Bright Young People: Silver Society | Photos by Curtis Moffat, 1923-35

Curtis Moffat (1887–1949) was born in 1887 into a wealthy New York family. He was raised in Brittany and attended boarding school in the United States. After a brief diplomatic career, he studied painting in New York and from 1913-1914 at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In Paris during the 1920s, Moffat collaborated with Man Ray, one of several avant-garde artists to revive the photogram, which was originally used at the invention of photography in the 1830s. Moffat’s photograms are among the earliest examples of the 20th-century interest in camera-less, abstract photography.

Living in London throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, in the era of the “Bright Young Things,”
Moffat produced stylish photographic portraits of leading figures in high society, theatre and the arts, including Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Daphne du Maurier. In 2003 and 2007, Moffat’s daughter, Penelope Smail, generously donated her father’s extensive archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Lady Diana Cooper by Curtis Moffat and Olivia Wyndham            Diana Cooper, c.1925-30

Curtis Moffat, Golden guinness sisters, 1920

Curtis Moffat, Nudes with African masks, about 1930