?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,000
EUGENE OGE LA LANTERNE. 1902. 55 1/4x39 1/2 inches. Charles Verneau, Paris. Condition B+: minor losses, restored minor losses, repaired tears and creases in margins and image; vertical and horizontal folds. Two sheets. 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 talented 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 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.
