Vintage 1954 Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec “Yvette Guilbert Taking a Curtain Call” Portrait Art Print

Professionally custom framed. Measures 8 3/8" x 14 1/2"

Painted in summer 1894, Paris

YVETTE GUILBERT TAKING A CURTAIN CALL

Yvette Guilbert (1868-1944), the celebrated diseuse, was in every sense a phenomenon: a great artiste, a remarkable personality, and a performer whose repertoire was at once thoroughly popular and yet appealed to a more sophisticated audience. Unlike La Goulue and Jane Avril, who were canaille, Yvette Guilbert came of a bourgeois family. She made her debut on the legitimate stage in 1886, but in 1889 changed over to performing at café-concerts. At first she was a failure, but after enlarging her repertoire in 1890, she was offered an engagement at the Moulin Rouge and the Divan Japonais.

By this time Yvette Guilbert had evolved a make-up and costume - low-cut simple dresses and long black gloves - to enhance her personality and distinctive features - a long neck, reddish hair, a comically up-tilted nose, and a broad, expressive mouth. Within a year or two she had become as famous as Bruant or La Goulue, and posters (designed by Chéret and others) advertising her appearances were stuck on walls all over Paris. In 1895 she performed in America. By her superb diction and dramatic instinct Yvette Guilbert revolutionized the method of presenting songs; at the same time many of her most popular numbers were distinctly libertine. However, to quote from Le Figaro of 1896: "She understands the art of making obscenities palatable by uttering them with a nonchalant air." The first of Lautrec's works in which Yvette Guilbert appears are the poster Le Divan Japonais (1892) and Aux Ambassadeurs: Gens Chics (1893), in both of which she is no more than a distant silhouette. Lautree and Guilbert did not meet until the summer of 1894 when he submitted a project for a poster to her. Yvette was shocked by the element of caricature in Lautrec's representation of her; nevertheless the image of Yvette Guilbert which was, and is, most clearly impressed on the mind of the public was that created by Lautrec. She figures more largely in Lautrec's work than any other "star" of the 1890s, yet although she sat to him for several drawings he never painted a straightforward portrait of her.