For spring 2026, the Labirinto della Masone presents the exhibition Erté. Style is everything , curated by Valerio Terraroli and organized by Elisa Rizzardi, which from March 28 to June 28, 2026 will introduce the great public to the figure of Erté, one of the greatest exponents of Art Deco in the world.

The exhibition aims to offer a broad reinterpretation of Erté's work, highlighting its complexity and modernity and proposing a careful selection of the artist's extensive production, with particular attention to works created between the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, considered the most original and

successful period of his long career.

Roman Petrovich Tyrtov was born in St. Petersburg in 1892 and in 1912 he moved to Paris at a very young age to pursue his artistic passions; here he naturalized his name to Romain de Tirtoff, from which the pseudonym that made him famous, Erté, was born, from the French pronunciation of the initials of his name.

Between 1913 and 1914, he worked with the renowned couturier Paul Poiret; in 1915, he began a long and successful collaboration with the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, for which he designed about two hundred covers until 1937, a job that allowed him to connect with the entertainment and star system of the time, creating stage sets and costumes for legendary figures like Mata Hari, Marion Davies, and Mistinguett, and for the shows of the famous Folies Bergère. In the 1920s and 1930s, his illustrations were also published in publications such as London News, Cosmopolitan and Vogue, as well as in

musical magazines; in 1922, he arrived in New York, collaborating for years with theater producer George White, and in 1925, he reached Hollywood where he created sets and costumes for various silent films.

Throughout his long career, Erté was a versatile artist, stylist, set designer, and creator of theatrical costumes, but also a jewelry designer and illustrator for the most important international fashion magazines in Paris during the 1910s and 1920s. Erté managed to synthesize in an extremely elegant and unmistakable lexicon the stylistic and decorative elements most characteristic of modernity between the two world wars, becoming one of the most refined interpreters, and is still considered one of the emblematic figures of Art Deco taste, whose works are found in numerous museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the LACMA in Los Angeles to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.