Altina Schinasi
1907–1999 · American sculptor, filmmaker and designer
Altina Schinasi (New York, 1907 – Santa Fe, 1999) was an American sculptor, filmmaker, entrepreneur and designer, best known for creating the Harlequin eyeglass frame, popularly called cat-eye glasses, which came to define glamour in the late 1930s.
She studied painting in Paris with her cousin René Bensussan and, back in New York, with Samuel Halpert at the Roerich Museum. She worked as a window dresser for Fifth Avenue stores and helped build windows that Salvador Dalí designed for Bonwit Teller. She later studied with George Grosz, whom she had long admired, at the school he founded with the painter Maurice Sterne.
Her best-known breakthrough grew from frustration: unimpressed by the dull frames in an optician's window, she set out to design glasses with whimsy and romance, drawing on Venetian Harlequin masks. The major manufacturers rejected the idea, so she set up her own production, made deals with department stores and won the Lord & Taylor American Design Award in 1939.
In California she devoted more time to painting. Her documentary George Grosz' Interregnum, about the anti-Nazi work of her former teacher, was nominated for an Academy Award and won First Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Her legacy lives on in the strong association of these frames with women, so much so that cartoonist Gary Larson used them to signal adult female characters.