La Depeche: When Radicals Met Avant-Garde Art

It's Marthe Meunier,  not yet married to the artist Maurice Denis, posing for the poster La Depeche de Toulouse in 1892.  Although Marthe posed frequently for her painter husband, her first appearance usually goes unremarked.  La Depeche de Toulouse by Maurice Denis was one of a select company included by Jules Cheret,in the influential  series Salon des Cents (Salon of the One Hundred).

The first draft (at right) shows Denis working in lestyle Cheret; the finished work has become. an example of the new Nabi style,influenced by the Japanese woodblock print.  Among his changes,  Denis replaced the primary colors, a Cheret signature,  with their complements.   Signs of depth and shading  removed; the picture plane is flattened, presenting the viewer with a series of tableaux, in the manner of a stage set.   The city of Toulouse is the background for  the newspaper, just as the pattern exists on a separate plane from the outline of  Marthe's dress.

 

The Toulouse Dispatch began publishing on October  2, 1870,to transmitnews of the soldiers fighting the Franco-Pruissan War to the women of Toulouse.  It survived to , become a regional newspaper with several editions.   In the hands of John Baptist Chaumeil, a civil engineer, it was the voice of the working classes  After Chaumeil. came Arthur Huc (1854-1932), originally the Paris correspondent for the paper.  While Huc shared the leftist politics of his fellow journalist Jean Jaures, (soon to be leader of France's Socialist Party), he married an heiress from Marseilles, whose money allowed him to cultivate his interest in modern art.

 

The very year that Huc became editor-in-chief he arranged an art exhibition on the premises of  La Depeche.   The lithographs of the Paris avant-garde were represented by  the works of Louis Anquetin, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Vuillard, and Maurice Denis.   Huc's pet project attracted little notice.despite the inclusion of multiple works by a (former)  local artist - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Lautrec, having learned to scorn the values of the bourgeoisie in his hometown, doubtless enjoyed the chance to tweak their noses.  In Danse Eccentrique it is not the dance itself but the facial expressions - of mordant detachment on the part of the female dancer and moist concupiscence on the face of the male spectator - that are the point.   And so, the match between radical politics and modern art, while an intriguing episode, proved less durable than that between Marthe Meunier and Maurice Denis.