Library Briefings

Shadow Theater of Montmartre

Selections from the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections

As some of you may already know, one of the significant collections of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections is photographs, caricatures, books, and manuscripts relating to the Siege and subsequent Commune of Paris of 1870-1871. Montmartre, a fairly rural and working class neighborhood which had only been incorporated as part of Paris a decade earlier, was epicenter for the revolutionary Communards, and was chiefly destroyed by government troops in the suppression of that rebellion. As it was rebuilt in the 1870s and 1880s, an anti-establishment spirit lingered like some unexercisable local genius, and Montmartre, with its inexpensive housing, became a favored locale for artists, intellectuals, and increasingly populist modes of entertainment. This is the first of two small articles highlighting some of the McCormick Library’s holdings generated from that time and place.

One kind of newly affordable entertainment was the cabaret, and one of the most famous of Montmartre’s cabarets was Le Chat Noir [cn1], founded by Rodolphe Salis in 1881. Salis was an energetic impresario, orator, and satirist and Le Chat Noir quickly became a meeting place for like-minded artists, writers, and musicians. Performers entertained with poetry, political songs, skits, and mimes both fanciful and caustically sarcastic. The walls were decorated with the work of local artists. Cheap beer, wine, coffee, tea, and snacks were available -- a menu that eventually expanded to include cocktails and inexpensive lunches and dinners as the cabaret grew more successful and moved to its second, larger home in 1885.

Both to promote his cabaret and to provide a venue for his own and his friends’ writing and art, Salis simultaneously published a weekly journal, also called Le Chat Noir, the first issue [cn2] of which appeared in 1882. The journal was very cheap and quickly became popular, achieving a print run of 20,000 copies per issue. Its format remained essentially constant throughout the years: four newspaper pages consisting of poetry, satire, reviews, and cartoons and comical drawings by graphic artists like Henry Somm (1844-1907) and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923). Besides smaller decorations sprinkled among the text pages, these comic drawings [cn3] had a page to themselves each issue. If torn out they could serve as inexpensive wall décor.

George Auriol (1863-1938) and Henri Rivière (1864-1951) were two close friends who shared, among other things, a taste for the newly popularized arts of Japan (both became key exponents of Japonisme) and work for both the Chat Noir cabaret and Le Chat Noir journal. Auriol contributed humorous essays and illustrations and served as an editor of Le Chat Noir from 1883-1893. Rivière helped teach him drawing skills, and a friendship with another Chat Noir associate, Eugène Grasset, introduced him to a life-long interest and practice in typographical design and book decoration. Rivière contributed illustrations to Le Chat Noir and also served as a sub-editor for a few years until new labors at the cabaret, as principal designer and operator of the innovative Théâtre d’Ombres, Shadow Theater, took his attentions.

The shadow theater at Chat Noir was an interesting forerunner of cinema. Using back-lit cut zinc figures and landscape elements silhouetted in front of a lamp and manually moved, the shadows drifted across the white silk screen in conjunction with live music and narration. It was a novel spectacle of sight and sound. Rivière was able to create delicate color effects by projecting light through movable racks containing pieces of translucent painted glass; these could be superimposed to create complex gradations of tints and tone for the illusion of sunrise or sunset skies and other atmospheric effects. For the absinthe-soaked crowds, these musical shadow shows [cn4] were a phantasmagoric sensation and became a great draw, one of Paris’s top attractions. Claude Debussy attended. Erik Satie (a former pianist at Chat Noir till a fight with Rodolphe Salis sent him packing) attended. Paul Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as foreign notables like the “decadent” English writer Arthur Symons, all found themselves there like moths to flames.

The first shadow theater was quickly found to be too cramped and hot backstage and at Rivière’s suggestion Salis agreed to expand. The new stage took up two stories and an entire wall of the cabaret. Below stage was a piano and a place for a narrator or performer. Behind was a specially ventilated area with the hot lights, equipment, and staff of performing technicians.

A number of different artists designed the figures and wrote the scenarios for the 30 or so shadow plays produced at Chat Noir between 1887 and 1896, but it is Rivière's that are best known today. The reason for this is that several of his shadow plays were “published” in book form. How does an evanescent event like a musical shadow play get turned into a book? Well, interpretively. Rivière made color lithographs depicting various “moments” within the flux of the shadow plays, almost as if they were photographic snapshots. These were paired with facing pages depicting music and lyrics that accompanied (at least approximately) the shadow show at the moment depicted by the lithographed image. Dispayed here are spreads from the 1897 volume Claires de Lune [cn5, cn6, cn7, cn8]. The shadow books were oblong and horizontal in format, to mimic the shape of the stage.

Rivière explicitly acknowledged the profound influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints had on his own art. His prints typically featured simple strong contours, foreshortening, tilted perspective and asymmetrical compositions, as can be seen in these images from La Marche à l'Étoile [cn9, cn10, cn11, cn12, cn13, cn14, cn15, cn16, cn17, cn18, cn19] or these from L'Enfant Prodigue [cn20, cn21, cn22, cn23, cn24, cn25, cn26, cn27]. In fact, the Japanese aspect was emphasized in ads like this one [cn28] published in Le Chat Noir promoting the shadow show performances, even though the shadow theater itself was not a Japanese concept.

George Auriol collaborated with Rivière on his shadow books, providing type design and internal and external decorative devices, which are elegant examples of how Japanese ideas helped create the style soon known as art nouveau. Auriol went on to design bookplates, cachets, and monograms for his friends, published these designs in a series of quaint, crisp little model books. Depicted here are some of his designs for Rivière [cn29] and some he made for himself [cn30].

Among the books produced by Rivière and Auriol, the masterpiece was in fact not a shadow play book, but Les Trente-six Vues de la Tour Eiffel,[e1, e2, e3, e4, e5, e6, e7, e8, e9, e10, e11, e12, e13, e14, e15, e16, e17, e18, e19, e20, e21, e22, e23, e24, e25, e26, e27, e28, e29, e30, e31, e32, e33, e34, e35, e36, e37, e38, e39] finished and published in 1902 after many years of labor. The book is modeled after Hokusai’s set of woodblock prints depicting 36 views of Mount Fuji. Here Rivière shows a magnificently diverse array of views of contemporary Paris, all with at least a tiny bit of the newly built Eiffel Tower somewhere within the frame. Rivière was a talented photographer and many of these images derived from photographic originals. Along with Rodolphe Salis and other excited Parisian friends, he visited the Eiffel Tower frequently during its construction, and a good number of his 36 views show the tower in various stages of completion. Again Auriol designed this book, its type, the lovely iris-strewn wrappers, and art nouveau decorations. This was to be Rivière’s last major publication. He retired from active participation in the art world and spent most of the rest of his long life in what seems to have been a chiefly happy retirement, devoting himself to making watercolors for his own enjoyment.

Scott Krafft