Miss Loïe Fuller

A small face and two feet emerge from an enormous turning shape. In Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Miss Loïe Fuller, the dancer’s costume seems almost to have become the dancer. This 1893 lithograph translates a performance at the Folies-Bergère into a few swelling contours surrounded by a haze of printed dots. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impression, examined here, gives the fabric muted gold, olive and pale peach tones. Other impressions change the colours while retaining the extraordinary silhouette. ^[1]

Finding the Dancer Inside the Fabric

Begin at the centre rather than the top. Fuller's tiny yellow face sits in a dark green opening, slightly left of the image’s vertical axis. Above and below it, rounded expanses of fabric occupy the space where a viewer might expect to find shoulders, arms and torso. The face makes the silhouette intelligible without explaining all its mechanics. Once it has been found, the eye can connect it to the two small feet emerging beneath the lowest fold.

Those exposed fragments establish a human scale against which the costume becomes immense. The feet are close together, lightly articulated and disproportionately small beside the breadth above them. Their separation from the head is partly filled by an overlapping, curling shape rather than a clearly outlined body. The image leaves the viewer to imagine the physical effort concealed within that volume.

The outline has several different rhythms. At the left, an upright oval curves down into a large, rounded lobe. Below that, the fabric pinches inward, creating a dark notch. Another rounded projection hangs nearer the feet. The largest movement sweeps towards the upper right, where its edge breaks into small, irregular points. Each turn redirects the eye. Read from bottom to top, the form appears to gather and expand; followed downwards, it seems to curl back upon itself.

The word “spiral” describes the experience of looking more readily than a literal diagram of the cloth. Lautrec does not draw a regular coil with an obvious beginning and end. He places a succession of curves across and around an obscured figure. The broad upper-right mass could momentarily suggest a wing, leaf or plume. None of those resemblances needs to become a fixed symbolic meaning. Their instability belongs to a picture in which the edge keeps offering a new possibility as the eye moves.

Notice, too, how much space surrounds this expansion. The dancer does not fill the rectangle evenly. A large area of mottled darkness extends above the head and to the left. The luminous shape seems suspended within that field, with the small feet hovering just above a diagonal dark boundary. The design depends as much on this surrounding space as on the costume’s outline.

A Performance Made from Cloth and Light

Fuller was an American performer whose 1892 Folies-Bergère debut included the serpentine dance. MoMA’s account stresses her innovations in costume, production design and coloured stage lighting: fabric whirled around her while its illumination changed. These elements made the appearance of the body inseparable from an environment that she helped create. ^[2]

The physical enlargement of the costume was deliberate. The Met explains that Fuller manipulated her silk gown with large poles held in her hands. ^[1] This knowledge changes the relationship between the tiny face and enormous silhouette. The fabric’s reach is an extension of the performer’s action. What looks briefly like an independent cloud was produced by a person handling cloth through an apparatus.

Catherine Brun’s account for Musées Occitanie offers a useful emphasis: in Fuller’s choreography, the mobility of forms and light takes precedence over the straightforward display of the body. ^[12] Lautrec’s image makes that displacement visible. The stage act gives him a subject in which recognisable anatomy can recede while a performer remains present. The face is almost an interruption in the fabric’s larger sweep.

The print nevertheless gives us a visual response to a performance, rather than a technical plan for restaging it. Its pale and dark regions cannot tell us the number of lamps, the timing of their changes or the precise arrangement used on a particular evening. The pleasure of looking lies in how effectively printed colour suggests illumination. The figure appears to carry brightness within its boundaries even though the image consists of ink on paper.

The Darkness Is Full of Marks

From a distance the background can seem like a dark curtain. Closer examination reveals a surface alive with small deposits and gaps. Dense brown areas alternate with lighter, more open patches. Around the left side of the dancer, pale paper shows between scattered marks; above the figure, the grain becomes more concentrated. The atmosphere is built from differences in coverage rather than a smoothly shaded progression.

“Brush and spatter,” the Met’s medium description, is therefore a useful instruction for looking. ^[1] The broad shapes have a different visual character from the fine, dispersed texture that surrounds and crosses them. A contour can be abrupt and legible while the adjoining area breaks into tiny interruptions. That contrast lets the silhouette remain forceful without making its setting inert.

The grain also prevents a simple division between a solid dancer and an empty background. In the Met reproduction, the pale peach area on the left has a speckled surface, while the long gold-coloured sweep is veiled by minute marks. Light and dark regions belong to one printed field. The surrounding atmosphere seems to enter the cloth, and the cloth takes on some of the background’s instability.

Thin blue-green lines occasionally clarify an edge or fold. Follow the line that curves down the left oval towards the neck, then compare it with the more lightly indicated curve along the rising right-hand form. Such lines do less work than the large coloured masses. They give the eye a route through those masses without describing every crease. Lautrec can suggest fabric’s direction while leaving its full structure unresolved.

At the bottom, a broad dark diagonal brings another rhythm into play. Its upper edge climbs from lower left towards the right, underneath the feet. Against the rounded costume, it acts like a firm obstruction. Riva Castleman identifies the nearly submerged form at the lower right as the head of a contrabass projecting from the orchestra. Its presence places the spectator across a foreground barrier from the dancer. ^[13]

The instrument is difficult to recognise on first viewing because its dark shape merges with the surrounding tones. Once noticed, it changes the image’s depth. The luminous fabric no longer floats in an entirely unlocated space: something intervenes between us and the performance. Lautrec provides just enough of the theatre to make the view feel partial, as though the spectacle exceeds what can be neatly framed.

Why the Colours Change Between Impressions

The same sweeping outline can look strikingly different in another sheet. Cleveland’s impression, accession 1925.1202, introduces strong pink into the left-hand loop and the lower curling fabric. Its upper reach is pale yellow, and the background appears comparatively cool and grey. In the Met sheet, the corresponding regions form a quieter relationship of peach, olive-gold and brown. The shapes can be matched point by point while the balance of warmth, brightness and darkness changes. Cleveland identifies its work as a colour lithograph, catalogued as Wittrock 17 and Delteil 39. ^[14]

The change is particularly revealing around the head. In both impressions, the small face occupies the gap between the left loop and the long rising sweep. In Cleveland’s sheet, the adjoining pink gives the lower contour an immediate visual emphasis. In the Met image, the closer relationship between adjacent tones makes the figure appear more enveloped in a continuous golden mass. This is a comparison of the museum reproductions; a screen cannot reproduce every quality of ink, paper or metallic reflection.

MoMA describes the edition as approximately sixty unique impressions, printed in different colour combinations, some dusted with metallic pigments. ^[2] The variation is part of the work’s material history. A reproduction of one impression can accurately convey that sheet while giving an incomplete impression of the design’s possibilities.

It is useful here to distinguish an impression, an individual printed example, from a state, a stage in a printing image’s alteration. The Met calls its sheet the only state. ^[1] A pink costume and a gold-coloured costume do not, by themselves, establish different states. Colour can vary while the same underlying arrangement persists. Nor does a digital image establish whether a particular gleam comes from printed metallic ink, added powder or the way a sheet was photographed.

The 2005 Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre checklist makes this plurality tangible. Its sequence of Fuller lithographs, catalogue numbers 204–217, includes the Met impression as no. 216 and Cleveland’s as no. 214, alongside sheets from other collections. Their measurements and ownership records remain individual. Encountering a group allows the repeated contour and changing colour relationships to be considered together, rather than treating one familiar reproduction as the definitive palette. ^[15]

A Print with a Printer and Publisher

The Met credits Edward Ancourt as printer and André Marty as publisher. Those names locate the lithograph within the collaboration that brought an image onto paper and into circulation. ^[1] Designing, printing and publishing the work involved related activities with different responsibilities.

Phillip Dennis Cate places Marty within the contemporary revival of artists’ prints. He published L’Estampe originale as well as the Fuller lithograph; his activities connected Lautrec with a market for original graphic work. ^[13] The small edition and its variations invite close comparison of sheets, an experience different from recognising an advertisement across a street.

The visible image reinforces that distinction. It contains no large announcement of the Folies-Bergère, no programme information and no block of lettering naming Fuller. Instead, the whole rectangle is given to the relationship between her apparition and the surrounding dark. Even the foreground instrument is absorbed into that relationship. The viewer has time to search the image rather than being directed immediately towards a venue or an event.

This does not remove the performer’s public identity. The title supplies her name, while the characteristic costume supplies the action around which the image turns. The sheet makes a theatrical celebrity recognisable through the form of her performance. In the wider range of Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints, it offers an especially concentrated example of how much can be conveyed when descriptive detail and advertising text are pared away.

The Albi Painting and a Japanese Comparison

Miss Loïe Fuller is distinct from La Loïe Fuller aux Folies-Bergère, the 1893 oil on cardboard in Albi. Brun describes the painting as a developed work that prepares the lithographs. ^[12] In the painting’s museum reproduction, green and violet lines run through pale fabric against exposed brown cardboard. The legs extend farther below the costume, and the towering right-hand sweep continues out of the image at the top. The face, tucked between the rising forms, already occupies the crucial opening that will organise the print.

Comparing the two shows a change in the distribution of attention. In the painting, long strokes let the eye follow movement within the fabric. In the lithograph, broader areas and the speckled surrounding field give the entire silhouette a more unified presence. The print also introduces a stronger dark diagonal beneath the dancer. Recognising the related arrangement does not make the two objects interchangeable: their surfaces, edges and relationships to the surrounding space differ.

Colta Ives places the Met lithograph beside a Japanese theatrical woodcut in which a small head emerges from an expansive costume. She also connects the use of metallic enrichment with Japanese printmaking. These are illuminating comparisons, although her assertion that the image could only have derived from Japanese art is stronger than the visible resemblance can establish. ^[10] The comparison helps isolate a formal choice: costume can become the dominant shape while a tiny face remains sufficient to anchor it to a human figure.

Fuller’s performance supplies a further, immediate reason for that relationship. Her manipulated cloth genuinely enlarged and transformed her appearance. Looking between the painting, the lithograph and its differently coloured impressions reveals Lautrec testing how to make that transformation readable. The viewer repeatedly loses the body in the fabric and finds it again through the same small clues: the face, the feet and the curves connecting them.