Partition pour piano "Blanche et Noire - Valse"

First edition of this waltz for piano, with the upper wrapper illustrated in colour by the Clérice Frères studio, at that time most probably the work of Victor Clérice alone, the last representative of this dynasty of Montmartre poster artists.

A fine copy.

Blanche et Noire was composed by Auguste Bosc (1868-1945), a prominent figure of Belle Époque Montmartre. Founder of the Bal Tabarin in 1904 and conductor at the Élysée-Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette, he was also, as here, his own publisher, issuing several hundred pieces of light music under his own imprint between 1893 and 1939.

The composition appeared in 1926, the very year in which Bosc commissioned the bandstand on the Esplanade in his native Montpellier, which now bears his name. The illustration depicts the then-common motif of a Black maid attending to the toilette of her white mistress, against a chequerboard background which, through a graphic conceit characteristic of the Clérice studio’s Art Deco style, reinforces the pun in the title: « blanc et noir » being the very vocabulary of chess and draughts.

A musical and graphic document of Montmartre in the Roaring Twenties, created by two emblematic dynasties of the Parisian music hall and poster tradition.