Full size sold $69,000 US
Poster Auctions International, NY. May 2005
"Of all the
female entertainers Lautrec celebrated in his posters, Jane Avril* and Yvette
Guilbert were the two with whom he maintained the longest friendship. He portrayed
them both together in one of his most brillant posters, Divan Japonais
Although
Guilbert was the performer at this rather shabby cabaret when it opened in the
spring of (1893), Lautrec made the half-Italian Avril* the local figure in his
composition. Under a shock of red-orange hair topped with a pagoda-shaped hat
and towering plume, her black, silhouetted figure dominates the frontal plane
as she nor her companion, Edouard Dujardin, the distinguished founder of the Symbolist
Revue Wagnerienne, deign to look at Guilbert on stage, whom Lautrec portrayed
as 'headless', probably as a witty response to her complaint that he caricatured
her and made her ugly"(Wagner, p.21)
*For further info on Jane Avril see Links |