CECIL DE BLAQUIÈRE HOWARD DIT CECIL HOWARD (1... Lot n° 56

Mistinguett and Max Dearly dancing the chaloupée waltz at the Moulin Rouge Beautiful fan project. Gouache on paper, signed lower right. 29.7 x 44.5 cm. On June 15, 1908, actor and stage director Max Dearly chose Mistinguett to perform with him the famous valse chaloupée, also known as the danse des Apaches or danse du Pavé, which he created in the "Revue du Moulin" at the Moulin Rouge, based on motifs from Jacques Offenbach's ballet "Le Papillon". The dance depicts an argument between an Apache thug and a prostitute. Violent, athletic and spectacular, it ends in a rhythmic waltz. Le Figaro of July 28, 1908 reports: "A regular at the Moulin-Rouge told us yesterday that never has there been a warmer, more 'excited' audience than the one that applauds the witty Revue du Moulin Rouge and its performers, led by Mr. Max Dearly and Mlle Mistinguett, every evening. The tiomphal, international success of the duo, who repeated the experience at the Casino de Paris, helped launch Mistinguett's career. In every corner, improbable Apache couples would perform, trying to imitate the two stars who would inspire artists such as Kees van Dongen, in a famous oil painting, and press cartoonists. Alphonse Rucho made statuettes of them in regula. Having left Buffalo in 1905, Cecil Howard moved to Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian. At the age of seventeen, he was immediately won over by the artistic life he encountered in Montparnasse. He would spend half his life there. A year later, the sculptor presented his first work at the Salon des artistes français. Thereafter, almost every year, he participated in the Salon d'Automne and/or the Salon de la Scité Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He soon became a member of these two institutions, and in 1909 presented animal sculptures created at the Antwerp Zoo with his friend Rembrandt Bugatti. In 1913, Howard took part in the Armory Show in New York, Chicago and Boston. For this major event, which marked the arrival of modern art in the United States, he exhibited a standing female nude modelled on Lucy Krohg. After experimenting with painted sculpture, particularly in the field of portraiture, Cecil Howard entered the field of Cubism. He incorporated the movements of tango dancers, which he regularly practiced at the Bullier ball, into his cheerful polychrome sculptures. These highly personal works, of which only five remain on record today, make Cecil Howard one of the pioneers of Cubist sculpture, and place him at the forefront of modernism in this period. The schematized sharpness of Cubist forms is found one last time in La mère et l'enfant, carved directly from a block of marble. Presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in 1919, it was bought by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and is now part of the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Touched by the vogue for "Negro Art", Howard also sculpted a beautiful Nubian with a fluid, stylized amphora, which he presented in New York in 1916. He continued this inspiration in the 1920s with commissions for an English baron, Lord Howard de Walden. Throughout his career, the sculptor also produced a large number of works inspired by his passion for sport. He never ceased to represent bodies in motion, and to animate his art with an irrepressible vital energy.