42 jM S t « * ’ tun« 6.2003
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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
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. . 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
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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.