Archivio Casorati
BELDY

Description

Beldy (Mabel Hardy Maugham) is an English artist, mother of Daphne Maugham Casorati, who, on the advice of Felice, whose Turin studio Daphne arrived in 1925 attracted by the portrait that the painter made of her sister Cynthia (ballerina of Alexander Sakharoff and then in Turin with Bella Hutter), began to frame his works and exhibit them in public and private spaces.
Beldy immediately emerges as an extraordinarily original artist, whose works are created using fragments and varieties of fabrics with varying textures, ranging from stretched velvet to thin scraps of crêpe de Chine. The fine fabrics used for the patchwork were given to the artist by her friend and stylist Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the “première dames” of international fashion in the 1930s, who with Coco Chanel is considered one of the most influential fashion figures in the period between the two wars.