FLEUR COWLES two autographs ARTIST Publisher

Description

FLEUR COWLES
-   two very nice
autographs - one is a handwritten note/letter, written on a postcard from Spain.  Miss Cowles sent this to her friend actress Jane Bryan (Mrs. Justin Dart)
. The typed letter was sent to producer Frederick Brisson, husband of actress Rosalind Russell.
AUTHENTICALLY signed, Very GOOD condition.  An uncommon and scarce and RARE autograph.
FLEUR COWLES  (January 20, 1908 – June 5, 2009) was an American writer, editor and artist best known as the creative force behind the short-lived Flair magazine.
Her third husband was Gardner Cowles, Jr. (1903–1982), an heir to the Cowles Media Company, which for a long time owned the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Known as Mike, Cowles was the publisher of his family's Look magazine. They married in 1946 and divorced in 1955. She kept his surname professionally.
Describing herself as "rough, uncut, [and] vigorous" as her trademark Russian emerald ring, she told Time, "I've worked hard, and I've made a fortune, and I did it in a man's world, but always, ruthlessly, and with a kind of cruel insistence, I have tried to keep feminine". In 1950, she was lampooned by the writer S. J. Perelman in The New Yorker as glamorous editor "Hyacinth Beddoes Laffoon"
In 1947, she became an associate editor at Look magazine, and a year later, an associate editor at Quick magazine. She resigned her position at Look in November 1955 upon her separation from Gardner Cowles and moved to Europe, where she served as the magazine's foreign editorial consultant. Before founding Flair, Cowles was a special consultant to the Famine Emergency Committee in Washington, D.C.
Cowles founded Flair magazine in 1950, and it folded a year later. The magazine, which Time described at its launch as "a fancy bouillabaisse of Vogue, Town & Country, Holiday, etc.," was celebrated not only because of its design and editorial production by European art director Federico Pallavicini (né Federico von Berzeviczy-Pallavicini) but also because of its lavish production. It was the resulting cost of production that killed the magazine, since the expensive special costs (for cover cut-outs for some issues, for example) could not be supported in the long run. This magazine is now sought after by collectors and sells for significant amounts on eBay.
Contributors included W. H. Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Winston Churchill, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí (The Gypsy Angels Of Spain), Lucian Freud, Clare Boothe Luce, Ogden Nash, Saul Steinberg, Rufino Tamayo, Tennessee Williams, and Angus Wilson.
In later decades, Cowles served on various government committees and represented Dwight D. Eisenhower at the coronation of Elizabeth II. She was a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. In 1996, the book The Best of Flair collected much of the material from the magazine she founded. Her paintings from the books Tiger Flower and Lion and Blue are to be made into three-dimensional computer-animated films.
Fleur Cowles' painting "Desert Journey" was reproduced as the cover of the 1968 Donovan album Donovan In Concert.
Fleur Fenton Cowles died on June 5, 2009 at a nursing home in Sussex, England, aged 101.