BUYS AND DOLLS
OLLECTING the objects pictured here is like watching a football match: it’s a game of two halves.
But when one side scores the most spectacular goal of the season, then everything else pales by comparison.
Spectacular was the £34,000 a Sunderland auctioneer netted for “Il Grattacielo” – it translates as “skyscraper” – the stylish Art Deco pottery figure collectors know as “Skyscraper Girl”.
The striking and technically difficult-to-produce figure of a young woman holding a powder puff and compact, fixing her make-up while standing atop a block of high-rise buildings, is one of the most stunning of all produced under the Ars Lenci brand.
It is also the most valuable, Boldon Auction Galleries thought to have broken their own auction record price, set in 2006, when another large-scale model, the 21-inch (53cm) figure of a coquettish nude in Egyptian headdress titled “Abissina” sold for £32,000.
The tale started so differently, and with a touch of sadness. During the Great War, Enrico Scavini joined the Italian Air Force.
While he was away, his only daughter Helen took ill and died.
In order to hide her grief and to comfort herself in her husband’s absence, Madame Elena Scavini (née König) decided to make dolls for other children. Each was in her daughter’s likeness.
Popular with her friends, she realised there was a living to be made from selling the dolls and production started in a factory in Turin.
The Ars Lenci brand was registered in 1919, the name being derived from “Elenechen” Enrico’s pet name for his wife, which the little girl pronounced childishly as “Lenchi”.
The letters were also said to have been used by the company to spell out the motto “Ludus Est Nobis Constanter Industria” – Play is Our Constant Work.
Enrico transformed his wife’s pastime into a proper business, inventing a steam-press which hich moulded the layers of felt used by Elena to create the dolls,
By 1935, when Italy went t to war with Ethiopia, the fortunes of the Lenci factory were at a low ebb.
More than 350 workers were employed and many went to
A Lenci felt doll with blonde mohair wig and original clothing, the girl with typical sulky expression and eyes that say “If you don’t buy me I’ll cry”. She sold for £260.
A Lenci mother and child figure gure group, the mother wearing a floral cloak and seated on a turned base. Painted marks s to base read: Lenci Made in Italy”. It sold for £750. answer their country’s call to arms.
Hostilities ceased a year later but by then, the world was wracked by the Depression. The Second World War broke out in 1939 and Italy – and the Lenci factory – was under Mussolini’s control.
Turin, long a production centre for cloth, was hit hard by Allied bombers. Raw materials became in short supply and key workers were again required for the war effort.
Ultimately, the factory was largely destroyed in an air raid and production ceased.
The name continued to be used after the war, the factory being run by bosses originally installed by Mussolini, with Madame Lenci acting in an advisory role, but the magic was lost.
Quality and originality suffered badly and in the 1960s, production shifted to plastic dolls.
At the height of their success, however, Lenci Len dolls – expensive pl playthings for both children and adults – were the toast o of the toy industry on both sides of the Atlantic Atlantic.
Con Contemporary adver advertising lists 100 chara character dolls inclu including a Chinaman with h his opium pipe, a choru chorus girl whose skirt “is a all too short to hide re real dimples in her knees”, cowboys, Hawaiian girls in grass skirts as well as children’s dolls – “demure little girls with blushing faces and dimpled cheeks” – and a large range of farm and domestic animals.
Customers included the crowned heads of Europe, theatre stars who no doubt used them to decorate their dressing rooms and Mussolini himself, who ordered four dolls, each wearing real jewellery, which he presented to members of Japan’s ruling family.
The secret of the dolls’ success was their lifelike cuteness and the fact that they were impossible to break.
The faces of early products were little more than a mask, but later dolls had face and neck front and back fashioned from one piece of felt shaped like a bag, thus avoiding the need for unsightly stitched seams.
The exception is a zigzag seam down the back of the neck.
The result is facial moulding complete with eyes, nostrils, mouth, temples and dimples which were then picked out with gloss and matt paint to give an unnervingly natural effect.
Most Lenci dolls have a sulky expression with half-closed dreamy eyes giving them a lovable but mischievous appearance.
Invariably, they pick you out with an appealing sideways glance ... and once you’re spotted, you’re hooked.
Lenci’s ceramic figures were a complete contrast. They first appeared in 1928, in part because pirates and copyists in the doll industry began to make similar products but at a fraction of the costs of what had always been luxury products.
Elena had attended art school before her marriage and designed many of the initial pottery products but she also enlisted the help of others, notably Sandro Vacchetti, who in 1930 was responsible for Abissina among others, Felice Toasli, Gigi Chessa and Abele Jacopi, who sculpted Skyscraper Girl.
He is believed to have taken his cue for the design from the pages of Vogue magazine, dressing the woman in a tight-fitting black and white polka dot dress with orange and black modish hat and bow and orange belt.
The Turin international exhibition of 1928 and an exhibition in Milan the following year were notable turning points in the factory’s inter-war period. In the latter, a group of 95 figures received rave reviews, but the collapse of markets in the Depression brought crisis.
New management took over the ceramic department in 1933, and Elena stepped down in 1937, working thereafter only as an artistic director until 1942.
Enrico died in 1938, she in 1974. The figures epitomise the era in which they were produced. They exude the fashionable and highly stylised Art Deco or so-called Style Moderne, the name being derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925.
Nudity had become acceptable and popularly depicted in fine art in the late 1920s, some of Lenci’s figures allegedly modelled by Elena on herself.
Ceramic production came to an end in 1964 although in 1999 a limited number of pieces were re-created to celebrate the 80th anniversary. The Lenci business closed in 2002.
Lenci ceramic figures are marked “Lenci Turino” or “Lenci Made in Italy”, painted on the base and sometimes with a date and an incised signature, which can help weed out reproductions.
As ever, buy from reputable sources where guarantees are forthcoming.
A Lenci figure modelled as a girl relaxing in an arm chair painted with birds and flowers. Painted marks to the base read “Lenci Torino”. It sold for £1,900.