Comparative Essay between La Goulue & Les Girard

The city of lights was all about fun and the nightlife during the 19th century. Fortunately enough, Jules Cheerer and Henry De Toulouse-Ululate were able to perfectly capture the essence of Parish's blooming nightlife through their posters. Generally speaking, both posters are the same style, however, each artist was able to create different visual effects and atmospheric perspective using their own aesthetic sense. In this situation, both posters are advertising to the viewer the exhilarating nightlife n Parisian cabarets back in the 19th century.

Yet, Latter's poster managed to capture a distinctive and sensual atmosphere compared to Cheerer's joyful atmosphere. Louise Weber, the female dancer In Latter's poster, can be seen performing the provocative cancan dance, which exposes her undergarments as she kicks her legs. The audience in the background looks as if they are interacting with the dancer even if they are Just watching her. Meanwhile, the dancers in Cheerer's poster are cheerfully dancing with their hands in the air with no audience around.

Even though the figures depicted in both posters are 2-dimensional, Latter's poster has more depth because of the way he places his figures through out different layers. The male dancer and the unusual yellow shape on the left dominate the foreground. The main focus of this image is the female figure placed in the center and between the foreground and background. The contrasting silhouettes behind her further highlight the focus on her. The figure in the middle of Cheerer's poster is wearing a vibrant red dress, which easily catches the viewer's eye even though two lively nagging men overlap her.

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The two male figures are framing the woman in the middle with their legs. The soft, textured, and plain background contrast with the red and black of the flat figures and brings them out. There Is minimal use of shading, but instead, crisp black lines outline the figures, giving the illustration a flat look. Nothing seems to have a definite structure since there is no sense of strong, angular and straight lines but instead, the lines look more organic as seen with the text and figures.

This poster might look a bit symmetrical but the artist drew both men who re facing each other with slight differences to add more to the unstructured and organic feel of the Image. One of the main features of Less Gerard is how the text and illustrations can be seen interacting with one another. One figure looks like as if he is standing on the letter G while the other figure has his legs passing through the letter o. The small 3rd figure relationship can be seen between the text and illustrations in the way they were rendered. The have a long pointed form.

For example, the tip "A" in "Less Gerard mimics the man's foot. The text was customized by the artist hence the similarities between the illustrations and the text. Ululate uses several different fonts in his poster. In this case, Latter's font does not interact with the figures in the poster and does not look like it was drawn by hand but instead is placed on top of the figures with low opacity. The other text that is dominating the top part of the poster has more bold colors and is outlined in black, which balances out the heavy image filled bottom part of the poster.

Since Ululate was influenced by Cheerer, the similarities in their work. Ululate also chose to work using the same medium, lithography, which is why their work has strong bold colors. There is no doubt that both artists were influenced by the Japanese style, as it is evident in most of their work. The flat planes of color, 2-dimensional figures, and crisp black contour lines are elements from the Kikuyu-e woodblock print style. Latter's composition of figures overlapping each other is also derived from the Japanese art style. On the other hand, the composition in Cheerer's poster is almost symmetrical.

This shows us that even though Ululate was influenced by Cheerer, Ululate had a better understanding of Japanese art and was able to fuse that with his own work in order to produce his own style. In conclusion, the posters may seem to be very similar in style; nevertheless, slight differences between those posters do exist and those differences showcase each artist's unique touch. This demonstrates the endless cycle of an artist influencing another artist who in turn modifies and develops what he learned in order to develop his own style and that may even result in a whole new art movement.

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