Réunion de trois dessins originaux à la gouache et au crayon sur papier

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

Formed at the crossroads of Cézanian, Cubist and Vorticist modernities, Loïs Hutton occupies a special place with the European avant-garde 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 – brother of famous dancer Isadora – neo-Greek Akademia, and its 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 arrondissement, 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 to its climax the “New Spirit” described by Apollinaire in his review of the ballet Parade (1917) which “promises to modify the arts and customs from top to bottom, in universal joy”, “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” 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.In 1923, the Margaret Morris School is established on the Côte d'Azur and opens an summer school at Cap d'Antibes where Hutton begins a new creative and sensual adventure with the French dancer Hélène Vanel. They undertake rehearsals by the sea, outings alongside Hemingway and performances as far away as Brussels or Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, even eclipsing the latest production of the Ballets Russes in the heart of critic Harold Levinson. Vanel and Hutton, untameable lovers, soon separate from Margaret Morris and the following year publish their manifesto of the Rythme et Couleur movement, claiming their definition of total and rhythmic art inspired by Rudolf Steiner's theosophy."We look for rhythm: rhythm in space, rhythm of lines that leap and break, intertwine, swirl, flee, rhythm of volumes that arise and light up in the depths, recede, fade away, each having its place and inevitable value, and everywhere and in everything, balance” they declare in this manifesto. The radiant dancer devotes all of her creations to the visual rhythm of images, from which she draws the name of her new Rythme et Couleur movement musically inspired by the Montparnasse "Groupe des Six". Founded in 1924, Loïs' original movement is embodied in her troupe of dancers always celebrating the liberation of the female body and inspired by Dalcrozian dance.

On the idyllic heights of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, “les danseuses de Saint-Paul” open their own studio in a house in the village as well as a theatre. Joined by Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, as well as a handful of young girls, the troupe rehearses in the middle of nature at the place now occupied by the Maeght foundation more than ever at the forefront of modernity. In the middle of the 1930s, the names Loïs and Hélène were on the lips of the most influential artistic and political elite, from Dali to the Duke of Windsor and Picasso. They live their homosexuality without constraints and share their bohemian life with artists, writers and poets who visit them and come to admire their performances illuminated by torchlight.