Thérèse Bonney

Thérèse Bonney
Thérèse Bonney
	Therese Bonney wearing medal, February 1942
Born	July 15, 1894; Syracuse, New York
Died	January 15, 1978; Paris, France
Occupation	Photographer; Publicist

Last updated September 30, 2019

Thérèse Bonney (born Mabel Bonney, Syracuse, New York, July 15, 1894 - Paris, France, January 15, 1978) was an American photographer and publicist.

Syracuse is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and Yonkers.

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts. The City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €709 billion in 2017. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, and ahead of Zürich, Hong Kong, Oslo and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong Kong, in 2018.

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to the northeast, Switzerland and Italy to the east, and Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres (248,573 sq mi) and a total population of 67.02 million. France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice.

Bonney was best known for her images taken during World War II on the Russian-Finnish front. Her war effort earned her the decoration of the Croix de guerre in May 1941, and one of the five degrees the Légion d’honneur . She published several photo-essays, and was the subject of the 1944 True Comics issue "Photo-fighter."

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from more than 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

Education

Bonney earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and a master's degree the following year from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She settled in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne from 1918–1919, publishing a thesis on the moral ideas in the theater of Alexandre Dumas, père. She earned a docteur-des-lettres degree in 1921. She thus became the youngest person, the fourth woman, and the tenth American of either sex to earn the degree from the institution. She was also the first American to receive a scholarship from the Sorbonne.^[1] After graduation she received multiple sources of financial aid, including the Horatio Stebbins Scholarship; the Belknap, Baudrillart, and Billy Fellowships; and the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation Oberländer grant in 1936, which allowed her to study German contributions to the history of photography.^[1]

The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was founded in 1868 and serves as the flagship campus of the ten campuses of the University of California. Berkeley has since grown to instruct over 40,000 students in approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs covering numerous disciplines.

Radcliffe College former womens college in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges, among which it shared with Bryn Mawr College, Wellesley College, Smith College, and others the popular reputation of having a particularly intellectual, literary, and independent-minded female student body. Radcliffe conferred Radcliffe College diplomas to undergraduates and graduate students for the first 70 or so years of its history and then joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas to undergraduates beginning in 1963. A formal "non-merger merger" agreement with Harvard was signed in 1977, with full integration with Harvard completed in 1999. Today, within Harvard University, Radcliffe's former administrative campus is home to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and former Radcliffe housing at the Radcliffe Quadrangle has been incorporated into the Harvard College house system. Under the terms of the 1999 consolidation, the Radcliffe Yard and the Radcliffe Quadrangle retain the "Radcliffe" designation in perpetuity.

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and part of the Boston metropolitan area.

Career

Beginning in 1925, she thoroughly documented the French decorative arts through photography. At this time, most of the photographs were not taken by Bonney herself, but rather gathered from sources such as the collections of fellow photographers, photo agencies, architects, designers, stores, and various establishments. An ardent self-publicist, Bonney acquired the images directly from the Salon exhibitions, stores, manufacturers, architects, and designers of furniture, ceramics, jewelry, and other applied arts as well as architecture. She sold the photographic prints to various client-subscribers primarily in the U.S. (a small-effort precursor to today's illustrated news agency) and charged fees for reproduction rights in a more traditional manner.^[1] She typed captions and glued them to the backs of the photographic prints. These photographs, sometimes garnered without permissions, were widely published — both with and without published credits.

The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes interior design, but not usually architecture. The decorative arts are often categorized in distinction to the "fine arts", namely painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale sculpture, which generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate the intellect.

The applied arts are all the arts that apply design and decoration to everyday and essentially practical objects in order to make them aesthetically pleasing. The term is used in distinction to the fine arts, which are those that produce objects with no practical use, whose only purpose is to be beautiful or stimulate the intellect in some way. In practice, the two often overlap. Applied arts largely overlaps with decorative arts, and the modern making of applied art is usually called design.

A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, or news service.

She attended the 1930 "Stockholmsutstäliningen" (Stockholm Exhibition) and gathered photographs there. While in the Netherlands, she collected images of contemporary Dutch architecture.

The Netherlands, sometimes informally called Holland, is a country located in Northwestern Europe with some overseas territories in the Caribbean. In Europe, it consists of 12 provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with those countries and the United Kingdom. Together with three island territories in the Caribbean Sea—Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba—it forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The official language is Dutch, but a secondary official language in the province of Friesland is West Frisian. In the northern parts of the country, Low German is also spoken.

After her decade-and-a-half activities in publicity and the photography of the decorative arts and architecture by others, Bonney took up photography herself and became a photojournalist. Her concerns with the ravages caused by World War II informed her images, which focused on civilians. Her early photographs focused at first on the individuals at the Russian-Finnish front. For her documentation of this demographic, she was granted the Order of the White Rose of Finland medal for bravery. She also traveled through western Europe during the war, taking photographs of children in dire conditions. A collection of the images were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940 and later published in her 1943 book Europe's Children. Other activities included serving with the Croix-rouge (French International Red Cross).

The Order of the White Rose of Finland is one of three official orders in Finland, along with the Order of the Cross of Liberty, and the Order of the Lion of Finland. The President of Finland is the Grand Master of all three orders. The orders are administered by boards consisting of a chancellor, a vice-chancellor and at least four members. The orders of the White Rose of Finland and the Lion of Finland have a joint board.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2018 population of 8,398,748 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km²), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 19,979,477 people in its 2018 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 22,679,948 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

Toward the end of her life, Bonney donated her estate of furniture to her Alma mater in Berkeley, California, and photographs and negatives — many duplicates of one another — to a number of other institutions in the U.S. and France. Other documents and books were donated to St. Bonaventure University by Ralph King.^[1]

In France, approximately 3,000 of her existing negatives are part of the collection of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historique et des Sites (CHMHS), formerly stored in Paris and today in St. Cloud. (In 2000, the CHMHS became the Centre des monuments nationaux [CMN].) The CHMHS archive has been digitally copied to save the images, due to the deteriorating negatives. Approximately 2,000 negatives and 1,500 prints are a part of the collection of the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris. And 3,000 negatives exist in the Fort de Saint-Cyr, Montigny-le-Bretonneux (Yvelines).

In the U.S., approximately 4,000 vintage photographic prints were donated to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, initially organized in the 1990s with funds from the Smithsonian Institution Women's Council (SIWC) by archivist Mel Byars. But not all exist today. Her extensive collection of World War II photographs, photographic portraits of designers and architects, paintings by 20th-century artists, and her furniture (including examples by Pierre Chareau) was donated to the library of University of California, Berkeley. Some 6,200 photographs are held by the Photography Collection of the New York Public Library, including large numbers of images from Finland. The CNMHS and the Cooper-Hewitt collections are accessible; the University of California's is not.

Personal life

Bonney never married. She claimed to have adopted a child, but legally did not. She provided a false date of her birth, which has since been corrected by an extant birth certificate, a copy held by a biographer, Claire Bonney.^[2]

Exhibitions

"War Comes to People: History Written with a Lens by Therese Bonney," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1940.
"Selections from the Thérèse Bonney Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum," International Center for Photography, New York, 1976.
"Paris Recorded: Thérèse Bonney Collection," Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, 1985.
"Aren't They Lively?: An Exhibition of the Bequest of Thérèse Bonney, Class of 1916, University of California," Berkeley Art Museum, June–September 1992.

Works

With sister Louise Bonney. Buying Antique and Modern Furniture in Paris. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929 | Library of Congress NK949.P27.B6
With sister Louise Bonney. French Cooking for American Kitchens. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929 | Library of Congress TX719.B673
With sister Louise Bonney. Guide to The Restaurants of Paris. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929 | Library of Congress TX637.B6
With sister Louise Bonney. A Shopping Guide to Paris. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929 | Library of Congress DC708.B55
Remember When: A Pictorial Chronicle of the Turn of The Century and of The Days Known as Edwardian....From The Collection of M. Therese Bonney. New York: Coward McCann, 1933 | Library of Congress N7592.B6
Europe's Children, 1939 - 1943, New York: Rhode Publishing, 1943 | Library of Congress D810.C4 B68 1944
Rattray, R. F. with photographs by Bonney. Bernard Shaw: A Chronicle. New York: Roy Publishers, 1951 | Library of Congress PR5366.R3

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References

Mary Blume. "The First and Only Thérèse Bonney," International Herald Tribune, 29–30 December 1973
Nan Robertson. "In a Life of Firsts, She Has Few Regrets," The New York Times, 25 July 1976, p. 38
"Therese Bonney, at 83; a Journalist in France" (obituary), The New York Times, 26 January 1978, p. B2
Carol Mann. Paris Between the Wars, New York: Vendome, 1996 | ISBN 0-86565-981-8
Mel Byars. The Design Encyclopedia, New York: Wiley, 1994 | ISBN 0-471-02455-4
Claire Bonney. "Thérèse Bonney: The Architectural Photographs," a doctoral dissertation, Zürich: University of Zürich, 1995.
Lisa Schlanaker Kolosek. The Invention of Chic: Thérèse Bonney and Paris Moderne, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002, ISBN 0-500-51096-2, copublished as L’Invention du chic. Thérèse Bonney et le Paris moderne, Paris: Éditions Norma | ISBN 978-2-909283-72-2

1 2 3 4 "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2009-11-29.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-07-21. Retrieved 2009-11-29.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

External links

Library of Congress, Therese Bonney
Thérèse Bonney Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Thérèse Bonney Collection Archives, Stanford University
The Therese Bonney Collection, St. Bonaventure University, Friedsa Memorial Library Archives, Journalism Collections
Library of Congress, True Comics , v. 4, no. 37 (July 1944)
Selected images by Bonney in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum collection.