Bessie Love

Scanned from the book From Hollywood With Love 

"You doll-soul, not made by God, you soul, begged as a whim by some impetuous elf, you thing-soul exhaled laboriously by an idol and kept in being by us all, partly from anxiety and partly out of magnanimity, you soul from which nobody can completely detach himself, you soul never actually worn by anyone but always kept in storage, protected by all manner of old-fashioned fragrances (like furs in summer)—look, now the moths have got into you. You have been left untouched too long. Now you are shaken by a hand both cautious and bold—look, look, all the little moths are fluttering out of you, indescribably mortal, already beginning to take their leave at the very moment of birth.

So in the end we really destroyed you, doll-soul, when we thought we were cultivating you in our dolls. It must have been the larvae who were eating you from within; and this explains too why the dolls were so fat and why they could not be given more food.

Now this new timid generation escapes and flutters through our dark sensibility. Looking at these, one might describe them as tiny sighs, so faint that our ears are not attuned to hear them. They swarm and fade at the uttermost limit of our vision. For their only concern is to dwindle away. Sexless like our childhood dolls themselves, they experience no decline in their permanent sensuality, into which nothing flows and from which nothing escapes. It is as if they yearned for a beautiful flame, to throw themselves into it like moths (and then the momentary reek of their burning would fill us with limitless unfamiliar sensations). Thinking these thoughts and raising our eyes, we stand almost unnerved as we contemplate their waxen nature.”

Rilke, R. M. "Dolls. On the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel."

Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), Return from School After the Storm, ca. 1939. oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 19 ¾ inches

White House, 1918, Chaim Soutine

1930’s debutante gown

Illustration to a story by the Brothers Grimm. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. 1912 ed.?

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“Ciao tokusei Valentine message card set” (February 1993)

Marie Antoinette by Ikeda Ryoko

Roses of Versailles (1979)

Bed frame

c.1880

Indianapolis Museum of Art (Accession Number: 80.10A-M)

King Arthur and Camelot (Gustave Doré, 1868)

Textile (England) - It is dated ca. 1800

me after sleeping ljke shit for the 10,497th day in a row: this is good actually because now i'll be really tired when i go to bed tonight