Lady Shalamar Montague 3 World Tours
September 14 - October 26, 2024
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
Lady Shalamar Montague:
3 World Tours
September 14 - October 26, 2024
Born Frances Montague in 1905, Lady Shalamar derived her artist moniker from the luxury perfume and began making artwork in her 70’s. The selected drawings in this exhibition, created between 1984-90, represent Montague, then an octogenarian, at full command of the mediums of ballpoint pen, watercolor, and glitter, demonstrating her elegant calligraphic line and distinctive penmanship. Channeling the flamboyant aesthetics of an earlier time, as well as theatrical posters by Toulouse Lautrec and Leon Bakst for Ballets Russes, these drawings take the form of autobiography with obvious embellishments. We see her various alter egos in each drawing, as Lady Shalamar appears in an improbable number of roles: actress, ballet dancer, burlesque dancer, opera star, belly dancer, and even a lion tamer in the circus.
In 1990, Montague wrote Lady’s Shalamar’s illustrated autobiography, revealing an adventurous and vibrant life on the road, from Europe, to Asia, to South America. In her signature handwriting, she recounted memories of performances and venues with distinctly punctuated fragments: "Lady Montague made her debut in a fascination place! The Paris Opera Theatre, her mother's dressing room. Her mother, an opera star, was singing the opera Carmen”. Later when Montague was a girl, she described, ”Mother decided on dancing school in St Petersburg Russia under World Famous Balletrina, Anna Petrova. and 3 World Tours with the company and 33 Ballets." Her autobiography proceeded to mention Lady Shalamar performing in a fanciful range of theatrical engagements, from the ballet stage, to "Dance Excentric at Club Momarte” in Paris, to a belly dancer in Tangiers, each depicted in dramatic costumes and sparkling makeup.
In many of her drawings "Surf Manor" is noted, which was the name of the group home in Coney Island where Montague lived the last years of her life and made these works; and where Kerry Schuss made her acquaintance in 1987 after being introduced by the artist Mark Davis. Montague died in Brooklyn in 1996. In 2015, White Columns, New York presented a solo exhibition of Montague's late work in collaboration with Healing Arts Initiative, New York and published a facsimile of her original autobiography for the exhibition. Her drawings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, New York.