9 14 Rose Oneil Composition Kewpie Doll With Blue Wings
A Fond Look at the Kewpie Craze
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January 8, 1978
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WHITE PLAINS FROM the early 1900's to the end of World War II, a strange creature captured and clung to the American imagination. Loosely resembling a fat, naked baby, it had oversize eyes, a pug nose, a nearly bald head crowned with a vertical topknot, and stubby webbed hands. its mouth was fixed in a permanent smile, and tiny wings sprouted from its shoulders.
The character, designed and named by Rose O'Neill, was a Kewpie—diminutive fdr Cupid. Within a few years of its birth, the Kewpie had proliferated into a full‐fledged fad. r
At the peak 9f the craze, Kewpies were appearing as drawings, dolls, paper dolls,, ceramic ornaments, lamp bases, talcum‐powder containers, salt and pepper shakers, candy dishes, vases, candlesticks, lapel pins, lucky charMs, and wedding‐cake figures; on chinaware, tin ice‐cream trays, postcards, greeting cards, baby clothing and sheet music; and in advertisements for saddle shoes, garters and Jell‐O.
The 1919 Flo Ziegfeld musical, "Rose of Washington Square," had Kewpie characters in the chorus, and the musical was named for their creator.
Today, Kewpies and Rose O'Neill memorabilia are collectors' items. Dee Seeley, a tag‐sale organizer and curio and antiques collector who lives in White Plains, has 75 Kewpie objects, several original O'Neill drawings, and a scrapbook full of the artist's letters.
According to Mrs. Seeley, Kewpie items are currently valued primarily for their nostalgic qualities, but were popular in their day because they suggested innocence and security.
"About 10 years ago, the nostalgia craze in collecting made Kewpie items very popular," Mrs. Seeley said, "and today they'll sell from anywhere from $30 to several hundred dollars. There is even an International Rose O'Neill Society with several hundred members who meet annually in Branson, Mo., at the old O'Neill home.
"But during their heyday, Kewpies took on a special dimension of popularity, and there really was a craze for them. Naturally, children liked them, but I believe that, to adults, they represented goodness and innocence and, at the same time, that which was disciplined and well‐confined.
"Although they were sprites, they were essentially stable and able to be controlled—an idealization of the way real children ought to be," she said. "But what many people did not realize, I think, is that there was another, darker side to Rose O'Neill and her work." Mrs. O'Neill did not have the simple, carefree life some of her Kewpie fans might have envisioned for her. Born in 1874 in Wilkes‐Barre, Pa., to restless, artistically oriented parents, she won a statewide drawing contest In Nebraska at the age of 14.
"All superlatives, very black and white, fairly drenched with ink, and picturing Temptation leading down into an abyss" was her later description of the prize‐winning sketch.
In 1893, at the age of 19, she moved to New York City, where she studied art and illustrated for magazines like Harper's Monthly, Tires Weekly and Bazaar. After two marriages and two divorces—one husband was a wealthy Virginia playboy; the other, Harry Wilson, a novelist and literary editor—she lived alternately in Europe, Saugatuck, Conn., Branson (where she died in 1944) and 61 Washington Square, designing and creating Kewpies and other artworks and entertaining writers, artists and other bohemians in the manner that later earned her the soubriquet of Rose of Washington Square.
"Rose was a delightful eccentric with light and stormy sides to her nature," Mrs. Seeley said. "Her art included not only the famous Kewpies, but a series of very powerful, very grotesque monster drawings and some poetry that has been compared to the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
"She loved children, but had none and lived for years with her sister, Callista. When she worked or saw friends she insisted on wearing long, flowing silk robes."
Not surprisingly, Rose O'Neill said she had dreamed of the first Kewpie. They were bouncing all over the coverlet, chirping their little newborn name, she said. Their first public appearance was in 1909, in Ladies' Home Journal. As described in a letter to the editor, they were "innocent, unspoiled little souls, perpetually amazed at their own exploits and discoveries."
Within several years, Kewpies were tumbling over pages in Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and other women's magazines, their adventures described in accompanying verse: "Like a jack‐o‐lantern popping through the grass Topknots, waving as they pass."
The Kewpie saga continued through the 30's in magazines, books, comic strips and even paper dolls. In the tradition of artists working with fantasy, Miss O'Neill fabricated an entire locale and peopled it with her own characters.
The first dolls were produced in 1912 by J.D. Kestner of Germany, and were made in bisque, celluloid and composition, sawdust hardened with adhesive.
By 1913, as Miss O'Neill reported in a letter, "the dolls were all over the world." Ranging in size from two to 14 inches, they were unclothed, posed in a straight stance with legs molded together and little blue wings on their shoulders.
Action Kewpies are the most popular among collectors today, according to Mrs. Seeley. She owns several, including the Huggers, a bride and groom posed in an innocent clinch.
But with all the "sweetness" of the Kewpies, there remains a disquieting element to Rose O'Neill's work, Mrs. Seeley said. She calls the Kewpies "cold dolls, not really huggable or pretty'; others might see something vaguely malformed in their pixy faces. The verses that accompany the early drawings sometimes seem feverish, or mildly hysterical in their brightness.
It is in the monster drawings, however, that the grotesque is fully expressed. Exhibited in Paris in 1921, they are pen‐and‐ink pictures of half humanoid creatures, great ape and ramlike beasts, often turning into or embracing men and women. Foreheads are flat, thighs are heavy, expressions are tortured and bewildered.
In one drawing a mother embraces a baby that is more of a monkey‐devil figure, a hairy, squat creature with pointed ears. Critics have described the monster series as depicting the "brutal, pagan, ignorant side of human nature"—a far cry from the roly‐poly Kewpies—perhaps their diametric opposite.
Rose O'Neill died in 1944, of a cerebral hemorrhage, and with her died the Kewpie trend. Mrs. Seeley said that there were "Kewpie dolls being made commercially even today, but it is nut the same, it is just another doll." The mystique of Miss O'Neill's personality, she feels, was such a contributing factor to the Kewpie's popularity that when the "mother" died, the creatures lost their vitality.
Additionally, Mrs. Seeley said, technology and changing values helped to render the Kewpies a thing of the past. "After World War II," she said, "there was a rise in the level of the sophistication of the whole population, including children. Little girls started wanting lifelike dolls they could dress up and play with, dolls like Shirley Temple and Patsy. Kewpies, which were symbolic of sweetness and innocence, were actually impersonal and unrealistic‐looking, and when Rose O'Neill died, they taped out too." ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/08/archives/westchester-weekly-a-fond-look-at-the-kewpie-craze.html
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