JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME | LA DANSE (LOÏE FULLER)

The artist’s studio, Paris 

Marie Gérôme (the artist's daughter), Paris (from 1904)

Mathilde Follet

Sale: Artcurial, Paris, April 10, 2013, lot 190, illustrated (as Sketch for Loïe Fuller)

Galerie Michael, Beverly Hills

Acquired from the above

In 1892, the Folies Bergère opened its doors to its largest and most diverse audience to date, which had gathered to witness a spectacle unlike anything Paris had ever seen before. Distinguished gentlemen in black dress coats arrived in their carriages while working-class patrons waited outside the storied cabaret for their chance to see Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) perform. Fuller’s dances had already become famous in America, where her life and career had begun, but in Paris they would achieve unprecedented success. Marrying rhythmic movements and expressive choreography with revolutionary new lighting and stage design, mostly of her invention and for which she held over a dozen patents, Fuller transformed herself into “the marvelous dream-creature you see dancing madly in a vision swirling among her dappled veils which change ten thousand times a minute,” (Arsène Alexandre, “Le théâtre de La Loïe Fuller,” Le Théâtre, vol. 4, August 11, 1900, p. 24). French artists too joined the crowds at the Folies Bergère and later, in 1900, at the Exposition Universelle, in order to see Fuller dance on her technicolor stage. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, Jules Chéret, Jean de Paléologue and the Lumière brothers were among the many who created entire series of works in a wide variety of media inspired by Fuller's performances at this time. (Toulouse-Lautrec alone produced sixty versions of a single lithograph in his attempt to capture the dancer’s mesmeric illuminated form.) In 1893, Jean-Léon Gérôme added his name to the list of documentarians, creating two oil sketches and, later, a sculpture of Fuller, which are now at the Musée Georges Garret at Vesoul. (Gérôme may also have exhibited a painting of Fuller at the Cercle de l’Union artistique in 1893.) The present work, given to the artist’s daughter upon his death in 1904, is the only other known representation of Fuller in Gérôme’s vast and wide-ranging oeuvre. It is also the most intimate and spontaneous of this special portrait group.

Gérôme’s sketch may have been started during one of Fuller’s performances or immediately thereafter, when the impression of her act was still vivid in his mind. In contrast to the artist’s typical— and celebrated— style, which featured scientific accuracy and saturated opaque hues, the technique here is loose and expressive, and the paint is thinly applied. Fuller’s gestures and features are not so much recorded as they are suggested by brushstroke and delicate line: her voluminous green silk dress disguises her body, and her arms are all but lost. Gérôme’s growing interest in the depiction of movement through the swirl of fabric or the suspended dynamism of a raised leg and foot is evident, as are his earlier investigations into the postures of dancers in Egypt and classical Greece. Here, however, they are overshadowed by a form of near-abstraction that is both unexpected and new. Indeed, it seems that in this small work France’s greatest and most influential master of Academic conservatism proves himself to be as progressive and avant-garde as his subject, and closer to Symbolism than most biographies and art history books would have us believe.