In the 19th and early 20th centuries, everyone worshiped Sarah Bernhardt’s altar. She was a stage actress at a time when the theater was the equivalent of a stadium, and a world-famous pioneer of that very concept.
Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhard was a sickly child whose mother preferred to ignore her. As she grew older, she was obsessed with standing out. She captivated audiences with her hypnotic voice (Victor Hugo called it “golden”) and bombastic performance style. She was too ambitious in every role. She was also a writer, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Newspapers spread her legend of her “Holy Sarah”, as did artists and writers who consider her a muse.
The fanaticism that surrounded her rivaled anything inspired by The Beatles or Taylor Swift. Her followers built shrines and gathered under hotel windows. Reporters followed her movements like a paparazzi archetype.
Bernhardt may have been the object of extraordinary attraction, but he was never passive to her. She played in front of the camera and generated her own public image in her own unique way with her dynamism and her exuberant originality. Her Bernhard, as her act of resistance, relentlessly created herself, filling her memoirs with epic tales of her origins, on a scale rivaling her starring epics. lived her life. She is the only one who can define her, and one hundred years after her death in 1923, she still dares us to pin her down.
It was this villainous nature of Bernhardt that attracted me to the 1910 self-portrait that can be seen in the exhibition.Sarah Bernhardt: And women made starswill run until August 27th at the Petit Palais in Paris. This is an oil painting of an actress who is mischievously smiling as a clown. Bernhardt played another clown in Jean Richpin’s 1883 play The Murderer Pierrot. A famous photo of Bernhard in a clown costume is on display at the exhibition. But this self-portrait struck me as a statement of purpose.
In the 19th century, clowns were like poets who walked the line between reality and fiction, imagining alternatives to the status quo. No wonder Bernhard saw himself that way. On and off stage, her showmanship challenged ordinary women bound by the restrictions of the French Third Republic.
Bernhard was free, so it was dazzling. Annick Lemoyne, director of the Petit Palais and one of Bernhardt’s co-curators, said, “She did whatever she wanted, she didn’t care what other people thought.” “She loved men and women. She traveled all over the world. She had a son out of wedlock, and she raised him the way she wanted. There was no.”
At 18, Bernhard joined the prestigious theater company of the Théâtre de la Comédie-Française in Paris, but did not last long. An altercation erupted between her veteran actress and her feisty newcomer, leading to Bernhardt’s dismissal, added another twist to the young woman’s already turbulent life. Her father had disappeared, and her mother, her Parisian courtesan, had taken her daughter to and from France, sending her to boarding schools, rural nurseries, and convents.
Bernhardt seems to have grown accustomed to hustle and bustle, and soon after being kicked out of the Comédie-Française he got his breakthrough in 1868 with a revival of Alexandre Dumas’ Keen. From newcomers to full-blown celebrities, she tackled heroic roles like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Hamlet. These characters lived like wild spirits instead of just playing. She has taken her own biggest hits to the streets and performed in front of audiences across Europe and America.
Known for his plethora of death scenes, Bernhardt had a knack for melodrama and was an eccentric person with a penchant for the spooky in his private life. One of her many hats is adorned with a stuffed bat and she has been photographed of herself pretending to be dead in her coffin. I was.
These include over 100 objects from private collections and public institutions around the world, along with works by and about Bernhardt, stage costumes, personal effects, advertising campaigns, photographs, silent film and gramophone clips. is exhibited in recording of her voice. (Not surprisingly, she was one of the first to harness the new technology of her time for her self-promotion.)
Bernhardt’s greatest role resembled the persona of David Bowie. She did not, for example, breathe life into her Empress Theodora or Floria Tosca, the singer of fate, but absorbed them into herself. Passing through rooms dedicated to her theatrical characters within the exhibition is like encountering a bat cave where the suits and props of her alter ego are kept. Later in her career, she grew tired of the tragic female roles for which she was famous, and she played teenagers and men and some teenage boys as women even into middle age.
“Bernhardt was someone who demanded the right to be extraordinary,” American playwright Theresa Lebek said in a video interview. Leveque’s play Bernhard/Hamlet, which premiered on Broadway in 2018, focuses on the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding an actress’ interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. When Hamlet, who suffers from neurotic depression for most of her work, undergoes Bernhardt Therapy in her 1899, Hamlet appears, paradoxically, steelier and more overtly masculine than usual, a traditionalist It frustrated critics and made fun of its strange notions about the fluid nature of identity. “People think I’ve completely rethought the history of directing the play, but it hasn’t changed much,” added Leveque.
Leveque said a visit to Prague’s Alphonse Mucha Museum, which houses a towering poster of the actress who has become synonymous with Art Nouveau curvilinear designs, inspired her to write about Bernhard. In 1894, Bernhard commissioned an illustration from the studio to promote his latest play, Gismonda, but the first mock-up was unsatisfactory. She requested a new version of the stat, which gave an unnamed her Mucha, one of her minor employees at the company, a big break.
Mucha went on to design several more posters for Bernhard’s shows. These sublime works, depicting her as a symbol of her paganism, are also on display at the Petit Palais. Dozens of other artists painted her likeness. In Jules Masson’s paintings she is depicted as an angel on a golden background. The shy mistress in her full-length portrait by Georges Claire. She is a topless geisha in one sketch and a cartoonish chimera in another.
As a self-brander pioneer, Bernhard undoubtedly had an intuition for the power of social media. But unlike today’s influencers, many of whom seem desperate to evoke the illusion of being real, she refused to be anything more than life-size. That’s why she always played elevated versions of herself, like Keanu Reeves and Nicolas Cage. The tension between her irrepressible personality and her dramatic skills has created something rare: stardom.
Sarah Bernhardt: And women made stars
Until August 27th at the Petit Palais in Paris. Petit Parias.fr.
