Cooper Hewitt says...
Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Tania Vartan (American, born 1940s) is the youngest daughter of William and Sue Cutchins. A graduate of the University of Arizona, Vartan also studied at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts Paris, her education emphasizing fine arts and graphic design. Vartan began her design career in the early 1970s. Living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, Vartan began creating romantic and fantastical fashions for herself. This turned into an opportunity to sell her clothing designs through a local art gallery. [1] After her marriage to a Canadian advertising executive, she relocated to Ontario, Canada to work as a costume designer for CBS television and The French Theater. While in Canada, she began designing textiles for Dominion Textile and Bruck Mills, and during this period, she also began importing Marimekko textiles into the country. In the mid-1970s, she embarked on a new career as an independent fashion designer in New York City. She designed all the textiles for her fashions, which were retailed at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman’s. She made a point of keeping the production of her fabrics in the United States in order to exercise complete quality control of the process. Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily and other regional newspapers provided editorial coverage of her fashion designs.
By the early 1980s, she was no longer in the fashion business but continued to produce textiles for interiors with American and European manufacturers; Kirk-Brummel Fabrics produced her designs during this period. At the same time, she was developing a new interest in trompe l'oeil painting treatments and mural designs applied to folding screens and interior walls, an increasingly popular design trend during the 1980s. Her first mentor was a New York muralist, Eloi Bordelon. She later opened the Tania Vartan Studio at 970 Park Avenue and operated this business for nearly two decades. By 1983, she had received the Arthur Ross award for her decorative murals and painted architectural details, also known as glazing in the industry. Interior designers like Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta included her painted murals as part of their overall design concepts; one striking design from this period was her zodiac ceiling for Georgette Mosbacher. Architectural Digest described the ceiling design as “a stylized astrological phantasmagoria complete with gold stars, a shooting comet, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the planets and all the symbols of the zodiac painted in gold, one look and you’re hooked.” [2] The New York School of Interior Design included her in the 1988 exhibition Painted Surfaces, a show dedicated to trompe l’oeil, stenciling, false marble and wood finishes. In 1989, she was one of four artists selected to create two murals for Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, one of which depicted the oldest and youngest sons of Teddy Roosevelt playing on a receding staircase with the family dog. The other was a depiction of the state dining room of the White House seen from a faux doorway as the room appeared in 1902, which required considerable research as renovations were made during the Kennedy administration. According to Vartan, the secret to a successful trompe l’oeil treatment was to catch the eye with a visual trick or quirk that made the viewer look twice. [3]
From the late 1990s to about 2011, Vartan moved between New York, Palm Beach, and Europe; she operated a painting academy in Italy, offering two-week summer sessions in Tuscany and Umbria, and a longer three-month session in Florence during the fall. In 2013, she returned home to Louisville, Kentucky where she lives presently.
[1] Marian Christy, “’Designer Very Much “Southern Belle,” Ogden Standard-Examiner (July 28, 1976), 8D.
[2] Aileen Mehle, “Neoclassical Overtones: Georgette Mossbacher’s Sutton Place Pied-à-Terre,” Architectural Digest (Nov. 1989), 291.
[3] Gary Schwan, “April Foolery: Two Artists with Wildly Different Approaches Play Visual Tricks in Shows Next Month,” Palm Beach Post (Mar. 31, 2000), 36.
