Miss Loïe Fuller

1893

This color lithograph, one of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s most abstract and innovative, depicts the American dancer Loïe Fuller onstage at the Folies-Bergère in Montmartre. Fuller was famous for a mesmerizing dance in which she twirled her voluminous dress amid shifting multicolored lights, surrounded by mirrors. One observer described Fuller as a “marvelous dream-creature you see dancing madly in a vision swirling among her dappled veils, which change ten thousand times a minute.”

Although Toulouse-Lautrec used the same five lithography stones for some sixty impressions, each image is unique. The artist created atmospheric effects of different color combinations and patterns by spattering ink onto the lithographic stone’s surface—a technique called crachis (spit). In imitation of Japanese prints, he also dusted the image with metallic pigments in silver and gold.

Brooklyn’s impression is inscribed to Toulouse-Lautrec’s friend, the critic Roger Marx, who compared original prints to drawings and championed works like this as being “free and spontaneous expression[s] of the artist.”


Titus Kaphar: That’s awesome. . . . I like that. I like the colors of it. It feels very modern, color-wise. This is great.