Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller, 1893. Color Lithograph with gold dust. 14 15/16” x 10 1/8” (37.9 x 25.7cm). Cleveland Museum of Art Collection.
Today - January 15 - is Loïe Fuller’s birthday, so we want to celebrate her by lauding her accomplishments. Loïe, or “La Loië,” as she was affectionately called by the French, was truly a superstar and fin-de-siècle Boss-Lady.
Born in Fullersburg, Illinois in 1862, Marie Louise Fuller showed a knack for performance at an early age and tackled the vaudeville stage as an actress in late her teens and twenties, but was pretty much a washed actress by the time she made her way across the Atlantic to Paris in the early 1890s. There, in the City of Lights and against the odds, she became a huge celebrity and the toast of the town.
Though neither very young nor lithe, she strategically showcased what she had to offer: imagination, ambition, hutzpah, and core strength. She concocted a sensational, physically-demanding new type of dance incorporating undulating movements, the latest stage lighting technologies, and hundreds of yards of white silk which she twirled around her body with long hidden bamboo sticks in order to evoke colorful serpentine lines and shapes in space. Audiences flocked to see her perform for more than a decade, and dozens of artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, whose gold-dusted lithograph we see above, tried to capture her unique art nouveau-esque expression. With each new dance , Loïe seemed to embody the synesthetetic aesthetic of the fin-de-siècle, magically transforming herself into a flower, a butterfly, a fairy, or a flame - using clever choreography, music, colorful uplighting, and projections called magic lanterns, even borrowing ideas from the lighting of spectacular fountains. That’s thinking outside the box and being totally #techforward.
Ahead of her time, Loïe was a multi-media artist before there was such as thing, and she was an entrepreneur from the get-go, hiring a crew of technicians who were sworn to secrecy about her techniques, trying to patent her dances, opening her own pavilion at the 1900 World’s Fair, licensing her image for jewelry and decorative art objects, and establishing her own dance troupe, which toured the world more than once. She never truly perfected her French, but she did become one of the most adored performers in Europe, and certainly shaped her own destiny. Way to go, Loïe. Joyeux Anniversaire.