Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 1
Crafting Public Identities: Printed Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Female Icons
An essay for the exhibition catalogue, The Changing Face of Portraiture: People and Places in the Multiple; February 20 – May 23, 2015; University of New Mexico Art Museum
In the nineteenth century, women in the public sphere (actresses, artists, cultural figures, etc.) took advantage of new artistic technologies to craft, manipulate, and promote their image. Understanding that publicity brought recognition and ultimately the chance of success, iconic women of the 1800s carefully constructed their public identities to attract attention, pique interest, and build fashionable or even risqué reputations. The employment of such personas for shock value, expression of sophistication, or to gain stardom challenged nineteenth-century regulatory norms of gender as women rejected traditional, private spheres and roles. For example, American actress Adah Isaacs Menken cultivated a notorious penchant for dressing in men’s clothing; cultural icon Misia Sert represented the epitome of the modern French woman; and French actress Sarah Bernhardt commodified herself as a heroine of eternal fame. The printed portrait served as the primary avenue to shape the public personas of these women, proliferating not only as engravings and etchings, but also the immensely popular pocket-sized cartes-de-viste and monolithic lithograph posters. Such public identities could be formulated through varying relationships between the sitter and the artist, ranging from a close, personal relationship to never having met. Despite differing utilization of printed media and various levels of communication with their artist, each of the aforementioned women carefully crafted their identities with the public portrait and promoted themselves as a talented, modern woman.
THE RISE OF THE CARTE-DE-VISITE
Patented in Paris in 1854 by photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, the carte-de-visite collecting frenzy reached its peak across Europe and America by the 1860s. Celebrity cartes of cherished icons and heroes were particularly coveted. In America, celebrity cartes-de-visite became particularly popular due to the outbreak of the Civil War, as relatively cheap portraits of military and political leaders were in high demand. The rapid influxes of immigration after the Civil War led to a booming entertainment industry; and as Americans gained wealth, so did those who participated in show business.i Although Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 2 theater had long been a popular site of entertainment in America, the inundation of performers from around the world and the increase in population fostered a public audience that devoured every riveting and sordid detail of their favorite icons in the press—an obsession known as the 'cult of personality'.ii
Photographers in Europe and America quickly capitalized on the 'cult of personality' that emerged with the booming interest in theater and celebrity portraits by using publicity photographs to promote both the sitter and the photographer’s studio. Card portraits of celebrities were stamped with photographers’ trademarks, publicizing a particular photographer coveted by the rich and famous. Profits from cartes-de-visite were so great that photographers encouraged the famous to pose for portraits by offering them a flat fee or royalty based on the number of cards sold.iii Such cartes were known as ‘sure cards’, referring to their likelihood of turning a profit.
NAPOLEON SARONY
Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896), already a popular lithographer in the years before the Civil War, learned photography and established studios first in Birmingham, England and then New York by 1866. Sarony took advantage of Europe and America’s growing fascination for theater by fulfilling demand for celebrity portraits, and theatrical portraits later became the photographer’s specialty.iv Sarony introduced accessories and painted backgrounds while posing his sitters in a variety of gestures and expressions. This style departed from the often stationary and expressionless portraits of past photographs, such as the daguerreotypes largely used in the 1840s. Sarony’s imaginative backdrops and dramatic scenarios made the photographer a popular choice for clients ranging from the everyday citizen to the most famous icons of the nineteenth century. Benjamin J. Falk, a friend and competitor of Sarony, stated: “More than all others, he had a gift of seizing what was characteristic and picturesque in his subjects with the quick intuition belonging to the successful photographer, and making these features predominant in his pictures.”v
ADAH ISAACS MENKEN Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 3
American actress Adah Isaacs Menken (1835 – 1868) was one of the most famous clients to sit for Sarony during the early part of his career. As early as 1859, the actress had advertised herself numerous times through cartes-de-visite, ensuring that a sizeable quantity of cartes was available in every city she played.vi Menken’s use of publicity photographs served purposes other than just theatrical advertisement: with the carte-de- visite, she cultivated international notoriety as an “amorous adventuress” who created a variety of fabricated histories for her audiences.vii The dissemination of Menken’s on-stage antics and her unconventional private life through cartes-de-visite led to recognition (and infamy) wherever she went.
Not one to follow traditional roles, Menken married and divorced numerous times. The actress was similarly unconventional in her professional life, embarking on several audacious career moves with her infamous “breech roles”—theatrical plays in which she played a man. Menken appeared in her most notable male role as Mazeppa: the lead character in the melodrama based on Lord Byron’s poem. Her performance sparked a storm of controversy when she appeared on stage dressed in nude tights—thus, “naked”— and tied to a horse. Though critics were far from positive about Menken’s skills as an actress, her voluptuous figure was admired while her courage to appear “nude” on stage was praised.viii
After her preliminary success with Mazeppa in New York, Menken desired to commission a carte-de-visite portraying herself as Mazeppa, the tragic lover, while performing the play in England. The portrait was sure to garner revenue due to the shocking nature of Menken’s part—serving to advertise Mazeppa in England while promoting Menken’s public identity as a daring performer. Disappointed by several photographers who failed to provide her with the perfect portrait, Menken approached Sarony’s Birmingham studio. According to Sarony, Menken permitted the photographer to capture her in eight different poses on the condition that she could pose herself.ix Sarony readily agreed—an out-of-character congeniality for the photographer who was later known for refusing sitters who did not respond to his direction.x When Sarony brought the final cartes-de-visite of Menken as Mazeppa to Menken’s dressing room, the actress was so impressed that she jumped from her seat to kiss the photographer.xi Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 4
Sarony’s success with the picky actress fostered future collaboration. Menken approached Sarony again in the winter of 1865 to create her portrait as Leon, a Mexican slave in John Brougham’s Child of the Sun.xii Again transgressing traditional feminine ideals, Menken’s male persona rode horseback, instigated numerous brawls, and even fired a pistol on stage.xiii Sarony’s negatives for Menken as Leon were sectioned into eight carte-de- visite portraits to one plate that were cut and distributed accordingly. The University of New Mexico Art Museum holds the first pose of one of these plates [Fig. 1].
Figure 1: Napoleon Sarony, Menken as Leon.
In Menken as Leon, the actress lounges on her side wearing the short-brimmed hat and costume of her male role. Sarony was known for creating set designs evocative of Old Master paintingsxiv— seen here in the plush drapery that hangs in elegant contrast to the diagonal line of Menken’s body. Both the actress’s languid posture (reminiscent of a classical Greek statue) and Sarony’s traditional set design attempt to elevate Menken’s status as an actress by using imagery of cherished cultural conventions. In turn, Menken’s sexuality is highlighted through seductive gestures that create shock value when juxtaposed with her male attire. For example, Menken’s left hand tugs at the plunging Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 5 neckline of her striped shirt as her right hand pulls at a pair of unfastened pants, uncovering her bare legs. Through an imaginative set and carefully positioned body, Menken’s portrait as Leon is as much a performance as the actual play. By making clear for the viewer that she is a woman dressed as a man, Menken rejects norms of her gender to provoke viewers and promote her role in Child of the Sun.
Though Sarony most likely influenced the way the actress was posed, it was Menken that chose her controversial roles and sought to promote herself through cartes-de-visite. Menken’s cross-dressing feats, advertised by such cartes, inspired several other actresses in the 1860s. This was the case for actress Lydia Thompson, who moved to New York to appear in a burlesque called Ixion where young women donned the nude tights made famous by Menken’s performance in Mazeppa.xv The popularity of Menken, her stage roles, and her private life can be attributed to the success of cartes-de-visite in the construction, dissemination, and transmission of her identities.
FRENCH POSTERS OF THE BELLE ÉPOQUE
Cartes-de-visite were not the only technological advancement in nineteenth-century printed media. The 1890s saw the golden age of color etching and lithography, where the rapid production and dissemination of monolithic lithograph posters became possible after the invention of steam-powered presses.xvi This technological advancement in printing emerged concurrently with the Belle Époque in France, an era that conflated style and fashion with consumerism. For the bourgeoisie and upper classes of this period, high elegance and self-confidence were valued as enthusiastically as bohemian flamboyance and artistic creation.
After Napoléon III’s employment of Georges-Eugène Haussmann to modernize Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, the city was transformed into an urban stage: swaths of identical buildings lined the grand boulevards, occupied by cafés, shops, and theaters.xvii Kiosks, public restrooms, and even cylindrical columns specifically built to display posters (known as “Morris columns”, after the printer Gabriel Morris) surrounded new parks and public buildings—all sites for advertising and public spectacle. By the 1890s, Paris became the city of poster advertisements, luring customers to the Parisian entertainment scene or Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 6 to purchase consumer goods. Clients in need of advertisements during the Belle Époque sought artists that could create stylistic, eye-catching posters with a speed and accuracy that reflected the modernism of the age.
Women were the “poster-children” of the Belle Époque, reigning as the primary subjects of advertisements, and valued for their style, elegance, self-confidence, and beauty. Often scantily clad, these women seduced consumers to purchase products ranging from cigarettes and booze to lampshades and magazines. Since women held prominent positions in both the high life and the low life of 1890s Paris, their everyday activities were depicted in a variety of ways within poster advertisements. Upper-class women sipped from glasses advertising a particular champagne, sat at their nightstands daintily applying a name-brand perfume, or lounged next to trays of chocolates and biscuits.xviii Women of the middle classes were occasionally pictured in advertisements for bicycles or motorcycles-- their appearance demonstrating to a public audience the ease in mastering new inventions.xix Women of the entertainment industry were often depicted wildly dancing with hoisted dresses, titillating viewers while inviting them to participate in the rambunctious events they advertised.xx Celebrity endorsements were popular at the time as well, and many artists capitalized upon the nineteenth-century 'cult of personality' by featuring well- known female celebrities next to consumer goods or event headlines.xxi
HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC & LA REVUE BLANCHE
On the streets of Paris, Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901) was stopped in his tracks by the poster that would initiate his own foray into color lithography: Pierre Bonnard’s (1867 – 1947) debut work, France-Champagne.xxii Lautrec became known for his massive poster designs featuring the underdogs of Parisian society: Cancan dancers and stage actors, bar patrons and absinthe drinkers, etc. The artist attended brothels and other seedy establishments of the entertainment industry to create highly polished studies before producing a poster that reduced his characters down to their essential elements.xxiii Lautrec’s posters—characterized by a seemingly crude style and bawdy subjects—created powerful images that captured the attention of street-goers bombarded by hundreds of advertisements along the Parisian boulevards. Such posters promoted not only the Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 7 advertisements within, but also Lautrec himself. His green monogram in the lower left corner of La Revue Blanche [Fig. 2] notified clients who to approach for future advertising commissions and informed collectors who to contact for limited-edition prints.
Lautrec’s style and subject matter were in stark contrast to Jules Chéret, another prominent poster-maker of the 1890s. Chéret invented the popular female character known as the chérette: a smiling, coquettish young woman that beckoned street-goers seductively. While Chéret’s women were most often anonymous, Lautrec’s characters were based on specific individuals such as Cancan dancer Jane Avril, English dancer May Milton, and the much- admired Salonière, Misia Sert. Lautrec depicted these women as distinct personalities by accentuating their individuality and often heightening
Figure 2: Toulouse Lautrec, La revue blanche. their flaws, creating powerful portraits of cultural icons.xxiv Their images appealed to a subset of the population: the writers and artists of bohemian Paris that such advertisements targeted. Lautrec’s graphic style was particularly important for the commission of La Revue Blanche, meant to attract the writers and artists who both consumed and contributed to the journal.
Lautrec was associated with La Revue Blanche through Thadée and Alfred Natanson, brothers and co-editors of the journal who attended the Lycée Condorcet with Lautrec when they were children.xxv In the hands of the Natansons, La Revue Blanche became a major voice in the literary and artistic world of Paris. The journal covered literature, arts, Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 8 politics, and other cultural events with various directions and ideologies. La Revue Blanche was open to all opinions and schools of thought, allowing the individual personalities of contributing artists and writers to thrive.xxvi Reaching a broad urban audience, the journal was known for its sophistication, humor, and reflection of the personalities of those involved.xxvii The Natansons employed Lautrec several times for La Revue Blanche, for which he created the June 1894 frontispiece, submitted drawings, and produced the 1895 poster advertisement featuring Thadée Natanson’s wife, Misia Sert.
MISIA SERT
Misia Sert (1872 – 1950), the daughter of Polish sculptor Cyprien Godebski, married Thadée Natanson in April of 1893.xxviii The Natansons’ flat on the rue St. Florentin soon became the center of La Revue Blanche, where Sert was introduced to Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, Léon Blum, Félix Fénéon, Debussy, and countless others.xxix The young woman continuously attracted a variety of writers, musicians, and artists to La Revue Blanche with her talent as a pianist, her love for music, art, and literature, and her beauty. During her marriage to Thadée, Sert became a renowned Salonière and a nurturer and patron of numerous artists and writers.
As a young woman, Sert became a fixture at the Revue Blanche headquarters—a place of fashionable social interchange located just off one of the grand boulevards. The offices were a place where men and women of literary and artistic taste would gather and discuss literature, arts, and politics. These conversations traditionally took place in male- centered cafés that were off limits to women who wished to maintain their polite reputations.xxx Sert’s access to the Revue Blanche offices and friendships with the writers and artists of the journal allowed the young Salonière to participate in the cultural and political debates of the time. Sert cherished this traditionally off-limits culture, cultivating a modern and worldly social persona by making a point to appear at openings and other artistic events with Thadée. Sert was the epitome of social life and the modern woman, making her the perfect subject for Lautrec’s La Revue Blanche.
Lautrec was commissioned to make a poster for the 1896 publication of La Revue Blanche. He chose Misia Sert as his subject, portraying her as an elegant, modern woman of Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 9 fin de siècle Paris through thickly-applied curvilinear lines, flat blocks of color, and the use of negative space. With simple and elegant design Lautrec emphasized Sert’s stylish clothing: she is adorned in a fur stole and muff, a flat blue dress that displays shape and pattern rather than the wearer’s form, and a hat created with just a few lines, sporting a burst of stylistic ostrich feathers. Sert skates across an ice rink implied by a single, swooping line and the swinging motion of her arms. Skating was a popular pastime in Paris by the 1870s,xxxi and Sert’s participation in the sport portrays her as a chic, modern woman of Paris who partakes in all fashionable Parisian activities. From beneath a brimmed hat peeks Sert’s red hair—a signature attribute often included in her portraitsxxxii that would have been instantly recognizable to many in the artistic and literary scene of Paris. Sert’s inclusion as an identifiable subject in Lautrec’s poster, as well as the massive, iconic, and simplistic rendering of her form upon a relatively blank background, would have drawn street-goers to the advertisement.
Sert often attempted to direct Lautrec in his portraits of her, stating in her memoirs that she made herself “insufferable” through complaints and advice about her features.xxxiii According to Sert, Lautrec took revenge by scribbling caricatures of the Salonière on napkins during her dinner parties.xxxiv Sert’s controlling behavior attests to her desire to shape her own public identity. Though Sert briefly mentions Lautrec’s poster for La Revue Blanche in her memoirs, she does not elaborate on how she felt about its outcome. Whatever the case, Sert’s crafted identity as a woman of culture, an elegant Salonière, and a muse to numerous artists, writers, and musicians matched the modern literary and artistic ideals of La Revue Blanche. According to Sert’s niece, Annette Vaillant: “She personifies La Revue Blanche,… this elegant, self-confident creature, daringly yet meticulously dressed… Gay and whimsical, and her winning ways and her bluntness and the swagger of a low-life princess, [she] was nonetheless everyone’s muse.”xxxv Sert’s legendary personality, combined with Lautrec’s essentialist style that accentuated Sert as a modern woman, successfully emphasized La Revue Blanche as a journal that promoted individual literary and artistic personalities of fin de siècle Paris.
WILLIAM NICHOLSON Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 10
Though posters rose to prominence during the 1880s, it wasn’t until the Belle Époque that poster design flourished with ferocity in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain. The first poster shows were held in Italy and Great Britain in 1894-- drawing artists outside of Paris to participate in the modern and lucrative business of graphic design. After producing a poster for a touring production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, twenty- two year-old William Nicholson (1872 – 1949) was introduced to the English market of poster design during the 1890s. With the publication of his poster for Hamlet, Nicholson saw an opportunity to support his young family until he became more established as an artist. Hungry for opportunity, Nicholson moved to London with his wife, child, and brother-in-law (the painter James Pryde) to work on a collection of designs for the ‘Pictorial Poster’ exhibition at the Westminster Aquarium, opening in October 1894.xxxvi Under the pseudonym ‘J. and W. Beggarstaff’, Pryde and Nicholson submitted designs consisting of large, colored paper cutouts pasted onto board (a scissor-and-paste technique) that created simplified forms with strong, flat colors.xxxvii Nicholson became known for this graphic style after his success at the exhibition.
Convinced that his talents at graphic design could supplement his family’s income, Nicholson decided to postpone his aspirations as a painter and turned his attentions to printmaking. Rather than seeking inspiration from the popular Japanese woodcuts that influenced many modern poster designers,xxxviii Nicholson gravitated towards English chapbooks, which were a popular type of cheap book or pamphlet produced in the early nineteenth century.xxxix Nicholson was particularly influenced by chapbook woodcuts of bold, flat designs that were usually printed in black and white. The artist utilized this way of rendering images during his foray into the commemorative print market-- the celebration of special events or honoring of important icons-- beginning with a hand- colored woodcut of the Prince of Wale’s Derby winner, Persimmon.
In the spring of 1897 Nicholson created a commemorative portrait of Queen Victoria to tie in with the monarch’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations later that year.xl In contrast to traditionally elegant and regal renderings of the monarch, such as George Hayter’s 1860 portrait of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, Nicholson portrayed the Queen as an elderly mother of the nation walking her dog in a park. The queen’s form is depicted in an Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 11 unusually simplistic manner not often reserved for royalty: her unadorned black cloak outlines her monumental shape while her gaze is cast downwards towards the cane clutched in her left hand. Though initially turned down by his publisher William Heinemann (who feared the modest image of the Queen would be construed as a caricature), Nicholson’s print was published as a supplement in the June 1897 issue of The New Review and was ultimately very successful.xli
The positive popular and critical reception of Nicholson’s Queen Victoria enabled the creation of another iconic print: a portrait of famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844 – 1923) [Fig. 3]. The print was published in the July 1897 issue of The New Review, coinciding with the actress’s season at the Adelphi. The seasoned Bernhardt had unsurprisingly refused to sit for the young Nicholson; she was known for demanding outrageous prices from artists to sit for a portrait, reportedly
Figure 3: William Nicholson, Sarah Bernhardt. charging Sarony several hundred dollars to publish her carte-de-visite in the late 1870s.xlii Nicholson had to rely on a photographed portrait of Bernhardt published earlier that year, utilizing an already existing form of self-promotion in order to create his print.
Heinemann eventually convinced Nicholson to create a set of woodcuts entitled Twelve Portraits to clear his accumulating debt (Nicholson had borrowed money in order to return to painting, supplying Heinemann with occasional cover designs). The project was published in 1899 with five new portraits to the seven already published in The New Review in 1897, including the image of Bernhardt. Within Nicholson’s series of twelve contemporary figures the portrait of Bernhardt comprises the only female portrait other than that of Queen Victoria, solidifying the actress’s importance to the nineteenth-century Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 12 public. The version of Nicholson’s Sarah Bernhardt held at the University of New Mexico Art Museum is a pre-colored order from one of these publications.
SARAH BERNHARDT
On the front page of the late nineteenth-century journal La Fronde, journalist Daniel LeSueur wrote:
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt practices in tranquility, with her divine poses, the rites of the cult of Beauty. In our somber era, our days of conflict and ugliness, she arises, luminous, on the threshold of an invisible temple… gathering the oracles of eternal Beauty in order to impart them to us… Does she not stand outside of any one race, any one time, any one civilization, like an incarnation of immortal love? The enigmatic smile of Cleopatra, of Theodora, of Joan of Arc has floated on her lips. One by one, their souls have animated her. Was she born in our century?xliii LeSueur, obviously a fan of Bernhardt, gives a rather typical description of the iconic actress. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the actress was known for her powerful presence, her feline appearance, and her ‘voice of gold’—obtaining a diverse set of admirers such as D.H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud.xliv Fans devoured details about her public and personal life, seeking to emulate her elaborate costume jewelry, her wild red hair, the dramatic poses she struck during theatrical performances and within paintings, and even her love for tigers, pumas, and cluttered living spaces.xlv
Although her brilliance as an actress was rarely questioned, Bernhardt’s personal life was not always considered with such positivity. In America, the actress was often thought of as an immoral woman and was continuously denounced in slanderous pamphlets (one of which claimed Bernhardt was the mother of an illegitimate child sired by the Pope!).xlvi In Montreal, the standing bishop excommunicated Bernardt due to her performance in Adrienne Lecouvreur.xlvii Such scandalous events only heightened the demand and success of Bernhardt’s theatrical appearances in North America. In 1879, tickets to her opening performances in New York were auctioned and bought for $20 to $40 each. She was guaranteed $1,000 per performance, 50% of the gross profit over $3,000, and $200 a week for living expenses, “plus a private Pullman car staffed with two Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 13 chefs and equipped with a piano.”xlviii By the time the actress returned to France after a year of 156 performances in New York, she had earned a half-million dollars.xlix
According to contemporary reports, by the end of the nineteenth century journalists and photographers followed Bernhardt everywhere she went.l Such a steady stream of reportage allowed Bernhardt to carefully craft her public identity while maintaining the constant attention of her fans. One journalist stated that Bernhardt, well into her fifties, required unabating media attention in order to ensure the continuation of success: “It is for this reason that the Sarahs of the world let us know little by little their dogs, their cats, their parakeets, their monkeys, their house, their salon, their sculpture, and their friends.”li In order to keep her audience interested, Bernhardt released details of her personal life through newspapers, magazines, prints, and posters. The actress used such minutiae to construct a public persona of a modern, talented woman of enduring fame, often conflating reality with the roles she played. It was this identity, along with a photograph of Bernhardt, that Nicholson employed for his portrait.
Like Lautrec’s posters, Nicholson’s Sarah Bernhardt emphasizes salient features while omitting extraneous detail. Bernhardt’s cane and the shape of her cloak and dress are created through bulky, black shapes while the details of her face are distinguished by only a few swipes of line. The image, though sparse of detail, creates an instantly recognizable and iconic portrait of the actress. Silhouetted against the stage curtain, Bernhardt is portrayed as a confident dame at the height of her career; her public persona of enduring fame is reflected in her outstretched arms as she bows to her audience. The woodcut was published two weeks after Bernhardt’s season opening with Alfred de Musset’s great drama Lorenzaccio. For those who wanted more than the reproduction in The New Review, hand-colored woodcuts could be bought at two guineas each, the same price as the portrait of Queen Victoria.lii Nicholson capitalized upon the public identity and publicity of Bernhardt, who served as the epitome of the ‘cult of personality’ rampant during late nineteenth-century Europe and America.
MODERN ICONS: Adah Isaacs Menken, Misia Sert, and Sarah Bernhardt Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 14
Although Menken, Sert, and Bernhardt influenced how they were portrayed in varying ways, each iconic portrait was based on their carefully crafted public identities. In addition, Sarony, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Nicholson each capitalized on the unconventional lives of these famous female celebrities in order to create portraits that promoted their own artwork or studios.
Wishing to assert her own ideas on how the public should view her, Menken initially asked for control over how she would be posed in Sarony’s studio. It was also Menken that sought a photographer to capture her controversial ‘breech role’, using the shock value of seductively posing in male clothing to promote both her public identity and her theatrical performances. In turn, Menken’s risqué appearance within Sarony’s cartes generated publicity for the photographer, attracting clients to his studio with a portrait featuring one of the most famous celebrities of the time.
Sert often instructed Toulouse-Lautrec to make changes to her portraits. However, according to the Salonière, they were generally superficial alterations to her appearance and much to the frustration of the young artist. Perhaps more indicative of a woman in charge of the formulation of her own public identity is Sert’s participation in the Revue Blanche enterprise. Surrounded by artists, musicians, and literary figures, it was through her association to La Revue Blanche that Sert cultivated an identity of a new, modern woman who participated in the aesthetic and intellectual debates of her time period. Lautrec benefited from Sert’s modern identity and connections to La Revue Blanche, achieving employment through the journal and disseminating his work and name through the use of the print. In Lautrec’s poster advertisement, the artist used Sert’s carefully constructed cultural identity to give a specific, modern character to La Revue Blanche.
Bernhardt, at the peak of her career, was revered as a public icon and had long developed an identity of eternal fame. Her image was so widely circulated and her identity so well known that Nicholson, who had never met the actress, was able to create his iconic print. The young artist capitalized upon Bernhardt’s popularity to make money, publicize his work, and gain future commissions. Bernhardt inadvertently profited by being Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 15 advertised for her season at the Adelphi Theater, and was then memorialized in Nicholson’s later publication of twelve contemporary portraits.
Each of these portraits and the women they represent reflect a new, commodified form of the self that emerged in the nineteenth century. In an era obsessed with consumerism and the ‘cult of personality’, women constructed public personas unlike anything that had been seen before. Breaking from traditional portraiture of women, these portraits represent their subjects as powerful, talented, and modern icons of the late 1800s.
Notes
i Ben L. Bessham states that the population rose from around 38.5 million in America to about 76 million between 1870 and 1900. Ben L. Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 1978), 3. ii Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 3. iii Robin Wichard and Carol Wichard, Victorian Cartes-de-Visite (Buckinghamshire, UK: Shire Publications Ltd., 1999), 37. iv Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 3. v Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 4. vi Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 11. vii Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 64. viii Bessham quotes one reviewer: “So far as the person called in the bills ‘Mazeppa,’ she is best on the mare, and worst off that I have seen or expect to see.” The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 64. ix Quoted from Sarony in the Photo-American, September 1894, p. 324. It is important to note that, according to Sarony, Menken eventually rejected the cartes where she had posed herself, favoring the positioning advised by the photographer instead. However, this does not negate Menken’s active role in the formation of her public identity. x Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 15. xi In Sarony’s words: “She threw her arms around me and exclaimed: “Oh, you dear, delightful, little man, I am going to kiss you for that,” and she did.” Also quoted from the Photo-American, September 1894, p. 324. xii See G. Lippard Barclay, ed., The Life and Remarkable Career of Adah Isaacs Menken the Celebrated Actress (Philadelphia, PA: Barclay & Co., 1868). Barclay (Menken’s fourth husband) states the play was written for Menken by Brougham (p. 35), and Eiselein states Menken produced the play herself (Gregory Eiselein, ed., Infelicia and Other Writings: Adah Isaacs Menken (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 2002), 225). Menken played numerous characters within a single performance of Child of the Sun, including the “Dumb Slave Zamba” and Metóxa, “the Indian Chief”. The play began on October 9th, 1865 at the Astley’s Theatre in London and ran for only seven weeks. xiii Quoted in Punch, or the London Charivari volume XLIX from October 28, 1865. xiv Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 18. xv Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 94. xvi Mary Weaver Chapin, Posters of Paris: Toulouse Lautrec & His Contemporaries (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2012), 14. According to Chapin, technological advancements in lithography were so great that: “one source recorded that a press could print two thousand color posters daily, versus the previous rate of twelve per day.” Posters of Paris, 14. xvii Chapin, Posters of Paris, 13 – 14. xviii See Paul Dupont’s Parfums des Femmes de France. Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 16
xix There are several examples of these advertisements, including Theophile Steinlen’s 1899 Motocycles Comiot. xx For an example, see Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1896 Troupe de Mlle. Égalantine, featuring Jane Avril and Cléopatre Gazelle. xxi For more on the role of women as subjects of Belle Époque posters, see: Ruth E. Iskin, “Popularizing New Women in Belle Époque Advertising Posters,” in A “Belle Époque”? Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture, 1890 – 1910, ed. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Ruth E. Iskin, “The Pan-European Flâneuse in Fin-de-Siècle Posters: Advertising Modern Women in the City,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 333 – 56; and Chapin, Posters of Paris. xxii As told by Thadée Natanson, co-founder and editor of La Revue Blanche, translated in Toulouse Lautrec: A Retrospective, ed. Gale B. Murray (New York: Hugh Lauter Levine Associates, 1992), 138. Bonnard himself would eventually introduce Lautrec to the mechanics of color lithography (Chapin, Posters of Paris, 25). Chapin notes that Lautrec could not print his own work due to his handicap, though “he remained closely involved with the production of his posters, a procedure that demanded careful and detailed preparation and equally careful supervision.” Posters of Paris, 12. xxiii Chapin cites Lautrec’s crayon and chalk design for the poster of May Milton, in which he follows academic traditions by working out her anatomy only to eventually discard these details in his final poster. Posters of Paris, 27. xxiv Chapin, Posters of Paris, 34. xxv Bret Waller and Grace Seiberling, Artists of La Revue Blanche (Rochester, New York: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1984), 10. xxvi Though La Revue Blanche was open to all, many of the contributors were part of the Nabis. According to Waller and Seiberling, this was a group of young men who, around 1889, “formed the semi-secret, semi- serious brotherhood called “Les Nabis,” regarding themselves as prophets of a new artistic order. Inspired by the ideas of Paul Gauguin as transmitted through Paul Sérusier… the Nabis dreamed of an art in which the subject represented was no more important than the means by which it was depicted.” Artists of La Revue Blanche, 15. xxvii For more on the artists and writers of La Revue Blanche, see: Waller and Seiberling, Artists of La Revue Blanche. xxviii According to Misia, as soon as she was fifteen and three months old (apparently the legal age of the time), she was married to Thadée. See Misia Sert, Misia and the Muses: The Memoires of Misia Sert, trans. Moura Budberg (New York: The John Day Company, 1953), 32. xxix Sert, Misia and the Muses, 35. xxx Ingrid Pfeiffer, Women Impressionists, ed. Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 14. xxxi Chapin, Posters of Paris, 27. xxxii See Toulouse Lautrec’s 1897 Misia Natanson and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1904 Misia Sert. xxxiii Sert, Misia and the Muses, 51. xxxiv See: Sert, Misia and the Muses. xxxv From Annette Vaillant, “Les amités de la Revue Blanche,” Derrière le miroir no. 158 – 159 (Paris, 1966): 1 – 15. xxxvi Collin Campbell, Merlin James, Patricia Reed, and Sanford Schwartz, The Art of William Nicholson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004), 23. xxxvii Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” in The Art of William Nicholson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004), 43. For examples of work by J. and W. Beggarstaff, see the Moma collection. xxxviii Notable poster designers influenced by Japanese woodcuts during this time include Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Cheret, Eugène Grasset and many of his pupils, including Paul Berthon. xxxix Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” 44. xl Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” 44. xli “I have yet to be shown a painting of Her Majesty worthier of a place in our National Portrait Gallery than this little colour print, exclaimed Joseph Pennell in the Daily Mail.” Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” 44. xlii Wichard and Wichard, Victorian Cartes-de-Visite, 38. Kelsey D. Martin / Crafting Public Identities 17
xliii In Daniel LeSueur, “Prêtresse de la Beauté,” La Fronde (28 January 1898). xliv See Marie Louise Roberts, “The Fantastic Sarah Bernhardt” in Disruptive Acts (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 164 – 220. According to Roberts, “Artists, poets, businessmen, journalists, critics, dandies, lesbians, fuddy-duddy old men, and radical young feminists—all adored her.” “The Fantastic Sarah Bernhardt,” 166. xlv Roberts states that “even the serpentine pose in which Bernarhdt was painted by her friend Georges Clarin was imitated by women who lay down to sleep in the same position, hoping to hear these words from their lovers: “Don’t move… you look pretty like that… just like Sarah Bernhardt.” “The Fantastic Sarah Bernhardt,” 169. xlvi Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 105. xlvii Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 105. xlviii Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 105. xlix Bessham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, 105. l See Théodore Chan, “Sarah Bernhardt, Reine de Théâtre contemporaine” 1902 and “Sarah Bernhardt et ses reporters,” Le Figaro 14 (October 1880). li In “Jadis et aujourd’hui” Dangeau (1882). lii Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” 159.
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