Bibliography
Catherine Lepdor, Steinlen. Coups de griffe et patte de velours, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, coll. Espace Focus, n. 11, 2023.
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.
Jacques Christophe, Steinlen. Partitions musicales illustrées. Chansons et monologues d’Aristide Bruant, Lyon, Aléas, 2004: n. 96.
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen met the performers at the legendary Chat Noir cabaret soon after he came to Paris in the early 1880s, and soon became the star illustrator of its eponymous magazine. When the Chat Noir moved premises in 1885, the songwriter Aristide Bruant took over its Montmartre site for his own cabaret, Le Mirliton, launching a new magazine of the same name. It often headlined with the scores and words of his most popular songs and was generally illustrated by Steinlen, who used the pseudonym Jean Caillou in his early career.
Between 1884 and 1895, Steinlen produced around five hundred drawings for 116 of Bruant’s musical works, many of them printed in Le Mirliton. 1888 and 1895 saw the two volumes of their most emblematic collaboration, Dans la rue. Chansons et monologues. Dessins de Steinlen [In the streets. Songs and monologues. Drawings by Steinlen]. The pair fell out in the late 1890s against the backdrop of the emerging avant-garde movement, when Steinlen refused to keep milking the nostalgic image of Bohemian Montmartre.
Steinlen’s drawings for Le Mirliton are annotated with notes about colouring for photomechanical reproduction. Here, he cut out some small advertisements printed in the magazine and added them to his street scene as public advertising posters, an increasingly common sight at that time. The drunkard’s hands extend outside the frame, blurring the line between drawing and text. Aristide Bruant would maximise profits by carefully copying his own songs on to a piece of card and adding one of Steinlen’s original drawings to sell on.