Lot 409: Loie Fuller/Vol Oriental.

Loie Fuller/Vol Oriental.
GASTON NOURY (1866-?)

Gouache and crayon drawing with metallic gold highlights. Framed.
Loie Fuller's meteoric rise to fame is one of the oddest success stories of the 1890s. Coming from a small Midwestern town in the United States . . . she studied singing, dancing and acting . . . In one play, she noticed how the spotlights, with various color filters, created a rainbow effect on the material of her dress. Fascinated, she experimented with the effect, eventually working up a specialty dance wearing diaphanous materials on which the colored lights played with dazzling results (Gold, p. 116). In a recent and quite revealing biography of the dancer, we read that "the French had always taken Loie more seriously than the Americans had . . . She had maintained her fame by constantly adding something new to her work" (Fuller/Goddess of Light, p. 111). Though perhaps best-remembered for her Fire Dance and Lily Dance, the metallic gold cranes and theatrical masks present on this otherwise sheer costume clearly show that the shrewd Ms. Fuller was not only willing to titillate an audience-she was more than willing to exploit the wave of Orientalism that was rippling across France at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. Noury was born and grew up in Elbeuf where his grandfather was founder and director of the local museum. Although his primary interests were painting and drawing nature subjects, he created several evocative posters of the era. Maindron (1896) indicates that the "young Noury" is one of the best illustrators of the period.
ca. 1898.
5 7/8 x 9 in./14.8 x 22.8 cm