No one had to tell Helena Rubinstein to “lean in” — she was changing faces half a century before Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg was born.
How else could a 4-foot-10 Jewish gal from the Polish ghetto build a cosmetics empire?
The Jewish Museum is only just catching up with the makeup magnate, who died in 1965, at 92. Its “Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power” exhibit, opening Friday, is a testament to vision, drive and chutzpah.
Though her products haven’t been sold here since L’Oréal acquired the brand 26 years ago (you can still find them in Asia, Europe, South America and on amazon.com), her charitable Helena Rubinstein Foundation lives on.
And then there’s her life story, a tale Jewish Museum curator Mason Klein calls remarkable — a kind of “Fiddler on the Roof” crossed with “Mame.”
The eldest of eight sisters, young Chaja Rubinstein refused the arranged marriage her father planned for her. Sent off to live with one relative after another, she landed in 1896 in Australia, where her milky skin — which she credited to a cream made by a Polish doctor — awed the weather-beaten women of the Outback.
Soon she was making her own face-saving potion, a mixture of sheep lanolin and herbs. The newly renamed Helena — she probably pulled it from the lady of Troy — called it Valaze, which sounded French, but meant “gift from heaven” in Hungarian.
It certainly was a gift for Rubinstein: She sold vats of it and, with her marketing-savvy-but-philandering husband, Edward Titus, was soon off to London and Paris, selling cream, opening beauty salons and amassing a first-class art collection.
For her, Klein says, makeup was a metaphor for modern art and its mysteries.
“She felt the modern woman needed to create herself on her own terms, rather than adhere to some standard,” he says.
At the turn of the 20th century, when only actresses and prostitutes painted their faces, Rubinstein showed women how to use makeup to make the best of themselves.
“There are no ugly women,” she declared, “only lazy ones.”
She practiced what she preached, writes Lindy Woodhead in “War Paint,” about Rubinstein and her arch rival, Elizabeth Arden, “faithfully rubbing cream onto her face, never forgetting her neck.”
She took foaming baths every morning and gave herself dozens of hand-pats under her chin. She applied her makeup in natural light, to the amusement of pianist Arthur Rubinstein (alas, no relation), whose Park Avenue window overlooked hers.
That she lived there at all speaks volumes both about her grit and 1940s New York: Denied an apartment at 625 Park Ave. because it didn’t allow Jews, Klein says, “She had her accountants buy the building.”
Anti-Semitism also kept her from expanding her empire. Though she opened her first salon on East 49th Street in 1915, it took her 21 years to get to Fifth Avenue.
There, her flagship salon had seven floors of beauty rooms, a library, rugs by Miró, and the dollhouse-size dioramas of period rooms she commissioned, down to the last exquisite detail — a birdcage and skylight, for example, in the miniature Montmartre loft.
Those dioramas are in this show, along with the European, South American, African and Pacific Islands paintings and sculptures Rubinstein acquired — and the 12 Picasso sketches she forced the artist to make of her.
After calling him for 20 years, she finally arrived at his door in Provence and refused to leave until he picked up his pencil (“I’m taking down a dossier,” Picasso wrote, “. . . a few police notes”).
Here, too, are the Elsa Schiaparelli jacket Rubinstein wore on her honeymoon with her 23-years-younger second husband, Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia; the silver ring she gave to Andy Warhol (with her initials, “HR,” in rubies); and many of the necklaces she stored in a filing cabinet — “D” for diamonds, “E” for emeralds, “P” for pearls. She said that whenever her first husband cheated on her, she went out and bought more jewelry.
“Quality is nice, but quantity makes a show,” she once said.
It sure does here.
“Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power”
Runs Friday to March 22 at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street; admission $15 adults, and free on Saturdays; thejewishmuseum.org.