Magic Man: Oliver Messel
Step into the world of Oliver Messel, the British artist and stage designer who turned the 20th century into a land of make-believe...
Not long ago, Georgia Fanshawe, a scion of the Guinness dynasty, was recalling her first trip to the Caribbean. “It was 1974, and we were on our way to Mustique,” she said. “We stayed overnight in Barbados at Oliver Messel’s house, Maddox. We had dinner by candlelight in his beautiful garden. There were monkeys running about in the branches above us. After dinner, Oliver suddenly emerged through the undergrowth. He kept vanishing and reappearing, wearing different masks and theatrical headdresses as he danced among the palms. I remember it being terribly exciting, but also slightly sinister.”
It’s fitting that Messel should have placed himself, Puck-like, at the centre of such an arresting tableau. For decades he had been the master of mise-en-scène, whether designing costumes and sets for the opera and ballet (including his celebrated and oft-revived Sleeping Beauty for the Royal Ballet, premiered in 1946), production-designing Broadway hits and Hollywood classics (and getting Oscar- nominated for his work on 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, starring Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor), and — when Fanshawe made his acquaintance — enjoying a late flowering as an architect, drafting plans for and overseeing the building of nearly 20 houses on Mustique as statement boltholes for the Cunards, Heinzes and — yes! — the Guinnesses who’d commissioned them. From the start, Messel revelled in rolling up his beautifully turned sleeves and embracing ‘craft’ both as a noun and a verb. His one-time assistant, Tom Carls, marvelled that, “He always had something you could pull out from somewhere and make into something. He could fashion almost anything out of anything.” Messel put it more pithily: “I attempted to use every device to make as much magic as possible.”
Oliver was aware of budgets, but mostly tried to ignore them. He was very meticulous about what he wanted.
Messel was born in London in 1904 to richly artistic stock; while his wealthy and cultivated family had more than its share of Anglo- German bankers (including his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Messel), his great uncle, Alfred Messel, was one of Germany’s leading architects, best known for Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, while his grandfather, Linley Sambourne, was the chief political cartoonist for Punch magazine. Messel’s mother, Maud, was raised in Sambourne’s celebrated Kensington house (now a museum) amid collections of antique porcelain and 18th-century furniture, and was dandled on the laps of fêted visitors such as Henry Irving and Oscar Wilde. The Messel family home, Nymans in Sussex, was filled with textiles, paintings and collections of European and Asian fans from various Grand Tours and global peregrinations.
Messel, tall, saturnine, raffishly handsome and given to temper tantrums, and his sister, Anne — the embodiment of the haute flapper in her white cloche and pearls, and the future mother of the photographer Lord Snowdon — quickly established themselves as mainstays of the lionised interwar social set (later satirised as the ‘bright young things’ by Evelyn Waugh) that also included Stephen Tennant, the Sitwells, William Walton, Lady Diana Cooper, and Messel’s fellow fabulist and lifelong frenemy Cecil Beaton. Messel marked himself out as a magus of materials, fashioning chandeliers out of sticky paper and fuse wire, or headdresses out of pipe cleaners. His nephew, Lord Snowdon, recalled being sent into Messel’s London garden as a child to search for “treasure”, finding a bird’s nest made by Messel out of twisted piano wire, complete with “eggs” he’d created from hand-painted china.
Messel went to Eton but skipped university in favour of studying painting at the Slade School of Art, making a friend in Rex Whistler (until the latter’s death in world war II), and the acquaintance of titans like Augustus John and Jacob Epstein (when interviewed on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1958, Messel’s choice of luxury item was “painting materials”). However, it wasn’t Messel’s capable-if- less-than-revolutionary portraits that gained him notice; rather, it was the papier-mâché and wax masks he made for student revues, which were exhibited at the Claridge Gallery in 1925, and which brought him to the attention of the Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev and theatre producer Charles B. Cochran. Messel’s masks adorned the dancers in the Ballet Russe’s 1925 production of Zéphire et Flore (with designs by Georges Braque), while he would also design costumes and backdrops for Cochran’s annual revues — songs, sketches, skits — at the London Pavilion, where he rapidly gained a reputation for both offhand improvisation and imperious perfectionism. “Oliver was dimly aware of budgets,” recalled Tom Carls, “but mostly tried to ignore them. He was very meticulous about what he wanted. He might be told, ‘Oliver, you can’t have pure silk’, but, seeing the distaste on his face after being presented with lesser alternatives, he nearly always ended up getting his way.”
“Oliver made a white dress for me from a wonderful material called lysse, which is finer than organza,” recalled Evelyn Laye, the actress and singer who starred in Cochran’s divertissements. “He had a sharp eye for what you were and never overdressed me. He made me look like a million dollars.”
In 1932, Messel’s groundbreaking white-on-white set and costume designs for Helen, an opéra bouffe with music by Jacques Offenbach, caused a sensation,
with its more-is-more aesthetic referencing Greek temples, Rococo drapes, Baroque colonnades and Louis XIV carousels. His Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House fielded 200 costume changes (many for the prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn), and four set changes; the ornate grandeur and the riot of purples, blues and golds — shades always near the top of Messel’s palette, along with buttercup yellow — was extolled for bringing colour back to post-war austerity London. Architectural Digest magazine summed up the Messel sensibility thus: “As the brittle sophistication of the 1920s succumbed to the Depression, Messel responded to the hunger for escapist nostalgia and fantasy by developing a magpie approach to period detail in order to create a poetic confection — a romantic English tradition.”
Messel’s poetic confections were soon co-opted by Hollywood. After a couple of films for the British director Alexander Korda, he brought his creative ingenuity to bear on such productions as 1946’s Caesar and Cleopatra (conjuring ‘antique’ Egyptian jewellery from wire, plastic, cellophane and shards of glass) and Suddenly, Last Summer, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s torrid New Orleans- set play in which Messel’s hothouse atmosphere — outsize exotic foliage spun from coiled paper and pale green flock — was more than a match for the carnivorous melodrama unspooling within it...
Photo Credits: Getty Images
