Page 171 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Napoleon Sarony: self portraits (1890) and Portrait of Oscar Wilde 1882
They don’t make characters like Napoleon Sarony nowadays. Their grandiloquence, their dash and daring, their style, the ‘bohemian millionaire’, quasi-regality that they affected, disappeared with great men like Sergei Diaghilev (of the Ballets Russes), the great film-directors Fritz Lang, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, and Olivia Manning’s fictional Yakimov (from The Balkan Trilogy). Sarony opened his New York Studio in the 1870s, photographing the celebrities of the time – the stars of the opera, theatre, music hall and vaudeville. Oscar Wilde - at 28 already famous as an aesthete and a poet, was in New York on his American lecture tour - what did these guys make of each other?
Napoleon Sarony: Sarah Berhardt as Cleopatra 1891