Lazare Meerson
| Lazare Meerson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 8, 1900 Warsaw |
| Died | June 28, 1938 (aged 37) London |
| Occupation | art director |
| Years active | 1925-1938 |
| Spouse(s) | Mary Meerson |
Lazare Meerson (1900–1938) was a Russian-born art director in the cinema. After emigrating to France in the early 1920s, he worked on some notable French films of the late silent cinema and the early 1930s, particularly those of René Clair and Jacques Feyder. He worked in England during the last two years of his life. He had great influence on film set design in France in the years before World War II.
Lazare Meerson was born in Warsaw, which in 1900 was part of the Russian Empire. He may have begun studying painting and architecture in Russia, but after the revolution of 1917 he moved to Germany and by 1919 he had registered as an art student in Berlin. While in Berlin he gained some experience of designing for the theatre, before leaving for Paris in 1923 or 1924.
His first job in France in 1924 was at Films Albatros in Montreuil (a company which had been formed by Russian exiles in France) where he worked initially as a scene-painter and then as an assistant to some more experienced designers: Boris Bilinski (for L'Affiche), Alberto Cavalcanti (for Feu Mathias Pascal), and Pierre Kéfer (for Le Double Amour). By 1926 Meerson was appointed head of design at Albatros, and during the next three years he was responsible for the art direction on ten films. He formed particularly fruitful partnerships with Jacques Feyder (on Gribiche, Carmen, and Les Nouveaux Messieurs) and with René Clair (on La Proie du vent, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, and Les Deux Timides).
In several of his set designs of the 1920s, Meerson employed a 'restrained modernism', as in the spacious art-deco home of the wealthy Mme Maranet in Gribiche, or the architectural interior of a dancer's apartment, with its big white surfaces and sparse ornaments in Les Nouveaux Messieurs, or the sumptuous premises of the banker Saccard in L'Argent, in which the large open spaces facilitated long camera movements and the complex interplay of light and shadow. Meerson, in 1927, said of his work: "It is an art of self-denial. The designer should constantly conceal himself before the other elements of the production. The frame should never encroach upon the work itself. The setting harmonises with the film. Released from it is that atmosphere which is so important both to the director and to the performers."
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