Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen
Born in 1859.
Died in 1923.
A painter, draughtsman, lithographer, etcher and sculptor, he became a naturalized French citizen in 1901. Under the pseudonym Jean Caillou, he signed caricatures for the journal Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui.
Montmartre constitutes an essential horizon of his oeuvre. His 1896 poster for the Tournée du Chat noir with Rodolphe Salis, preserved at the Musée Carnavalet, condenses the imaginary of the cabaret into an immediately legible image: a black cat crowned with a halo, rendered as a lithograph on paper. The fame of this composition should not obscure the variety of his graphic commissions.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves, in particular, posters for the Compagnie française des chocolats et des thés (1895), as well as documents relating to the worlds of performance and publishing. Steinlen thus participated in a visual culture in which art took its place in the street, the press and urban leisure.
Alongside these public images, the works recorded by the Musée d’Orsay reveal a sustained attention to the ordinary conditions of existence: Deux jeunes blanchisseuses, Trois jeunes ouvrières se rendant au travail, La Pierreuse or Le chariot au cheval tombé. These titles designate popular subjects and occupations without reducing their protagonists to mere picturesque accessories. The presence of Manifestation populaire and Sur les routes du Nord (1915) in the Orsay collections also recalls the extension of his gaze to collective events and wartime.
The sculptor is no less present: Maternité, preserved at the Musée d’Orsay, is a wax or plasticine sketch depicting a woman and a child. In Steinlen’s work, poster, drawing and sculpture thus form a corpus attentive to the people, gestures and tensions of his time.
