued her dream of becoming a dancer.

Throughout her childhood, Brooks had performed at events across southeastern Kansas. She made her first public appearance at age four playing a pint-sized bride in a church production of Tom Thumb’s Wedding. By the age of 10, she had become in her own words what “amounted to a professional dancer,” appearing before community groups, men’s and women’s clubs, local fairs, and at various social gatherings in neighboring counties — sometimes as far away as Missouri. By age 11, she was dancing in public on a regular basis, performing at recitals and in programs held in meeting halls and at the local opera house.

Brooks also studied dance with the best local instructors, and choreographed pieces that were performed at her high school in Wichita. Brooks was serious about her art. While a student, she traveled to see the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, who was performing in a nearby town. She also attended a Wichita performance by the famous Denishawn Dance Company, led by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. There, backstage, she met its principals. The meeting proved pivotal.

(via Louise Brooks Society)