AND ANOTHER THING
A dumpy girl from Chicago who was the toast of Naughty Nineties Paris
PAUL JOHNSON
Recently I bought an alabaster bust of a woman, done (I guessed) in Paris in the sec- ond half of the 1890s. It is of the very essence of art nouveau, the woman's hair being dressed in three swirling confluences, one on each side of her head, the third on top. In its own way it is one of the most delightful objects I have ever acquired and has been much admired by visitors. Then, this week, browsing through a reprint of Lara-Vinca Masini's comprehensive catalogue of art nouveau, I discovered who the sitter was.
My bust is undoubtedly of Loie Fuller, the American dancer from Chicago, who fascinated Parisian audiences in the 1890s when she gave a 45-minute display every evening at the Folies Bergere. I knew of Fuller only through Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec's 1892 study of her in crayon. In fact, scores of artists tried to capture Loie, in pencil and oils, in pastel and gouache, in glass and bronze, marble, stone, plaster and wood — as well as alabaster. She is the sub- ject of one of Jules Cheret's most striking posters for the Folies Bergere, and the architect-decorator Henri Sauvage built a theatre for her act at the Exposition Uni- verselle in Paris in 1900.
Loie Fuller was a brassy girl, not intended by nature to be a dancer at all. She was plain and rather stockily built. By training she was an actress, and was performing in a routine piece when an accidental combination of lighting and costume — her dress was so long that she picked it up in both hands to move across the stage and the stage lights shone through it — led the audience to shout, 'A butterfly!' and then, when she turned round, 'An orchid!' (I am quoting her own account.) This gave her an idea. She constructed her own voluminous outfits of silk and other lightweight, transparent mate- rials, which she extended on either side using hand-held batons, and she employed a team of specialist lighting electricians to provide a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of colour. Using these devices, she choreographed four main dances: the Serpentine, the Violet, the Butterfly and the White Dance. Audiences were not then accustomed to the use of coloured stage lighting for aesthetic purpos- es, and they were enraptured.
From New York and London, Loie Fuller took her show to Paris where (after it was turned down by the Opera Gamier), it was put on by the Folies, opening on 5 November 1892 and running for 600 per- formances. Art nouveau was then the fash- ionable aesthetic and La Loie seemed to personify it. The French, in their funny, condescending way, took her to their hearts, and artists from all over Europe came to Paris to see, draw and paint her.
The critics were at a loss how to charac- terise LoIe's dancing, or to decide whether it was a dance at all. She moved her legs very little and achieved her effects through her arms and hands and sinuous body movements. Jean Lorraine, in his famous series Poussieres de Paris, confessed himself baffled: 'Was it a dance? Was it a projec- tion of light, or an evocation of some kind of spirit? A mystery.' The great American dancer Isadora Duncan wrote of the per- formance: 'Before our very eyes she turned into many-coloured, shining orchids, into a wavering sea-flower, and at length into a spiral-like lily, all the magic of Merlin, the sorcery of light, colour, flowing form . . . I was entranced. She transformed herself into a thousand colourful images before the eyes of her audience. Unbelievable. Not to be repeated or described.'
Having held Paris spellbound, Loie in turn fell under the dangerous wand of that ego- centric devourer of women, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She had, as it happened, begun her Chicago career as a child temper- ance lecturer and she had a quasi-religious streak which made her a born worshipper. Rodin was delighted by her dancing and exclaimed: 'C'est une femme de genie.' He saw her art as wholly aesthetic, devoid of sex, and wrote: 'Paris and all the cities in which she has performed are under obligation to her for the purest emotions. She has reawak- ened the spirit of antiquity.'
Her lack of obvious sexuality may explain why he was unable to capture her in stone or bronze or even in line, though he certainly tried. Robert de Montesquiou, the leading society aesthete, immortalised in Boldini's famous painting and the hero of the 'per- verse' novel A Rebours, actually wrote verses about her. But most found her, in the flesh, on the dumpy side — Jules Renard, who I'm the new-style cricket that's attractive to young people.' caught sight of her in an omnibus, wrote her off as `cette figure commune de grosse fille qui aurait la manie de se peindre comme use actrice'. She took Marie and Pierre Curie to Rodin's studio and afterwards their daugh- ter, Eve Curie, called her 'an odd, badly dressed girl, with a Kalmuck face innocent of make-up, her eyes as blue as a baby's'. But Rodin took Loie to his bed all the same, and she, though lesbian-inclined, fell in love with him. She said that, at the entrance to his villa, 'my heart leapt for joy, like the dog that precedes one in quest of the master of the house'. She was then 40, and her chances of keeping Rodin's attention for long — count- less women were after him — were slim. But Loie, as her career showed, was a business- woman. In return for his attentions, however transitory, she made him an artistic star in America. She organised his first American one-man show, at Gramercy Park, New York, in 1903. The New York Times com- pared his sculpture to Wagner's music- dramas, and he was made. Today, Philadel- phia, like Paris, has a museum entirely devot- ed to his work.
Despite this, La Loie was soon ousted from Rodin's bed by the young Finnish sculptress, Hilda Flodin. And Hilda, in turn, introduced Rodin to Gwen John, the gamine sister of Augustus, the young star of the Slade who was already famous. Gwen, of course, was then a nobody, being a woman, but she had what Rodin called un corps admirable. He used her as a model and, as his biographer, Frederick Grunfeld, puts it, `got into the habit of sleeping with her when the posing sessions were over and the other assistants had gone home'. Grunfeld adds: `Sometimes Hilda Flodin would join them in their love-making to form what Alice Mir- beau would have called le groupe de Carpeaux'. La Lok, her dancing days over, had no chance against that lot. But Rodin owed her a big commercial debt and he was conscious of it. In his will he bequeathed Loie one quarter of his entire estate. Howev- er, not long before he died the French artis- tic authorities tempted him with the offer of an entire museum to himself. Egoistical to the end, he fell for it, wrote a new will and left the French state everything.
So La LoIe lost her legacy. And now few people have ever heard of her, though there was an exhibition devoted to her in Rich- mond, Virginia, in 1979. Maybe they ought to turn her into a movie. I think of these things as I gaze at her luminous image.
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