At home and in her professional life, the keen eye and advocacy of New York collector and retailer Kathryn Hausman have served to breathe new life into the arts of the Jazz Age, a century on.
It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to the densely packed splendors at Kathryn Hausman’s New York town house. But once I am acclimated, I see recurring patterns, and it all makes perfect sense.
Her shelves and vitrines are laden with art deco objects from the 1920s, especially ceramic statues of women from the prolific Goldscheider factory in Vienna. They are frozen in motion, twirling and contorting themselves. They show off the ruffles and butterfly wings on their femininely diaphanous costumes, or they push the boundaries of respectable appearance for their era, with form-hugging clothes and mannishly bobbed hair.
Others wear traditional garb of faraway lands, whether Japanese kimonos, or turbans and billowing harem pants from the Middle East and North Africa. Similarly varied women appear in Hausman’s Jazz Age posters, drawings, photos, and framed magazine covers—Vanity Fair, Vogue, Collier’s, Life, Harper’s Bazar, Woman’s Home Companion—that span floor to ceiling.
“My life mission is to honor, glorify, and celebrate the beauty of the art deco woman,” Hausman explains. Hausman, age seventy-five, has been building her collection of empowered female forms for five decades and has barely slowed down. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a real-estate agent and an artist, she originally moved to New York to earn degrees at the Fashion Institute of Technology and New York University. She was captivated upon arrival by art deco landmarks like the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall. She gradually found herself drawn to all things related to 1920s deco style, including movies, fashion, furniture, and magazines. “I felt this magical and spiritual period connection,” she says.
Hausman started designing and making jewelry and hair accessories out of old stocks of European art deco jewelry components that she found in the garment district. Those artistic experiments turned into a life’s work. Her company, Medusa’s Heirlooms, founded in 1972, works with French manufacturers to create hair accessories and jewelry, many of them glittery and iridescent. Clients over the decades have included celebrities and high-end designers and retailers (the likes of Henri Bendel, Bloomingdales, Anna Sui, and Free People). Hausman has turned herself into a walking advertisement for her wares. She drapes her creations around her neck and wrists and clips them into her cascading black tresses, in coordination with her eye-catching vintage chiffony and velvety gowns, beaded purses, and feathered and bejeweled hats.
While traveling internationally for business, Hausman made time to visit antiques stores and galleries, where Goldscheider ceramics most tempted her. Goldscheider produced over ten thousand different figurines between 1885 and 1938 (when Nazis seized the company from its Jewish owners). “Every time I made money, I bought a beautiful statue,” she recalls. What persuades her to finalize a purchase is an intuitive feeling. “I have to fall in love with the piece, there has to be a magic to it,” she says.
In 1976 Hausman bought the town house, built in the late 1880s, where she raised her sons Trevor and Graham Smith (and where she now delights in hosting her grandchildren Grayleigh and Henry). The building’s interior is largely unspoiled, complete with original pocket doors and carved fireplace mantels. Hausman has added some art deco touches to the architecture, installing chocolatey wood paneling and tin ceilings with chevron patterns.
In the 1980s she joined the board of the newly founded Art Deco Society of New York (ADSNY) and served as its president from 1998 to 2013. She organized innumerable programs that attracted up to hundreds of attendees: tours, lectures, symposiums, galas, and advocacy campaigns, on subjects ranging from cocktails to skyscrapers. In 2009 she exhibited her Goldscheider collection at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Walking around display cases full of her possessions, Hausman says, “was like opening a treasure chest of timeless female beauty.”
Her dedication to the art deco field, and her generous sharing of energy, expertise, and connections, have become legendary. “She is such a personable advocate,” says Stephen H. Van Dyk, an ADSNY board member and a librarian emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution. Michael Arenella, a musician, crooner, and founder of the Jazz Age Lawn Party (an annual outdoor celebration of 1920s music and culture on New York’s Governors Island), describes Hausman as “the grande dame” of all things deco. Her town house is “almost overwhelming” and deserving of museum status, he adds: “It’s also very touching the amount of love she has for this statuary. They’ve almost become sentient beings in her care.”
The more I roam Hausman’s rooms, the more the collection seems organized and practical. There are female forms adapted for utilitarian purposes: perfume bottles, lamps, mirror frames, bookends, and even hors d’oeuvre forks. I notice how many women are depicted as unfazed while taking risks: riding on a motorcycle or elephant or in a hot-air balloon, petting a dragon. I even find myself granularly analyzing how the beaded fringe on Hausman’s silk lampshades echoes the tasseled trim on the Goldscheider dancers’ shawls.
Hausman tells me about her calendar’s busy roster of upcoming events: a screening of a new documentary about the artist Tamara de Lempicka, for instance, and a Paris gathering of the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies to celebrate the centennial of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes that gave art deco its name.
She hopes someday to write a book about her collection and dreams of making it into a museum. In the meantime, she loves coming home from workdays to her statues awaiting. They embody “delicate feminine beauty and glamour,” she says, and they make her feel “humble, happy, visually inspired, and at peace.”
EVE M. KAHN is an independent scholar who contributes regularly to the New York Times and is the biographer of Zoe Anderson Norris (1860–1914), a journalist, reformer, and queen of Bohemia.
