Creole Cognac, Perfect Popovers, Abu Ben Goulash Sugar Cake and Cabbage Soup. 1970’s nude sketches and recipes from “The Newd Cookbook” featuring Cleo Dorman, perhaps the world’s longest serving nude artist’s model.

Dorman posing, possibly for Louie Ritman’s class at the Art Institute of Chicago
(a nearby notation reads “posing for Louie Ritman’s class – 1942”). Cleo Dorman papers, c. 1930s-1990.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Cover artwork: “The Newd Cook Book; sketched, compiled and published by artists of Torana Art League, Santa Ana, California.” 1971. Cover by Corrinne Shminke.
Cleo Dorman papers, c. 1930s-1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The very little known Cleo Dorman, (1908-1990) was an artist’s model in Los Angeles, California.

The subject of paintings and sculpture by artists ranging from the famous (Sister Mary Corita Kent) to those known best for other talents like the actor Peter Falk and singer, Nelson Eddy. Cleo would often accept a painting or piece of sculpture in lieu of a fee and amassed a collection worth a small fortune.

Born Essie Cleo Dorman, May 16, 1908, she was forced into modeling as a teenager by her family’s dire economic straits. She began work in Chicago in the early 1930s and modelled at a number of art schools, among them the Cranbrook Academy, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student’s League, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Otis Art Institue in Los Angeles and at various university art schools.

In a modeling career that lasted six decades, Cleo displayed her supple figure to literally tens of thousands of wanna-be and actual artists. In 1971, she collaborated (at age 63) with artists from the Torana Art League in Santa Ana, California to model for and produce her own artistic work – “The Newd Cook Book” from which the following drawings are (‘scuse the pun) drawn.

Cleo had what must surely be the longest nude artist’s modelling career in history. The Smithsonian hold 50 (currently unavailable unfortunately) photographs of Cleo and friends at an exhibition called “Cleo: Fifty Years as an Artist’s Model” held at the Otis/Parsons Art Institute, Los Angeles, in 1990, and 3 photographs of Cleo modeling, age 72 in 1980!

“I was like an actress,” said Cleo in a 1989 interview with The LA Times, shortly after she announced she would sell her personal accumulation of art treasures to finance art scholarships for minority students.

“The art of illuminating as practised in Europe from the earliest times – illustrated by borders, initial letters, and alphabets”, 1860. 6th – 16th Century letterforms by the British architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt.

Art & Design

“The artists were my audience.”

Cleo, who married and divorced twice but had no children said, “My paintings are like my children, when I’m on the model’s stand, there is a spirit that comes over me. To be needed after all these years. I cannot think of anything more wonderful.”

Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.

Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

The Art of Protest: Albert Hahn was righteous anger manifest. A graphic character assassin that even the mighty Germany Kaiser feared.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Dope fiends busted. 1950s narcotics crime photography from the archives of L.A. Enquirer.

John Martin’s sister was murdered by a neighbour, one brother was a “perfectly cracked” eccentric philosopher/inventor & the other an insane religious firestarter. Perhaps it’s no surprise John became the ultimate harbinger of The Apocolypse.

Outraged. The 1896 murder of Helen Thomson. Markinch, Fife, Scotland.

Achille Lemot learns the exact price of a mistress in 1870s Paris.

Erland Soderburg. A 1907 matricide. “Then I grabbed a small kitchen knife that was lying on the table. I hacked at her throat, then slashed it and the blood spurted out on me.”

Children of the Runestones. 300 A.D. Sweden.

The Dutch ocean liner Hooft, plagued by rats, burned three times and cursed by a French shipyard that lost 3 ocean liners to fire between 1930-1933.

1800s India. A mystery blue-eyed, pale skinned redhead is painted alongside those of 28 Mughal royals. An anonymous court artist evokes how richly the Indian “1%” lived, in these exquisite and rarely seen paintings.

Found. 3 Untitled works (1974). By an unknown artist working in a daylight atelier in Budapest.

8 mystery photographs from 1908/1910. From within some kind of medical institution or sanitorium somewhere in Eastern Europe. There’s one small clue: The Trendelenburg Position. Maybe.

Painter & early street photographer. The astonishing early street photography that helped George Hendrik Breitner add social realism to his famous paintings of Amsterdam.

India mid-1800s : Dr John Murray, cholera specialist an photographer. He spent 40 years travelling with gear weighing 400 pounds and a servant. His ever so slightly psychedelic negatives made it all worth it.

Samarkand, early 1900s. The first ever colour photographs of the ancient Persian city by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an unknown Russian who invented his own colour photography process.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

Around the world with the rare travel drawings by the American painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Found in the archives of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Creole Cognac, Perfect Popovers, Abu Ben Goulash Sugar Cake and Cabbage Soup. 1970’s nude sketches and recipes from “The Newd Cookbook” featuring Cleo Dorman, perhaps the world’s longest serving nude artist’s model.

“The art of illuminating as practised in Europe from the earliest times – illustrated by borders, initial letters, and alphabets”, 1860. 6th – 16th Century letterforms by the British architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt.