Le Grand Guignol
Artist
Jules-Alexandre Grün
Date1897
Dimensions24 x 15 3/4 in. (61 x 40 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LinePoster House Permanent Collection
Object numberPH.805
DescriptionMany new performance venues opened in Paris during the last three decades of the 19th century, among them cafés-concerts, music halls, and theaters. The larger and more respectable of these might have commissioned a distinguished artist like Jules Chéret to design their advertising. Sleazier and more modest operations, like the Grand Guignol, could not have afforded the six hundred francs he charged per poster. Thus, they hired less famous designers like Jules-Alexandre Grün, a painter, caricaturist, and poster designer who had trained under Chéret. Few of these venues were sleazier than the Grand Guignol, a notorious theater that had opened in 1897 in Pigalle, the red-light district of Paris, and staged shockingly violent pageants and lurid, amoral tales featuring insanity, hallucination, and terror in a spooky former chapel. The cheerful prostitute here in her risqué costume, suggestively holding a baton, and the various grotesque characters lolling and grinning behind her, as well as an apparently dead soldier, are entirely representative of the seedy and horrific tenor of the scenes that awaited visitors to the Grand Guignol.On View
Not on view
