Information regarding the model in the painting The Dancer Loïe Fuller Seen from the Backstage – Wheel was brought together by Camesasca (1987, p. 232). Born in Chicago in 1862, Loïe Fuller was a child prodigy who, from the age of five, was launched on a spectacular career – becoming famous as a dancer, speaker, and show-woman in New York and in Paris. For one of her most interesting choreographies, she dressed in Japanese costume with long veils undulating under shimmering colored lights, thus achieving suggestive arabesque effects. In 1892, her fame was confirmed at the Folies-Bergère with a performance that J. Lorrain, reviewer of L’Écho de Paris, described as a kind of “apotheosis of the modern age” (in Camesasca 1987, p. 232). However, her fall was just as fast as her rise to fame and eight years later she was living in poverty and ostracism, still in Paris.
Camesasca and Bardi (1979, p. 104) were the first to identify the figure, based on the inscription on the lower part of the painting. The picture “is part of a series of eleven paintings, of which the first five, including ours, were reproduced in Figaro Illustré, in July 1893, to illustrate an article on ‘le plaisir à Paris’ from the pen of G. Geffroy; the other six paintings of the series were featured in the February 1894 issue of this same newspaper, together with another article by Geffroy”. (Camesasca 1987, p. 232). Painted in the same year as the Masp gouache, the lithograph series Miss Loïe Fuller (36.8 x 26.8 cm.) was dedicated to her and consisted of sixty copies – each featuring a unique color combination enhanced with watercolor and gold and silver powder – and she also figured in an oil painting now conserved at the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, in Albi. Loïe showed no interest in meeting the artist, preferring photographer L. H. Lucas, who also portrayed her at that time. He showed a provocative chorus girl wearing only a transparent veil, possibly an allusion to one of her choreographies (Camesasca 1987, p. 230).
In this painting, more than in any other, Toulouse-Lautrec heralded Expressionism. In a way he was already an Expressionist painter in the strictest sense of the word, given his unique capacity to emotionally reduce the world of cabaret into the form and image of a whirling circle in a formal and expressive operation that was at the same time metonymical and metaphorical.
— Unknown authorship, 1998
