I’ve had reason to mention the Austrian artist in Shanghai Friedrich “FH” Schiff many times, most recently in this post about his illustrations for a photography book with Ellen Thorbecke – Peking Studies (1934 – click here to read). Schiff was born in Vienna in 1908. He attended the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and then the Akademie der bildenden Künste from 1924. In 1930, he travelled to Shanghai to visit his cousin Francis Gmehling, who ran an art and antiques shop there. He decided to stay and established himself as an artist and press illustrator, also opening a School of Applied Art. He worked with many restaurants and nightclubs including the Maskee, Roxy, The Pelican, Maxim, La Cumparsita, Bolero, Blue Peter Bar, (Jack Reilly’s) DD’s and Silk Hat. His cartoons, portraits and other work were published and mentioned in the local press, such as The North China Daily News, The Shanghai Herald, The China Journal, Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and the Shanghai Daily Tribune.
FH Schiff by the well known Shanghai photographer Sanzetti
The great collector of old China ephemera Roy Delbyck saw my post and sent me the documents below related to the Gresham Apartments. Roy had acquired a batch of documents relating to the property seemingly owned by a Japanese lawyer named K Sugunama. He had inquired about the 29 residential units and four shops in the Gresham Apartments (where he lived at #12a) at 1228 Avenue Joffre (HuaiHai Lu) and some retail premises on Rue Gaston Kahn (Jiashan Lu), both in the French Concession. The documents were overseen at the offices of the well-known Frenchtown lawyer Paul Premet on Avenue Edward VII (Yan’an Lu) – Premet was known as a regular in the Shanghai courts and most famously had been engaged by accused Soviet spies in the 1920s and represented several Shanghai beauty queens (click here)
Among the list of renters in the Gresham Apartments in late 1941, is FH Schiff. There he is at #27…. Earlier records have one Otto Blume living at #27 so we can conclude that Schiff moved in sometime after January 1941.
London: Two upcoming opportunities to see Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, directed in London by EA Dupont, 1929.
Anna May Wong is perfectly cast as Shosho, a dishwasher so charismatic her elevation to the stage transforms the fortunes of a struggling nightclub. Between bustling kitchens, smoke-filled dive bars and art-deco dining halls, Shosho ascends, drawing envy and desire in equal measure. Wong outshines even the excess and sparkle of Alfred Junge’s opulent art direction in this tragic tale of mystery and murder
The BFI on the Southbank is doing 2 screenings of Piccadilly:
David Wiley (who was the grandson of a Venetian master woodcarver) is best known as the BBC’s veteran Vatican correspondent, died last week at 93. I hadn’t known that prior to his long stint in Rome he had reported from Algeria, Vietnam and China. Wiley reported from Saigon on the early stages of the Vietnam War. In 1965 he based himself in Beijing at a crucial moment on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, one of the first BBC correspondents back in China since 1949.
You can hear some of Wiley’s amazing reporting from Saigon and Beijing in this BBC radio tribute to Wiley…..
Two untitled studies of Chinese subjects by British artist Hilda May Gordon (1874-1972). Painted during her visit to China on a multi-stop six year tour of Asia between 1922-1928….
Gordon grew up on the Isle of Wight to Scottish parents who had previously lived in South Africa. She studied in part under the highly influential Frank Brangwyn. In 1922 she embarked on an independent round-the-world trip which eventually took six years to complete and involved visiting 22 different countries, including a number of the Balkan countries, Greece, India, China, Korea and Japan
Happy Publication Day to Jerome Sauvage, whose fascinating memoir of working for the UN in the DPRK, Witness to North Korea, reveals the country at a crucial time for the regime and the UN organisation is now available everywhere. It’s the latest book in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series of shorter books on contemporary Asian issues…. And here’s the author in conversation about his experiences and the book with Alannah Hill of the essential NK News….
Learnt something new today….. This type of French brioche is called Le Chinois because of a popular French idiom. It actually originates from Germany and the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, where its traditional name is Schneckenkuchen (literally meaning “snail cake” due to its spiral, snail-like shape). When the pastry was first imported into wider France bakers understandably found Schneckenkuchen entirely impossible to pronounce. In French, when something is completely incomprehensible, people say, “C’est du chinois” (literally, “It’s Chinese to me”). The nickname stuck. Bakers referred to the cake as “that Chinese stuff,” and the shorthand nickname Chinois permanently stuck as its official French name. So now you know too…
