May 08, 2006 - Sale 2079

Sale 2079 - Lot 101

Price Realized: $ 2,760
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
EMIL CARDINAUX (1877-1936) SALOME. 1914.
55 1/4x38 inches. J. C. Muller, Zurich.
Condition B+: repaired tears at edges; vertical and horizontal folds.
Cardinaux studied painting with Germany's von Stuck, and also worked in Paris before returning to Switzerland where he became one of the founding fathers of Swiss poster art. In 1908, his poster for Zermatt with its flat colors and broad outlining was a revolution in the Swiss graphic art world. And in 1914 he designed a fauvist image of a yellow horseman astride a green horse to promote a Swiss Exhibition (an image which proved to be scandalous, as it was on such a patriotic subject that the normally passive Swiss surprised everyone by rallying against it). This same fauvist approach can be recognized here, in a poster he created the same year. Sensuously evoking smoke and the exotic Far East through a lithe, curvy dancer, Cardinaux employs flat surfaces in crude colors with a strong painterly rendering to help build a powerful Orientalist image. This style is dramatically different from the soft-toned almost watercolor-like tourist posters he designed later in his career. Cardinaux 39, Schweiz p. 32.