?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
JULES CHERET (1836-1932) FOLIES BERGERE / LES GIRARD. 1877. 22x16 3/4 inches. Cheret, Paris. Condition A-: vertical and horizontal folds. This is one of Cheret's rarest and most mythical posters. It was not offered by Sagot in his 1891 catalogue of posters. It did not appear in the tremendous poster exhibition in Reims in 1896 (meaning it was not part of Alexandre Henriot's extensive collection), and has appeared at public auction only once in the past several decades! Cheret designed two versions of this poster for the Girards. This version, the first and most rare, was printed in 1877, when the troupe appeared at the Folies Bergere, with a red background, and the performers in green. The second version, printed two years later, simply inverted the colors. The image is extraordinarily modern, with its solid background, extravagant movement of the composition and the manner in which the unrealistically elongated limbs of the performers are entwined with the text. The image is actually a fair representation of their contortionist act, which Thetard, writing in the Merveilleuse Histoire de la Cirque, described as "disarticulated from their legs." Inexplicably, having virtually created modern graphism with this poster (with the use of flat colors, the organization of the space and the distortion of the characters), Cheret chose instead to pursue his mastery of color lithography in a more painterly way. Yet it was this image, as pointed out by the art critics Meyer Shapiro and Robert Herbert, that influenced Seurat in his painting, "Le Chahut" (1889-1890), where the vertical and oblique movements reflect Les Girard. Broido 158 (var.), Modern Poster 1 (var.), Word & Image p. 25 (var.).
