1900s

Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.

Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.

From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.

This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.

For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.

And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer. 

SKI ART: William Russell Flint (1880-1960)

The careful, almost technical, depiction of Norwegians skijoring behind motorcycles in 1906 shows a passion for detail learned when William Russell Flint was a medical illustrator in London from 1900 to 1902. Born in Scotland, Flint had come south from Edinburgh’s Daniel Stewart College and the Edinburgh Institute to study at Heatherley’s Art School and The British Museum.

Flint’s national recognition began when he became an artist for the Illustrated London News, the well-to-do’s glossy weekly that covered politics, society, fashion, and sport. In 1906, Flint had been intrigued by skiing and then had learned how the speed and excitement of skijoring behind motorcycles was opening up a new sport in Norway.

Skijoring behind horses originated to transport military dispatches. It was a new social sport taken up in the St. Moritz area in the early years of the 20th century. Would motorcycle skijoring become the latest attraction? Enough to titillate the English skiing class, for certain. But not, in fact, enough to make it part of the skiing holiday, at least not in Switzerland, nor in Norway.

This was not Flint’s only skiing work. Years later he painted “Winter Sport,” in his own words a “big watercolor of five girls skiing on the practice slopes of Flims in the Engadine” of Switzerland. Flint also illustrated Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1907), W. S. Gilbert’s Savoy Opera (1909) and a 1913 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Flint exhibited five watercolors in the 1922 International Exhibition in Chicago and in 1936 was elected president of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours (now the Royal
Watercolour Society), a post he held for 20 years.

In 1947, he was knighted for his contributions to art. Details of Flint’s art life can be found in In Pursuit: An Autobiography, published in London by the Medici Society in 1970. —E. John Allen

Lady Day Hits the Slopes

In 1952, John Sihler, owner of the Red Onion Bar and Restaurant in Aspen, Colorado, hired Billie Holiday to sing at the Onion as part of the Wintersköl events in January. The town was already attracting Hollywood stars and famous musicians. In the 1950s, the Onion alone hosted greats Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. Holiday performed for six nights and put Aspen firmly on the live-music map.

“My mother was a waitress at the Red Onion when Billie sang there,” says artist and former longtime Aspen local Judy Haas. “There used to be a photo of her on the walls of the Red Onion, with Billie Holiday singing on stage!” At the peak of her fame, Holiday got to know some of the Onion’s employees who were aspiring performers, and after closing each night would sit and watch and give them tips while they sang. It wasn’t the usual behavior for a huge star and those who were there never forgot it.

It also wasn’t standard for visiting performers to learn to ski, but Holiday did that as well. This image shows her in a fur coat with a pair of what appear to be 10th Mountain Division signature white skis slung over one shoulder and 10th Mountain poles to match over the other. The photographer was the late Patrick Henry, who worked with the Berko studio in Aspen, and as far as anyone knows never provided many details on the shoot.

While this may have been a publicity photo for her Red Onion booking, she was seen by many people taking a lesson with a ski instructor on Aspen Mountain.

During her 1954 European tour, UPI distributed a photo of Holiday getting up from a tumble on skis. The shot ran in Jet magazine, on February 25, 1954. The UPI caption read: “Billie Holiday Clobbers. While satisfying her newfound enthusiasm for skiing, singer Billie Holiday—now touring Europe—takes a spill in Zurich, Switzerland. Miss Holiday first tried skiing in Aspen, Colo.”

The Red Onion, built in 1892, at the height of Aspen’s silver boom, closed briefly in 2007. At that time it had been serving guests for 115 years, making it the oldest such business in Aspen. It reopened in 2009 but closed for Covid-19, and needs renovation before reopening.

Honoring the Red Onion’s legacy as a music venue, Jazz Aspen Snowmass (JAS) has purchased space above and adjacent to the Onion that will host the JAS offices, as well as rehearsal, lesson and performance spaces—and a gallery featuring some of its thousands of images of legendary artists. This photo is one of its prizes.— Jay Cowan

Rites of Spring

At the end of April, about 1,800 enthusiasts celebrated the end of the Siberian winter by skiing Sheregesh resort in swimwear. It was the eighth annual Grelka Fest, named for a Russian hot-water bottle. Numbers didn’t quite reach the Guinness-certified world record of 1,835 set here in 2015, according to The Siberian Times. Originally billed as a bikini-skiing event, the rules were relaxed to allow one-piece swimwear for women and trunks for men. Swimwear skiing has been a rite of spring around the world at least since 1948 when Mt. Baker, Washington, staged its first Slush Cup pond-skimming contest. Inevitably, bikini slaloms followed, held at dozens of resorts on all continents. Many of these are charity
fundraisers. Some skiers go too far. For a quarter century, Crested Butte allowed nude skiing on the last day of the season, but after a few rowdies got drunk and disorderly, a dress code was enforced around 1996.

Two First Descents

On April 30, Polish mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel made the first ascent of 20,269-foot (6,178m) Yawash Sar II in the South Ghujerab Mountains in Karakorum, Pakistan. He immediately skied back to base camp and turned his attention to nearby 20,000-foot (6,096m) Laila Peak. With Jędrek Baranowski, he summitted on May 10. They then made the first ski descent, from just below the summit.

Bargiel, 33, is most famous for the 2018 first ski descent of K2, the second-highest peak in the world and considered by many as the most dangerous. He reported that his descent of Yawash Sar II was an altogether different experience. “The wall was very demanding, especially in the summit cone, but the descent was quite enjoyable,” Bargiel posted. “The descent itself took about 2 hours; It was icy at the summit, ropes were needed. Jędrek Baranowski, who also took part in the summit attack, waited for me halfway.”

Snapshots in Time

1955 A RELAXED NEED FOR SPEED
When the news came over the radio that Ralph Miller had just skied 109.04 miles per hour on August 26, SKI editors phoned him in Portillo, Chile, to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. What did it feel like? “Pretty fast.” What were you wearing? “Oh, just goggles and a t-shirt.” —“SPEED RECORD” (SKI MAGAZINE, October 1955)

1981 TEACUP STEEPS
The headwall of Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire is shaped like the inside of a teacup—and it is just about as steep, relatively speaking. On Memorial Day weekend, the most populous time for the headwall, skiers at various stages of paralysis, bravado and skill will be found adhering to the slope one way or another. —PETER MILLER, “SKIING THE STEEPS” (NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 25, 1981)

1996 YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION
The Shaped Ski Revolution is here and it will make skiing more fun. It’s a revolution that will free thousands of skiers from the drudgery of the skidded turn, and thousands more will ski longer, stronger and faster. —JACKSON HOGEN, “REVOLUTION” (SNOW COUNTRY MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1996)

2018 ONE MORE REASON TO KEEP SKIING
Skiing is a form of interval training, which has lately become one of the hottest fads in the fitness world. After pushing yourself for anywhere from 20 seconds to 15 minutes during a run, you get a nice break as you ride back up the hill. A growing body of evidence suggests this on-off style of training—working hard for a few minutes, then taking a breather—can provide a range of benefits, from extending your life to improving your fitness levels. —MARKHAM HEID, “WHY SKIING IS A RIDICULOUSLY GOOD WORKOUT” (TIME MAGAZINE, JANUARY 25, 2018)

2021 50 YEARS A COWBOY William Winston Kidd celebrated his 50th anniversary as the indefatigable Director of Skiing at Colorado’s Steamboat Resort in April. At the 1964 Innsbruck Games, Kidd and teammate Jimmie Heuga were the first American men to win Olympic medals in alpine skiing, taking home slalom silver and bronze, respectively. Ever since, the always approachable Kidd, now 78, has helped bring skiing to the masses. He also influenced ski fashion—as only he could.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.

The sport underwent a revolution more than a century ago, when skiers gradually shifted from a single shaft to holding a pair of poles.

By Luzi Hitz with Seth Masia

At a military cross country race in Chamonix, in 1908, the French and Italian squads showed up each with a single long pole, as they’d been taught by their Norwegian instructors. But the Scandinavians pulled a fast one: All their racers pushed off with two poles and sprinted away in a modern diagonal stride. The northern platoons took the first eight places out of 30 finishers. A couple of the locals were so disgusted at being passed that they threw away their “grands batons” and raced pole-free, finishing ninth and 13th. It marked the end of the single-pole era, at least for ski competition.

Double-poling was not new. Right from the beginning, hunters on skis used a spear for balance and propulsion. But if need arose, a hunter could use his bow as a second pole. Dating from 5,000 years ago, rock art in northernmost Karelia (Russia) shows ski tracks with pole plants on either side. Saami (Laplander) reindeer herders traditionally used two poles (see the Moses Pitt woodcut from 1680, and a better-known drawing in Per Högström’s 1747 description of the Saami.)...

The critical role of skis in 130 years of Arctic exploration and adventure.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

Throughout the modern era of polar exploration, skis have played an invaluable role in propelling explorers forward -- sometimes with dogsled teams, sometimes without, and more recently with kites to glide across the polar regions at speeds averaging 7 mph. Modern-day polar explorers including Eric Larsen, Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Richard Weber all continue to use skis today, taking a page right out of history. Were it not for skis, reaching the North and South poles in the early 1900s might have been delayed until years later.

To read the rest of this story, see the November-December 2017 issue of Skiing History magazine. To read the digital edition online, you must be a member of ISHA. Not a member? Join today!

Crans-Montana, Kitzbühel dispute first downhill race

In early April 2011, a commemorative race was held on the ski slopes of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Roberts of Kandahar downhill. Some 260 participants, organized into 60 teams, descended eight miles from the Plaine-Morte to Montana-Violettes, most of them wearing vintage skis and clothing, including retro glacier glasses. In the promotional flyer, event organizers said the race also marked the centennial of the “first official alpine ski race in history.”

This claim is contested by ski historians in Kitzbühel, who produced documents from the Kitzbühel Winter Sports Club, which held a “Ski Race for the Club Master Title” on the Hahnenkamm in April 1906. The timed downhill race covered three kilometers (1.86 miles) with a vertical drop of 624 meters (2,047 feet). It was won by Sebastian Monitzer in eight minutes, one second. “The quoted difference in altitude and route are almost identical to [the course] used for the ladies downhill in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the Super G of today,” says the club’s letter of rebuttal. “Further ‘pure downhill’ races were held in subsequent years,” including a team downhill in February 1910. –John Fry