?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,000
EUGENE OGE (1869-1936) LA LANTERNE. 1902. 55 1/4x39 1/2 inches. Charles Verneau, Paris. Condition B+: repaired tears, time-staining and restored losses along vertical and horizontal folds. La Lanterne was an anti-clerical magazine that began publication on April 22, 1877. Under the editorial direction of the radical socialist Aristide Briand, the periodical was especially vehement during the Dreyfus Affair. Oge started his career as a lithographic draughtsman in the Charles Verneau printing plant. After several years of anonymous work, he earned the right to sign his name to his art and went on to a long career as a successful commercial artist. While his general style can be categorized as simple caricatures, this poster is clearly an exception. The image of a priest-like vampire grasping the church of Sacre Coeur with his talons is one of the strongest anti-clerical images ever designed in fin-de-siecle France. The giant church in Montmartre was built as a monument by the Third Republic in expiation of the French insurgents who had died in the uprising of the Paris Commune. It was a monument considered to be the incarnation of conservatism. "To republicans Sacre-Coeur atop Montmartre symbolized the church's defiance of the republic and of the worker's movement....The very existence of an anti-clerical press was proof enough that Catholicism no longer reigned alone." (Gallo p. 80). This poster's message was so fierce and such a display of Oge's personal politics, that it caused an inseparable rift between him and his printer whom he subsequently left. Fit to Print p. 71, Oge p. 235.
