?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
JULES CHERET (1836-1932) BAL AU MOULIN ROUGE. 1889. 49 3/4x36 1/2 inches. Chaix, Paris. Condition B: restored losses, restoration and overpainting in top and side margins; repaired tears in margins; light vertical and horizontal folds. Color and image excellent. Cheret is unanimously considered to be the father of the poster. His first recorded attempt at poster art was in 1858 for Offenbach's Orfée aux Enfers<>. By present day standards the result was a dark, messy poster with clumsy color usage, but in its day it was a revolution. Over the next thirty years Cheret perfected the technique of mixing colors, and simplifying his layouts. He also may be the first artist to ever use sex to sell products; in most of his posters he would depict beautiful, care-free, irresistible and jubilant women. They became so popular with the French public, that they were referred to as Chérettes<>. In 1889, with this poster for the opening of the Moulin Rouge<>, Cheret (at the age of 53) reached his stylistic maturity. With thirty years of experience in the field he had resolved and refined all color and composition issues and emerged as a truly outstanding talent who created masterpiece upon masterpiece. For the next decade he produced some of the most vivid and colorful posters ever seen, and was an inspiration to a whole generation of artists, advertisers and consumers. This poster contains all of the life and spirit that were a hallmark of his work. In the forefront a Cherette<> is sitting on a donkey. Behind her, the landmark red windmill, after which the concert hall was named, as are charming girls in gray and black, also on donkeys, arrayed throughout the image as if whirling in the windmill's blades. The typography mimics this spiral composition. Cheret uses crayon and crachis<> to help shade this elaborate poster. Maindron 253, Broido 309, DFP II, 181, Wine Spectator, p. 6, Maitres, pl. 53 Weill, p. 27.
