Loie Fuller: Three Publicity Photographs
Anonymous

c. 1899

5 7/8 x 8 3/4 in /
12.7 x 20.3 cm

original photographs

When the American dancer Loïe Fuller arrived in Paris in 1892, every major artist in the city hastened to create art based on her performances-Lautrec, Steinlen, Anquetin, and Chéret all included her in their work. She appeared mostly at Les Folies Bergère, where she was paid 8,600 francs a month for an act that consisted, very precisely, of walking and turning on the stage, waving huge swathes of silk mounted on long poles which she held in each hand. Not truly a dancer, and decidedly overweight for one, Fuller was nonetheless perfectly in tune with what was most modern in both technology and art. Below her, electric lights in changing colors, shining through a glass floor, gave a spectacular, luminous effect to the budding Art Nouveau movement. Her influence at the time was so great that at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, she was allowed to perform in a specially-constructed theater designed by a sculptor and an architect to imitate the flowing movement of her robes. Some art historians even use her act to date the real beginning of Art Nouveau in France.

In December 1892, Lautrec completed his own view of what he called her ‘Samothracic' quality, referring to the armless, winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre. Although Fuller had refused him the offer to do a poster for her, he had been commissioned to do a print for the collector's market by the publisher André Marty. They have since become among his most precious works.