Bibliography
Guy Ducrey, Tout pour les yeux. Littérature et spectacle autour de 1900, Paris, PUPS, 2010.
Philippe Kaenel, in collaboration with Catherine Lepdor, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. L’œil de la rue, exh. cat. Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Milan, 5 Continents Editions, 2008: n. 61.
Réjane Bargiel and Christophe Zagrodzki, Steinlen affichiste. Catalogue raisonné, Lausanne, Editions du Grand-Pont, 1986: n. 10.
This poster for a ballet at the Académie nationale de musique in Paris is typical of the craze for all things Japanese in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Japan became fashionable following the re-establishment of commercial links in the Meiji era: Japan began to take part in universal exhibitions, playing into colonial-era France’s enthusiasm for exotica. The arts eagerly packaged Japanese culture for Western audiences, as demonstrated by this poster for a ballet by Léon Gastinel, featuring marches for the goddess Benten and Mikagura waltzes.
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s design includes all the popular clichés – a bamboo frame around the title, Japanese-style lettering, a fan decorated with figures from traditional mangas, a moonlit landscape, and a white pine tree. The main figure wears a tutu and ballet tights and shoes beneath her kimono. Half geisha, half ballerina, she steps towards the audience: she is both an untouchable idol and a woman ready to trade her affections, inviting her wealthy male admirers to join her in her dressing room.
This was one of Steinlen’s earliest poster designs. He worked with a reed pen, brush, and scraper, borrowing the large swathes of colour from Japanese prints. The impression of transparency is created by overlaying a matrix for each of five colours – pale and dark ochre, vermilion, grey, and grey-blue. It was quite a technical feat for its day, using a new photomechanical relief printing process known as gillotage after its inventor, the printer Charles Gillot. His name also features on the poster: perhaps not coincidentally, he was one of the leading collectors of Japanese art of his day.