Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 6, 2003)
42 jM S t « * ’ tun« 6.2003 ART ▼ RE/M AX PHOTO BY S ignature The belle P ro perties ! in Belle Époque Maryhill Museum expands exhibit of groundbreaking lesbian artist by L is a B r a d s h a w he next time you see a stage play or go to the movies or enjoy a dance perform ance or admire art from the Nouveau periixl, give a little nixl of thanks to Loie Fuller. W ho? T h a t’s what 1 asked last fall when a Maryhill Museum security guard, who had been challenging my friends and me with quizzes about artifacts in the Native Am eri can room, nonchalantly queried, “Did you know that Loie Fuller was a lesbian?” He then showed us the hallway devoted to the tum-of-the-last-century, multimedia artistic phenom, who revolutionized dance and stage design and inspired an A-list of geniuses, propelling the world into a new peri- ixJ of art and science. O h, and she’s also responsible for Maryhill Museum. Yet almost no one has ever heard of her. T he palatial museum— kx:ated 90 miles east of Portland on the Washington hanks of the Columbia River— wants to change that. Through July 6, its regular Loie Fuller exhibit expands to a beautiful three-rixxn show. Fire & Ice: The Magic o f Due Fuller includes a few extra borrowed items and some new acquisitions, but mostly sensitive pieces usually hidden away in archived darkness. “She was the first perfonnance artist, 1 think,” asserts C olleen Schafroth, curator of the exhibit. “She was extremely interdiscipli nary— she could hind Kxiks, do textile, work out the logistics of film, produce something in the theater— and all of her techniques were innovative. T h e sad part is many of those tech niques were then picked up by male producers later, and often they were given the credit for some o f the things she did.” Bom Marie Louise Fuller in a middle-class Midwest household in 1862, she began work ing as an actress in her 20s, traveling with vari ous shows around the United States. Extremely tenacious, she landed a part with the Buffalo Bill road show in 1883 and was well received I “ T in a ’s e x p e rtis e a llo w e d me to fin d an in v e s tm e n t p r o p e r ty e llic ie n tly a n d p ro fita b ly . I h ig h ly re c o m m e n d T in a to p u rc h a s e a firs t, s e co n d , o r re n ta l in c o m e h o m e !” — JiK‘t-phine Celiti Tina Schafer, I iic . . g r i . abr Associate Broker M ulti-M illion D ollar P roducer 282-4000 x 122 RE/M AX Signature Properties e-mail: tinas@remax.net mM l 0 ,gan¡c"'>'rie'"S . ,rol Pes» Con,r° Not«1 . Grow light* , . Garden'1^ To0'5 . pond Suppl,es . Hydt°PonlCS On C urator Colleen Schafroth, pictured with one of her favorite exhibit pieces, says Loie Fuller was “the Steven Spielberg of her day” York burlesque Lit tle Jack Sheppard ( in which, with hair cropped short, she played the role of Jack, no less). Performing on the stage in Eng land, Fuller took note of the popular hixip skirt dancers and, back in New York in a play called Quack M.D., employed some of those techniques playing a patient under hypnosis. T he play fizzled, but the dance— called the Serpentine— was a success, and the following year she tcxik it and more new dances to France (partially to escape financial disputes with stage mangers in New York). She pre miered four pieces— the Serpentine, the Violet, the Butterfly and the rather sexy X X X X — in Paris’ Folies-Bergere in November 1892 and, literally, in a single night, changed the face of dance and stage design forever. Her innovative use of white and colored lights amid surrounding darkness, as well as silk costumes she designed containing wixxJen dow els— allowing a shape, breadth and height of stage garb not before seen— propelled her to instant stardom. She became the toast of Paris, and the style of dance became synonymous with the Belle Epoque era— France’s “Beautiful Peri od” of pleasure, beauty and the rejection of stan dard tradition. Poet Stéphane Mallarmé nick named her La Loie (which stuck) and called her "the physical embodiment of an idea." “I think of her, actually, as the Steven Spielberg of her day,” says Schafroth, “because she had a real gift for looking at the available technology {and) experimenting with it...to create effects that had never before been seen.” European artists began to create pieces based on the new movements and designs of La Loie. Rodin, Roche, Riviere and master lithog rapher Jules Chéret all created work of her image specifically or through her direct influ ence, guiding the direction of Art Nouveau. Much of this you’ll find in Fire & Ice. Fuller has one of her admiring French crit ics to thank for introducing her to his relative Gabrielle Bloch. As a teen-ager, Bloch had seen Fuller perform and wrote to her later, “Soul of the flowers, soul of the sky, soul of the flam e...I never see you exactly as you are, but as you seemed to me on that day.” Although it’s unclear exactly when their romance officially began, they were together until Fullers death in 1928. “She knew Gabrielle for a long time," Schafroth remarks, “and Gabrielle was her rock. Loie...didn’t man age well. She was always short of money. She was always looking up people who had money. She relied a great deal on Gabrielle to. ..see that things were where they needed to be.” Together, Fuller and Bkx:h made films and opened a dance school. The couple had what Schafroth refers to as “an arrangement,” and Bloch apparently tixrk a personal interest, shall we say, in st^me of the students, which was revealed by a Cal ifornia scholar who was able to interview some of them in the 1970s before they died. As did her work, Fuller crossed from the arts to the sciences and back again, ingeniously linking the two. She was fast friends with the Curies, as well as Thom as Edison, who used her Serpentine dance to demonstrate the possibili ties of motion pictures. Fuller eventually met railroad bond mogul Samuel Hill, and in 1917, upon seeing his yet- unfinished home in the middle o f nowhere, she talked him into turning it into a museum. She then filled it with art and artifacts o f her per sonal friends, and Maryhill (named after Hill’s daughter) still holds the largest Rodin collec tion in the United States. So visit Maryhill and give a little nod to Loie Fuller. "Sh e elevated her dance out of the follies, out of the burlesque, into art," beams Schafroth. “T h at was the most important thing to her than anything else.” JP1 F ire & I ce : T he M agic of L oie F uller runs through July 6 at Maryhill Museum, 35 Maryhill Museum Drive near G oldendale, Wash. For complete information call 509-773-3733 or visit u a i a v . maryhillmuseum. org.
