- exhibition
- currently
-
Figure imposée
-
Parcours d'affiches
- from 15.05.2024
- to 28.02.2025
- commissariat
- Jean-Michel Géridan
- scénographie
- Kévin Cadinot
The exhibition Figure Imposée aims to generously showcase a selection of posters, from the collection assembled by Gustave Dutailly (1846-1906), bequeathed to the city of Chaumont.
This collection, gathered by the botanist, collector, and deputy of Haute-Marne during the period of Belle Époque, is characteristic of its era. Whether depicting technological, social, or societal progress, Dutailly’s collection outlines a historical shift in French and European society.
As an active participant in political debates, his commitment led him to support the separation of Church and State, the abolition of the Senate, secular education, and the guarantee of freedom of the press. He regularly contributed to the Workers’ Gazette and took a stand for the proletariat.
At that time, a left-wing bloc, including radicals such as Gustave Dutailly, emerged and opposed to the rise of nationalists in response to the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). This bloc maintained its position in the political and social context of entrenched anti-semitism in French society and revanchism following the annexation of Alsace-Moselle by Germany (1871).
In the context of the Second Industrial Revolution, there was a decline in poverty in France of the Third Republic — then a colonial empire. It was also a period of formation of many racial stereotypes and other prejudices, of persistent inequalities, but also of technological, scientific, and societal progress, that abled leisure and amateur sports to emerge.
The illustrated poster — l’Affiche illlustrée —, made possible by chromolithography, developed and evolved under the influence of painters and cartoonists, and become a true field of plastic and narrative experimentation. Oscillating between advertisement and free expression, it revealed some emerging particularities and singularities, whereas the medium had previously been primarily typographic in nature.
While the Belle Époque paradoxically signifies both a period of enlightenment and progress and the triumph of the bourgeoisie, Figure Imposée sketches, through Dutailly’s collection, the elemental figure of its time and its paradoxes.
In figure skating, a « figure imposée » is not the choreographed movement of the skater, but rather the design the athlete must produce on the ice surface. It involves etching the frozen surface and approximating the drawing to be reproduced.
Dutailly’s legacy compels us to examine the motifs of this bequest to the city of Chaumont, to trace intersecting figures that do not solely dwell on the subjects’ qualities.
The exhibition aims to outline some aspects of the Belle Époque, as well as their enduring influences and familiarities that have traversed the centuries.
Among others, figures encountered include Jules Chéret (1836-1932), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Eugène Grasset (1845-1917), Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), Jane Avril (1868-1943), Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898), Alfons Mucha (1860-1939), Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), Louise Michel (1830-1905), Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), Pierre (1859-1906) and Marie Curie (1867-1934), awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903 for their research on radioactivity), Louise Joséphine Weber known as La Goulue (1866-1929)...
Warning.
Some images in the exhibition, conceived over a century ago and reflective of their time, may contain content that could be sensitive to certain audiences, such as depictions of individuals, bodies, scenes of violence, and nudity.
With Jules Chéret Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Pierre Bonnard Eugène Grasset Félix Vallotton Adolphe Willette Firmin Bouisset