Thursday, September 22, 2011
12:30 PM
In the early 1890s, Marie Louise Fuller was a nearly washed-up, 30-year-old vaudeville performer with no formal training in dance. But, by the turn of the century, the Chicago native had re-invented herself and made her way to Paris, where her spectacular, “multimedia” performances—involving projected color, dramatic lighting, unusual choreography, and swaths of swirling fabric used to create radically abstract, undulating effects—were inspiring huge audiences. Over the next three decades Fuller was a muse to dozens of artists, poets, and composers, from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy. This talk will explore how “La Loie” transformed herself into a Parisian sensation—becoming the very embodiment of the Art Nouveau—and innovated modern performance while shaping her own destiny as an artist.
Larissa Bailiff (PhD, ABD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a specialist in late 19th- and early 20th-century European art and social history. Formerly an associate educator at MoMA, she has also lectured at other New York museums and teaches art history courses at both the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute.
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