Dancers: Bebe Daniels

 

Max Pollak

  1886 - 1970 (biography)

c. 1925  

drypoint and color aquatint 

18 1/4 x 9 1/2" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

3/150 (only printed around 10) 

pencil titled in lower left; pencil editioned in lower center; pencil noted along sheet's lower edge: "printed a. 10" (printed around 10); red Friedl Pollak Collection stamp in lower left corner 

 

delicate cream laid 

published 

artist 

23437 

$425.00 

While in Vienna Max Pollak became involved in the avant-garde dance scene. He did a series of intaglio portraits of dancers, usually costumed and posed, from one of their noted performances. He is sometimes credited with being "the first etcher to turn his attention to the dance as a subject."

Pollak did numerous refined drypoint portraits of Joachim von Seewitz, Ellen Tels, Mila Cirul, Ronny Johansson, Tatjana Barbakoff, Maria Ley, Anne Osborn, and Russian dancers within the Tels circle.

Bebe Daniels, born Phyllis Virginia Daniels, was born in Dallas, Texas on January 14, 1901. Her parents were both in the theater business and together they operated a traveling stock company. Bebe began acting as a child and was in films by the age of seven, after her family had settled in Los Angeles.

A long and prolific career included silent films and musicals under contract with RKO and Warner Brothers studios, as well as "talkies," stage work, dance choreography, and film production. She toured throughout the U.S. and in Europe as a dancer and actor, remaining in London for the duration of the Second World War and taking a job as a radio personality for the BBC, in an effort to uplift British listeners throughout the conflict. Her contributions to the war effort earned her a Medal of Freedom award by president Harry S. Truman.

She and her family eventually returned to the U.S. where Bebe worked as a film producer. She divided her time between Los Angeles and London, where she died in 1971.