- 1920-1922, oeuvres : 23x30cm ; cadres : 38,4x48,6cm, trois feuilles sous cadres. - Three original gouaches around dance by Loïs Hutton. 1. Original gouache with dancers May 16th 1920 | work: 23 x 30 cm frame: 38,4 x 48,6 cm | framed leaf This early composition, one of the rare ones still preserved, attests to her modernism and total symbiosis with her choreography. The dominant curves of the bodies in this Gouache with dancers, dated "May 16th 1920" evokes the androgynous silhouettes of Matisse's round dance (La Danse, 1910), as does the choice of vibrant blue and dark ochre tints. A Cubist aesthetic appears in the movement of the dancers with their unrelenting symmetrical balance - while the boldly contoured kaleidoscopic designs betray the influence of Vorticism, whose members during the same period assiduously frequented the underground club of Loïs' lover, Margaret Morris. This work from the London era will find its fulfilment the following year in the choreographies created in France where the Margaret Morris School settle in the summer. The photographs of these sensational performances from Dinard to Cap d'Antibes show very similar compositions, notably one of the scenes of Hutton's ballet, entitled Étincelles, created in 1922 to music by Maurice Ravel. 2. Signed original gouache "Background design, 1922" 1922 | work: 26,5 x 36 cm frame: 40 x 50 cm one framed leaf 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. 3. Signed original gouache "Composition - Ground design of dance, fool's dance" may 22 1919 | work: 20 x 25,5 cm; frame: 30 x 40 cm | one leaf One of Loïs Hutton's rare abstract works, a horizontal and graphic exploration (entitled "Ground design") of her Fool's Dance choreography. A hypnotic solo dance that she performed for the first time in January 1920 to music by Edvard Grieg. In this interesting and innovative vision of dance, Loïs Hutton lays down the products of the force of her choreographic movements on paper: a ballet of lines and curves filled with vivid colours. This fluid and dynamic composition is marked out by a square with asserted outlines, acting as both a physical support for the painting and a material surface for the scene where its movements unfold - an essential space of creation to be compared with the "original plan" theorised several years later by Kandinsky in Point et ligne sur plan (1926). Presented at the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea where her very first creations were born, Fool's Dance will be performed again at the Château des Deux Rives in Dinard in July of the same year. It earned Hutton one of her first mentions as a performer and choreographer in the French press, in the newspaper Comoedia on 20 July 1920, and marks the beginning of her notoriety in France.
