(New York Jewish Week) – The Google Doodle for Friday, Aug. 4 includes an animation picture of a bespectacled female peering out from among the lenses of orange cat-eye glasses. The Doodle commemorates the 116th birthday of Altina “Tina” Schinasi, the Sephardic Jewish artist, innovator and New Yorker who designed the unique spectacles.
A skilled carver, Schinasi developed the glasses in the late 1930s while working as a window display screen designer in Manhattan. Many significant makers declined her styles, motivated by the Italian Harlequin mask, due to the fact that they were too edgy. She pressed forward and partnered with a store optical shop called Lugene on Madison Avenue, where among the very first sets was offered to author Clare Boothe Luce. Schinasi’s styles removed and she quickly developed her own eyeglasses business.
The “Harlequin”-design glasses, more widely called “cat-eye,” ended up being a trademark of appeal in the late 1930s and were a dominant spectacles shape through the mid-20th century, used by the similarity Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.
By the mid-1940s, Schinasi offered her spectacles business and left to Los Angeles, where she once again concentrated on painting, sculpture and, later on in life, filmmaking. Three of her paintings appeared in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Schinasi was born upon this day in 1907 at her family’s estate at 351 Riverside Drive. She was the youngest of 3 children born into a rich Sephardic family. Her father, Turkish-born Morris Schinasi, was a worldwide tobacco business owner who made his fortune by developing a cigarette-rolling maker and after that offering his own brand name of cigarettes.
Her mom, Laurette Schinasi, was born in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece). The 2 fulfilled when Morris Schinasi was on a business journey to Salonica — Laurette was the granddaughter of his business partner. They wed in 1903.
Upon Morris Schinasi’s death in 1928, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Schinasi left $1.3 million (approximately $23 million in today’s dollars) to be designated to numerous medical facilities and Jewish charities, along with to put up a medical facility in Turkey and a brand-new synagogue building for the Bual Zion Congregation (now the B’nai Zion Congregation), a Conservative synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The Schinasi Mansion was developed by William Tuthill, the exact same designer who built Carnegie Hall, in the early 1900s. It was stated a New York City Landmark in 1974 and was contributed to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Currently owned by Goldman Sachs executive Mark Schwartz, it still rests on West 107th Street and Riverside Drive and is currently the biggest single-family residence along Riverside Drive.
As a kid, Tina Schinasi went to the Horace Mann School in the Bronx prior to starting boarding school at age 12 at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. A bio of Schinasi in an online Dana Hall encyclopedia specifies that Schinasi felt that “although she had many friends, she often felt isolated as one of the only Jewish students on campus and tried to hide that part of her identity from her classmates.”
Upon finishing, Schinasi studied painting in Paris and chose to participate in art school rather of college. In the late 1920s, she started to study painting with Samuel Halpert, a Russian Jewish immigrant, at the Nicholas Roerich Museum on the Upper West Side.
Schinasi’s very first job was creating windows for shops on Fifth Avenue, where she brushed shoulders with the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. She and Dalí then went on to study under George Grosz, who had actually left Germany in 1932 and Maurice Sterne, a Jewish carver and painter from Latvia.
In the late 1930s, Schinasi had her creative development and accomplished a long lasting tradition through her trademarked style of the Harlequin eyeframe. Per Wikipedia, “A walk down the street occasioned this design breakthrough; finding herself underwhelmed by the lackluster frames in an optician’s window, Altina set out to create a frame that conveyed whimsy, mystery and romance.”
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“‘Surely, there must be some way to design eyeglasses that could be attractive! What looks good on a face? What adds to a face? What could a woman wear on her face that would be romantic?’ she wondered.”
In 1939, she won the Lord & Taylor Annual American Design Award. She has actually been credited with changing spectacles into a style device.
In 1960, she produced a documentary about her previous art instructor, the late Grosz, who, though not Jewish, remained in exile from Germany and was active in anti-Nazi efforts. Titled “George Grosz’ Interregnum,” the 29-minute movie was chosen for an Academy Award and won top place at the Venice Film Festival.
Also throughout the 1960s, Schinasi got the movie rights for Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. She commissioned a movie script and consulted with King, Rosa Parks and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement while on a journey to Alabama. All revealed enjoyment about the film. However, Schinasi might not raise financing for the movie and it was never ever made.
Married 4 times, Schinasi had 2 kids, Terry Sanders and Denis Sanders, with her very first other half Morris Sanders. Both of her children ended up being movie directors. In 2014, her grand son Peter Sanders and her granddaughter Victoria Sanders produced and directed “Altina,” a documentary about her life.
“My grandmother Tina was proud of her Jewishness, deeply affected by the rise of the Nazis and personally furnished 13 affidavits to enable Jewish refugees to enter the United States. But we were never practicing Jews in the religious sense,” Peter Sanders informed JTA at the time. The movie depended on video footage shot on the honeymoon of her very first marital relationship in 1927 and 1928, along with a two-hour interview shot by her kid in 1991.
Altina Schinasi passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1999 at age 92.
In a note from Google, the business composed, “Happy birthday to the woman who was a visionary in more ways than one!”
Google likewise thanked Schinasi’s kid Terry Sanders for his contributions to the job. In a note, Sanders composed, “Happy Birthday, Tina! Thank you for your courage, kindness and inspiration. Much love, always,” and signed it on behalf of himself and Schinasi’s 7 grandchildren: Victoria, Juliette, Peter, David, Eve, Jessica and Brittany.
