American dancer Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) was a pioneer of modern dance. In his 1893 lithograph, French avant-garde artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) conveyed the mesmerizing effect of Fuller’s experimental dance style. Acquired in 2025, Lautrec’s Miss Loïe Fuller is a nearly abstract print that distills the dazzling light and energy of her Serpentine Dance.

Fuller’s Serpentine Dance, debuted in 1892 at the Folies-Bergères in Montmartre, Paris, redefined stage performance through its innovative use of lighting, costume, and movement. To perform, she donned a voluminous dress and manipulated the billowing fabric sleeves with long wooden poles she held in her hands. Multicolored lights were projected onto her white silk costume.

The visual sensation was positively electrifying to her audiences. Artists strove to capture her performance on canvas, on paper, in sculpture, on film, and in photography (as in Nadar’s photograph in our collection). Like Lautrec’s lithograph, Nadar’s photograph shows Fuller’s face just visible amidst the vast waves of fabric that undulate around her, nearly engulfing her body. We can sense the dynamism and intensity of her performance, and the stamina she must have had to keep her dress afloat.

It is unsurprising that when Lautrec saw Fuller perform in 1892, he became utterly transfixed, returning night after night to watch her dance. He turned to color lithography — one of his great furias, or obsessions — to translate onto paper the fantastical effects of movement, light, and music. In his print, he depicts Fuller almost as if we are below her, watching her perform mid-dance, the sleeves of her dress ballooning around her, her small feet lifting off the stage, as if she is floating. At right, the arm of an upright bass frames her silhouette — a shadow reminiscent of the Japanese printmaking that deeply inspired the artist. 

Though this print is a color lithograph, a medium invented for the mass reproduction of images, it is unique. In this, his most innovative print series (approximately 50 impressions, commissioned and published by André Marty), Lautrec endeavored to capture the changing colors of Fuller’s performance. To do so, the artist worked in the printshop of Edward Ancourt, meticulously printing numerous impressions from the same five stones. He used various combinations of color ink — yellow, orange, mauve, green, rose, blue — to achieve distinct iterations of the scene.

The impression of Miss Loïe Fuller acquired by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, our works on paper department, is a unique trial proof. It was dedicated to Lautrec’s publisher and friend Édouard Kleinmann, and made prior to the edition. The impression stands out for the deep ocher and purple-red gradient, and a remarkable gold shimmer, the effect of a metallic dusting that gives the final print its alluring gleam. 

Contemporaries of Lautrec also used color lithography to depict Fuller mid-performance. Our collection includes posters of Fuller by Jules Chéret, Jules-Alexandre Grün, and Manuel Orazi.

Fuller became a favorite of the Parisian Art Nouveau movement. Indeed, her fame grew over the course of the 1890s such that in the 1900 Exposition Universelle, she was one of the main attractions. Often referred to as the fair’s unofficial queen, Fuller presented her performances in a specially designed pavilion equipped with the most advanced electric lighting of the era. The captivating poster created by Orazi, rendered in a lavish Art Nouveau style, evokes the enchanting atmosphere of color and light that awaited spectators at her daily shows.

Fuller radically transformed dance by integrating art, science, and technology, developing performances that blended motion with lights. Eschewing classical ballet’s conventions, Fuller helped shape modern dance as a form of expressive, experimental, and multimedia performance art. Perhaps even more meaningfully to San Francisco, Fuller was also a close friend of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, co-founder of the Legion of Honor. It was Spreckels who donated this marble bust of Fuller by Théodore Louis Auguste Rivière to the Legion in 1937. With an intense expression, Fuller looks out defiantly from her thick hair, which tumbles and pools around her face.

Fuller proved essential in building the Legion’s collection of French sculpture. She was a close friend of Auguste Rodin. Acting as his agent, she was instrumental in the sale of 10 of Rodin’s works to Spreckels during his lifetime — a group that included The Thinker (1904), an iconic artwork that remains on view today in the museum’s Court of Honor.

Rodin gifted Fuller a remarkable nude drawing that the dancer annotated about the founding of the Legion of Honor and the important role played by Spreckels. The gift, now in our collection, is a testimony to the strong relationship between the three and Fuller’s legacy at the museum.