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THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE 1924 LA BEAUTÉ
In 2025, in a small thrift shop in Namibia, I found something no one expected to exist here — a nearly intact 101-year-old Parisian photogravure art portfolio, La Beauté, Album X from 1924.
What looks at first like an old booklet is actually a rare survivor from the early modernist art world of Paris — the same era that produced Man Ray, Josephine Baker, Picasso’s atelier period, and the birth of Surrealism.
Albums like this were never mass-market magazines.
They were professional tools used by artists, sculptors, photographers and art students as anatomical and lighting references before photography and printing became widespread.
Most of these portfolios were:
(a) torn apart in art studios,
(b) lost in the chaos of WWII,
(c) sold plate-by-plate for profit,
(d) thrown away as “indecent,”
(e) or simply disintegrated over a century of poor storage.
Yet this one survived.
It travelled from 1924 Paris — a city buzzing with modern art, the Olympic Games, early photography studios, and bohemian life — all the way to southern Africa, crossing continents and generations with no record of how it got here...
It lost its cover, but kept what mattered: 31 intact photogravure plates, clean, undamaged, and printed in the same workshop district that produced some of the earliest modern artistic photography.
The statistical odds of such a piece surviving — and then appearing in Namibia — are absurdly small.
These albums almost never leave Europe or the US. Many collectors look for years and never find early issues like this one.
Whether or not another copy exists on the continent is unknown — but realistically, this may be the only surviving Album X (1924) in Africa.
For 225 Namibian dollars, I rescued a cultural artifact that carries:
(a) the faces and forms of women who lived a century ago,
(b) the craft of early photogravure printing,
(c) the history of Parisian art education,
(d) and the improbable journey of an object that should not have survived.
This tiny portfolio is a reminder that history doesn’t always sit in museums...Sometimes it hides on a dusty thrift shop shelf, waiting for someone paying attention.
And now it’s preserved — properly, respectfully — for another hundred years.
Hopefully.
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