The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alphonse Mucha · colour lithograph poster, about 216 by 74 cm, impressions varying by a few centimetres with trimming, an upright of about 2.9 to 1, the figure near life size · Sarah Bernhardt standing full length in the Palm Sunday costume of the play’s third act, a palm in her right hand, her head set in a half-dome of mosaic, the title across the top and lettering in the arch and at the foot · the poster for Bernhardt’s production of Victorien Sardou’s Gismonda at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, designed at the end of 1894 and on the hoardings at the opening of January 1895 · impressions held widely, the Mucha Foundation and the Mucha Museum in Prague among them · the unit scored is the poster as an edition, the image as printed in 1894 to 1895; later reprints, reductions and reissues are context
Mode
The Paris theatre poster of the 1890s turned toward the icon; the first full statement of what became the maker’s style
Mythos
The woman as icon, the Byzantine empress or Madonna in the apse, the priestess with the palm, the Palm Sunday entry as a triumph; evoked through costume and setting rather than built
Phase
Designed at the end of 1894; on the Paris hoardings at the opening of January 1895, for the run of the play
Presentation
Colour lithograph, about 216 by 74 cm, near life size; flat colour in a restricted palette of ochres, olive, lilac, rose, gold and pale blue on cream, held in a firm, even contour
Register
Hieratic stillness and decorative solemnity, held from top to foot
Scale
One figure, one arch, one attribute and three registers of lettering, in a sheet the height of a person
Governing Proposition
A woman stands full length in a long robe of gold and pale tones, a heavy embroidered stole down its front, orchids in her hair and a palm frond rising from her right hand against her shoulder. Behind her head a half-dome of small mosaic tesserae makes a halo. Above her the play’s name runs in a band of built capitals; her own name and the theatre’s are lettered into the arch and the foot. The sheet is as tall as a person and very narrow. The wager of the poster is that a street advertisement for an actress can take the form of an icon in its apse, and that a passer-by in Paris will meet her standing at his own height, gilded and still.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Alphonse Mucha (1860 to 1939), a Moravian working in Paris, designed Gismonda at the end of 1894 as the poster for Sarah Bernhardt’s production of Victorien Sardou’s play Gismonda at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, and it was on the Paris hoardings at the opening of January 1895. It is a colour lithograph of about 216 by 74 centimetres, impressions varying by a few centimetres with trimming: an upright of about 2.9 to 1, very tall against the Paris poster of the early 1890s. The figure is near life size, so that on a hoarding Bernhardt stood at the height of a passer-by. The unit scored is the poster as an edition, the image as printed in 1894 to 1895. Later reprints, reductions and the reissues of his theatre posters are context and bear on survival only; so are the play, Bernhardt’s performance and the other posters he made for her.
Bernhardt stands full length, turned slightly to the left, in the costume of the Palm Sunday procession in the play’s third act: a long robe of gold and pale tones with a heavy embroidered stole, an orchid headdress, and a palm frond held in the right hand, rising against her shoulder. Behind her head an arch, a Byzantine half-dome worked in small mosaic tesserae, sets the head in a semicircular halo. The title runs in a band across the top in built-up capitals, GISMONDA; the actress’s name and the theatre are lettered into the arch and into a lower band, over a panel of mosaic ornament at the foot. The palette is muted, ochres, olive, lilac, rose, gold and pale blue on cream, and the figure is held in a firm, even contour. There is one figure, one attribute, no incident and no setting but the arch.
Judged by subtraction, nearly every part bears weight. The length of the figure is compelled, because the poster’s point is a woman at full human height in the street. The arch is required, because it is what turns a costumed actress into an icon. The palm is required: it names the scene and the liturgy, and its diagonal is the only line that crosses her vertical. The lettering is bound into the design rather than set on it. Necessity loosens at the foot, where the mosaic panel and the lower lettering are crowded, and the zone could be other than it is without loss to what the sheet says. That band of ornament is filling as much as structure.
Movement II
The half-dome is where the shrine is built. Its tesserae, small and regular, ring the head in a semicircle, and the head inside them becomes an image to be venerated rather than a face to be recognised. The jambs of the arch run down beside her, and she stands in it as a statue stands in a niche. Remove the arch and she is a costumed woman. Set the same figure in a broad sheet of the kind the Paris poster then preferred and the icon is lost, for it is the narrow, near life-size column that makes her a standing presence in the street, actress and statue at once. Print her in strong primaries and the solemnity goes: the muted gold is the liturgy.
The lettering is part of the architecture. The play’s name is set in a band like a frieze, and the actress’s name and the theatre’s are lettered into the arch and the foot, so that name, title and theatre belong to the shrine: the advertisement is the reliquary. That is the form carrying the knowledge, and it is what the sheet knows. The knowledge is not large. The form carries one idea fully rather than a complex one, and that is what holds it below the upper band of its axis.
One law governs the whole: flat colour bounded by contour, a frontal and symmetrical architecture, the figure treated as ornament and the ornament as image. Take the two most distant elements, the capitals at the top and the mosaic at the foot, and they obey the same law as the face, surface pattern made to bear a presence. The decorative and the sacred registers are fused rather than set side by side. But the territory is one figure, one setting and one mood, and a single still figure is easier to hold to one law than a crowded scene. The law is held completely over a small range.
Movement III
The palm is the one line across the column, and it names a day: Palm Sunday, the entry that is a triumph before a passion. Through it, and through the half-dome, the tesserae and the stole, the sheet summons the woman as icon, the Byzantine Madonna or empress in the apse, the priestess with the palm. These are evoked with precision. But they are costume and setting, borrowed from the play’s Byzantine Athens and from the icon tradition, not a structure the image builds. No passion follows this triumph, and the icon has no doubleness. What lifts the axis above allusion is that the myth of the actress as goddess is the real subject of the sheet.
That subject is also what the poster discloses. The star of a commercial theatre is given the bearing of a Byzantine icon, and the sheet makes visible what the modern cult of celebrity borrows from the sacred: a living woman set in a halo on a street hoarding to be looked at by everyone. It is a meaning, not a mood, and it holds; the poster is an early clear instance of the performer as votive image in mass print. But it serves the condition it displays rather than examining it. It sells Bernhardt as an icon with no second register that lets the viewer see the selling, as Lautrec’s posters, by their caricature, let the commerce of the music hall show. The disclosure is enacted, not articulated, and that is the lowest of the five gated axes.
The elevation is of one kind. A figure larger than the passer-by expects, gold, a halo, the gravity of a procession: seen at its size on a wall the lift is real, and the ceremonial calm is the sheet’s strongest effect. But it has one register, decorative solemnity, held from the top to the foot, and nothing rises above it to terror, transport or the shock of beauty. The face is composed and a little withdrawn; the height belongs to the costume and the arch more than to the woman. It is a dignified and sustained lift, not a summit.
Movement IV
The poster entered a tradition with its founders already in place. Chéret’s posters gave Paris bright primaries, swirling figures and broad formats; Lautrec’s gave it the flat silhouette learned from Japanese prints, caricature and the night world; Grasset had already drawn the medieval outlined figure and had made a tall poster for Bernhardt, Jeanne d’Arc. Against Chéret the turn is large: a still figure for a moving one, muted gold for primaries, a sacred register for a festive one, a life-size column for a broad sheet. Against Grasset it is smaller. The stake was real: a little-known illustrator was making the poster of the most famous actress in Paris in a manner close to an icon. The story of the commission, Mucha correcting proofs at the printer’s over Christmas while the regular designers were away, comes chiefly from his own later account and his son’s biography, and is tradition rather than record. What is certain is that the poster made his name and that Bernhardt kept him as her designer for several years.
The making is a master’s. The contour is sure and even over a figure more than two metres tall; the drapery runs in long continuous folds that keep the column standing; the lettering is designed, not set, and its built capitals carry the weight of the architecture. The palette is held to a narrow range so that gold reads as gold without metallic ink, and the colour lies in flat areas laid with care. The icon exists only through the line and the palette, so the making is load-bearing. The costs are charged at the foot, where the lower lettering and the mosaic panel are crowded, and in the face and hands, which are modelled more softly and less decisively than the robe. What the swerve invented, a repeatable style of contour, halo and ornament, is also its limit: it became a manner.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its making and its coherence stand high and its survival is whole, but four of the five gated axes stand short: the disclosure enacted rather than articulated, the archetype worn as costume, the swerve partly anticipated, and a reach that runs through a manner as much as through this sheet. Its nearest neighbour in Paris in the same decade, At the Moulin Rouge (7.9), stands three tenths above it, higher on disclosure and on return, lower on Pressure on Tradition, on survival and on the inner law. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (8.1), the nearest in kind, gold and Byzantine mosaic and a woman made icon, stands above it on most axes, level on necessity and survival, and below it only on Pressure on Tradition. Fragonard’s The Swing (7.8) stands two tenths above.
Movement V
The poster was made to be pasted up and thrown away, and it was taken from the walls by collectors. It survives whole in many original impressions; it is an edition, so no single loss touches it, and impressions are held widely, the Mucha Foundation and the Mucha Museum in Prague among them. Lithographs on paper fade and fox, and its first state is carried by surviving impressions rather than by any object made to last; it is legible in good ones. Its presence has been continuous since 1895, in every history of the poster and in exhibitions of the maker, though his imagery as a whole is more widely present than this sheet. It has outlived the play, now seldom performed, and the production it advertised.
In its field the sheet was a turn: the first full statement of the elongated figure, the contour line, the halo arch, the integrated lettering and the muted decorative colour that became Mucha’s style. It won him the run of Bernhardt’s posters that followed, among them La Dame aux Camélias, Lorenzaccio, La Samaritaine, Médée, Hamlet and Tosca; it set the pattern of his decorative panels and of his commercial work for Champenois and others; and it is a founding image of Art Nouveau graphic design across Europe. Much of that later reach is of a manner, sometimes a pastiche, rather than of this sheet’s discovery. Its return is formal: the tesserae, the embroidery of the stole, the construction of the letters, the palm leading the eye down the figure. The meaning is given at first sight, and return confirms it rather than deepens it. Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster (7.3), a later poster of a person made icon, stands three tenths below it.
The orders it holds are the theatre and its star, commerce and the street, the sacred through Palm Sunday and the icon, and history through the Byzantine Athens of the play, fused in one image and each held as a sign. There is no labour, no family, no state, no natural order and no consciousness beyond the composure of one face. Tower Bridge (7.6), a work of the same year that dresses a modern commercial function in historical costume, stands level with it. The figure describes the form. On the wall of a Paris street in January 1895 a woman stood at the height of the passer-by, in gold, under a dome, holding a palm.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction, nearly every part bears weight. The figure’s length is compelled: the poster’s point is a woman at full human height in the street, and the narrow sheet is the column she makes. The arch is required, since its half-dome is what turns a costumed actress into an icon. The palm is required: it names the scene and the liturgy, and its diagonal is the only line that crosses the figure’s vertical. The lettering is bound into the design rather than set on it. Necessity loosens at the foot, where the mosaic panel and the lower lettering are crowded and the zone could be otherwise without loss; that band of ornament is filling as much as structure.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure is real and narrow. The star of a commercial theatre is given the bearing of a Byzantine icon, and the sheet makes visible what the modern cult of celebrity borrows from the sacred: a living woman set in a halo on a street hoarding, to be looked at by everyone. That is a meaning, not only a mood, and it holds; the poster is an early clear instance of the performer as votive image in mass print. But it does not examine the condition it displays; it serves it. It sells Bernhardt as icon with no second register that lets the viewer see the selling, as Lautrec’s caricature lets the commerce of the music hall show. It enacts its disclosure rather than articulating it.
Score: 6.8 / 10
There is grandeur of one kind: hieratic stillness, a figure larger than the passer-by expects, gold and halo, the gravity of a procession. Seen at its size on a wall the elevation is real, and the ceremonial calm is the sheet’s strongest effect. But height and frequency both count, and the poster has one register, held from top to foot: decorative solemnity. Nothing rises above it to terror, transport or the shock of beauty. The face is composed and a little withdrawn, and the elevation belongs to the costume and the arch more than to the woman. It is a dignified, sustained lift, not a summit.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The archetype is the woman as icon: the Byzantine Madonna or empress in the apse, the priestess with the palm, the Palm Sunday entry that is a triumph before a passion. Half-dome, tesserae, stole and palm evoke these with precision. But they are costume and setting, borrowed from the play’s Byzantine Athens and from the icon tradition, rather than a structure the image builds. Nothing makes the archetype load-bearing beyond the act of display: no passion follows the triumph, and the icon has no doubleness. What lifts the axis above allusion is that the myth of the actress as goddess is the sheet’s real subject.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Paris illustrated poster: Chéret’s bright primaries, swirling figures and broad formats; Lautrec’s flat silhouette from Japanese prints, his caricature and his night world; Grasset’s medieval outline and tall format, already used for Bernhardt. Against Chéret the turn is large: a still figure for a moving one, muted gold for primaries, a sacred register for a festive one, a life-size column for a broad sheet. Against Grasset it is smaller. The stake was real: a little-known illustrator making the poster of the most famous actress in Paris in a manner close to an icon. What the swerve invented, a repeatable style of contour, halo and ornament, is also its limit: it became a manner.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and see what the poster stops knowing. Set the same figure in a broad format and the icon is lost: the narrow, near life-size column makes her a standing presence in the street, actress and statue in a niche at once. Print her in strong primaries and the solemnity goes; the muted gold is the liturgy. Remove the arch and she is a costumed woman, not an image of veneration. Name, title and theatre are lettered into architectural bands, part of the shrine: the advertisement is the reliquary. The form is the instrument. What holds the figure below the upper band is that the knowledge is not large: the form carries one idea fully, not a complex one.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence over promise. On return the eye finds more: the tesserae of the half-dome, the embroidery of the stole, the construction of the lettering, the way the palm leads the gaze down the figure. That formal yield is genuine. But the image is quickly grasped, and its meaning is stated at first sight; return confirms rather than deepens. The literature on the sheet is mostly historical, on the commission, the contract with Bernhardt and the birth of a style, and on Art Nouveau design; it is not a record of a century of new readings of the image itself. It has been admired and reproduced without a break, which is presence, not depth.
Score: 6.9 / 10
The field is the Paris poster of the 1890s, and in that field the sheet was a turn: the first full statement of what became Mucha’s style, the elongated figure, the contour line, the halo arch, the lettering built into the design, the muted decorative colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it won Mucha Bernhardt’s patronage and the run of her posters that followed, among them La Dame aux Camélias, Lorenzaccio, Médée and Hamlet; it set the pattern of his decorative panels and of his commercial work for Champenois and others; it is a founding image of Art Nouveau graphic design across Europe. Much of the later reach runs through the style rather than this sheet, and the field already had its founders in Chéret and Lautrec.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about 132 years. Form: whole, in many original impressions; it is an edition, and no single loss touches it. Presence: continuous since 1895, from the collectors who took it from the hoardings to its place in every history of the poster and in exhibitions of the maker; his imagery as a whole is more widely present than this sheet, which sits below that ceiling. Fabric: lithographs on paper fade and fox, and a poster was made to be pasted up and thrown away; its first state is carried by surviving impressions, legible in good ones. It has outlived the play, now seldom performed, and the production it advertised, which is the axis’s chief test.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of the colour lithograph at the scale of a hoarding. The contour is sure and even over a figure more than two metres tall; the drapery runs in long continuous folds that keep the column standing; the lettering is designed rather than set, and its built capitals have the weight of the architecture. The palette is held to a restricted range so that gold reads as gold without metallic ink, laid in flat areas with care. The making is load-bearing: the icon exists only through the line and the palette. The costs are charged at the foot, where the lower lettering and the mosaic are crowded, and in the face and hands, modelled more softly and less decisively than the robe.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One physics governs the sheet: flat colour bounded by contour, a frontal and symmetrical architecture, the figure treated as ornament and the ornament as image. Take the two most distant elements, the lettering at the top and the mosaic at the foot: they obey the same law as the face, surface pattern made to bear a presence. The decorative and the sacred are fused, not set side by side. But the range the law governs is moderate, one figure, one setting, one mood, and narrowness is not coherence: a single still figure is easier to hold to one law than a crowded scene. That holds the figure below the upper band.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held: the theatre and its star; commerce and the street; the sacred, through the liturgy of Palm Sunday and the icon tradition; history, through the Byzantine Athens of the play. They are fused in one image rather than listed, and that earns the floor. What holds the axis at its floor, the lowest of the twelve, is that each order is held as a sign rather than developed: no labour, no family, no state, no natural order, no consciousness beyond the composure of one face. A poster of one figure cannot hold what a great history painting holds, and this one does not try. The figure describes the form.
Score: 6.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.6 and The Inner Law at 8.3. An edition that survives whole in many impressions and has outlived the play and the production it advertised; a command of contour, built lettering and a restricted palette on which the icon depends; and one law of flat colour and contour under which the capitals at the top, the face and the mosaic at the foot all take part.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.0: theatre, commerce, the sacred and a historical setting fused in one image, each held as a sign; labour, family, the state and consciousness absent. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 6.8: the sacralisation of celebrity enacted rather than exposed. Then The Bottomless Well at 6.9: an image quickly grasped, its return formal. Then The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 7.0: one register of decorative solemnity, and the icon worn as costume and setting rather than built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.1, The Swerve at 7.6, The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 and The Unconcealment at 6.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 6.8, The Sublime, 7.0, The Archetypal Deep, 7.0, and The Bottomless Well, 6.9, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, meets its own floor of 6.0 exactly. Three of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 91.1, an average of 7.59 that displays 7.6. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the poster as an image and as a historical object, not from an impression in hand: well for the image, its format and its place in the Paris poster of the 1890s; without a measured view of any particular impression’s state, so that where a judgment turns on condition it is held more loosely. The work scored is the poster as an edition, the colour lithograph of about 216 by 74 centimetres as printed in 1894 to 1895, with no single impression the work. Later reprints, reductions and the reissues of the maker’s theatre posters bear on survival only. The play, Bernhardt’s performance and the other posters made for her are context and are not scored. No words are quoted except the title printed on the sheet; no statement of the maker’s, of Bernhardt’s or of any critic is quoted. The story of the commission is given as tradition from the maker’s later account and his son’s biography, not as fact of the poster. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact day of first posting, the name of the printing house and whether the image was printed in two sheets, the number of stones, the exact wording and placement of the lettering at the foot, the dates of the later Bernhardt posters, any holding of an impression beyond the two named, and the later artists and movements said to have drawn on the maker’s manner.