Gouache originale signée "Background design, 1922"

Signed original gouache “Background design, 1922” One of the only original preserved stage decor sketches by Loïs Hutton, also one of the first of her career. This abstract composition reflects the artist's incredible versatility. She flourished both as a principal dancer at her lover's school, the Margaret Morris School as well as a choreographer, set and costume designer. These painted sets on large fabrics served as the backdrop to the school's dance troupe productions and solo dances by Loïs who had previously painted a design on canvas based on a sketch by her mentor the Fauvist painter John Duncan Fergusson. Trying her hand here at a radically new and ambitious style, her design joinsthe angular movements of her dances and is inspired by the teachings of Cézanne: “Everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder” (letter to Emile Bernard). This vital attention paid to volumes goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of motives close to Edward Wadsworth's Vorticism.

Hutton visited at that time Wadsworth and the group of Vorticists in Morris' Chelsea underground club, a laboratory of modern dance where the set in its large-format version may have been displayed in December 1921 or the following year as suggested by the two dates on the lower part of the composition and on the back.


“Dancing as an art, instead of an idea”: art and movement by Loïs Hutton




Formed at the crossroads of Cézanian, Cubist and Vorticist modernities, Loïs Hutton occupies a special place with the European avant-gardes at the heart of the roaring twenties. She develops an ambitious graphic and choreographic work, initially in the Chelsea lesbian art circle, then on the Riviera, where her dances will enchant the lost generation.

In 1918, Loïs entered the school founded by Margaret Morris, who was already a renowned dancer, suffragette and feminist, in the London district of Chelsea. This experimental school, inspired by Raymond Duncan's neo-Greek Akademia, the brother of Isadora, who had introduced the use of simple tunics giving freedom to the bodies of barefoot dancers, had an eminently political vision rejecting the artificiality of classical ballet and its patriarchal organisation. Hutton began at the Margaret Morris club, a sort of London annex of the famous Montparnasse district, where Vorticist artists and writers such as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Katherine Mansfield, Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Ezra Pound mingled. A place of freedom and homosexual love, in which Hutton gradually asserts herself as an artist and choreographer.
In this first part of the 20th century, marked by an unprecedented intellectual and artistic proliferation, Hutton pushes the “New Spirit” to its climax, described by Apollinaire in his review of the ballet Parade (1917) which "se promet de modifier de fond en comble, dans l'allégresse universelle, les arts et les mœurs” “promises to modify the arts and customs from top to bottom, in universal joy”, "car jusqu'ici les décors et les costumes d'une part, la chorégraphie d'autre part, n'avaient entre eux qu'un lien factice” “because until now the sets and the costumes on the one hand, the choreography on the other, had only a fictitious bond between them”. Less than three years later, Hutton achieved the true “total art” that is dear to German romantics, mastering choreography, writing, masks, costumes, sets and lighting all at once, while the Ballets Russes called on a cohort of artists including Henry Laurens, Pablo Picasso, and Nicolas Roerich for their choreographic creations.

"Background design"

One of the only original preserved set plans by Loïs Hutton, also one of the first of her career, this abstract composition reflects the artist's incredible versatility who flourished both as a principal dancer at her lover's school, the Margaret Morris School, and also as a choreographer, set and costume designer. These painted sets on large fabrics served as the backdrop to the school's dance troupe productions and solo dances by Loïs, who had previously painted a design on canvas based on a sketch by her mentor, the Fauvist painter John Duncan Fergusson. Trying her hand here at a radically new and ambitious style, her design joined the angular movements of her dances and is inspired by Cézanien teachings: “Tout dans la nature se modèle sur la sphère, le cône et le cylindre” “Everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder” (letter to Emile Bernard). This vital attention paid to volumes goes hand in hand with the composition of a fragmentation of forms close to Edward Wadsworth's Vorticism. Hutton then visited Wadsworth and the group of Vorticists in the Chelsea underground club, a laboratory of modern dance where the sets in their large-format version may have been displayed, in December 1921 or the following year, as suggested by the two dates on the lower part of the composition and on the back.