Colette

1907 · Best.-Nr. 77332 — s. l. Paris 1907. Fine. Colette the ""nude dancer"" in her stage costume s. l. • Paris s. d. 1907 28.70 x 20.40 cm une photographie contrecollée sur carton Rare and superb original contemporary mounted albumen print showing Colette languidly stretched out on a lion skin and covered with a leopard skin. Photographer's penciled number and studio stamp on the back of the mount. A substantially cropped print bearing the same penciled number on the back of our photograph 11214 is in the Reutlinger archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France Album Reutlinger de portraits divers vol. 53 p.3. We have been unable to find any other examples of this photograph in other public collections. A similar photograph belatedly dedicated to Maurice Chevalier went on sale in 2008. A beautiful sultry shot of Colette probably taken the year of her banned dance show ""Rêve d'Egypte"" at the Moulin Rouge where she shared the bill – and a scandalous kiss – with her cross-dressing aristocrat lover Missy. ""Colette was a nude dancer which at the time meant that she . draped herself in vaporous veils concealing part of her anatomy under animal skins"" Paula Dumont. Colette had already used animal skins hugging her figure in this picture as a sensual costume in Charles Van Lerberghe's Pan accompanied on stage by Lugné-Poe and Georges Wague. This was the first time anyone had dared to go without a flesh-colored body suit. Justifying her choice she went on to say: ""I want to dance naked if the body suit bothers me and humiliates my plasticity"". At the time of this photograph in 1907 Colette was performing in countless shows following her debut two years earlier in Nathalie Clifford Barney's Sapphic Salon where Mata Hari also danced. For Colette dance was synonymous with emancipation in more ways than one - as a means of sustenance and liberation of her body which finally belonged to her after her separation from her abusive husband Willy in 1906. Her undulating almost gestureless dance was linked by contemporary critics to that of Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan; her greatest success remained ""La Chair"" a risqué mime show she performed two hundred times in Paris and was subsequently produced with a new cast in New York's Manhattan Opera House. It was also in the halls of Parisian dance venues that Colette flaunted herself freely on the arm of her lovers. Her scandalous union with Missy the virile Marquise de Morny who accompanied her on stage in male costumes contributed to the fame of her performances. This is probably the rarest photograph of Colette taken by Reutlinger who also photographed her draped in Grecian style or wearing her costume from ""Le Rêve d'Egypte"". A rare visual testimony to a revolution in dance costume brought about by Colette a key figure in twentieth-century artistic and literary Paris. unknown