Maurice Biais 1872-1926

The son of a wealthy notary from Corbeil, raised in a privileged and cultivated environment, Maurice Biais was a Belle Époque artist of many talents, working in turn as a graphic designer, poster artist, illustrator, and designer of furniture, glassware, and ceramics. Initially inspired by Jules Chéret and the Art Nouveau aesthetic, he quickly moved beyond these influences to develop a distinctive personal style. An enfant terrible of Montmartre, he formed one of the most active couples in the nightlife of the Butte - his companion Jane Avril was one of the most celebrated dancers of the Moulin Rouge, with whom he had a son in 1897 and whom he eventually married in 1911.

A debt-ridden gambler, incurable drinker, and inveterate smoker, estranged from his family, Biais nevertheless managed to put his decorative talents at the service of the most prestigious Parisian boutiques. He was employed for a time by the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, inaugurated by Siegfried Bing in 1895, for which he produced important mural paintings. From 1899 onward, he joined Bing’s principal rival, the equally renowned Maison Moderne of Julius Meier-Graefe. The latter, having frequented Berlin’s avant-garde artistic circles - where he had contributed to the creation of the influential magazine Pan - opened his own decorative arts gallery in Paris in 1898, offering clients the possibility of furnishing their interiors with a unified ensemble of sculptures, ceramics, glassware, lamps, and jewelry.

In addition to exhibiting the work of artists such as Henry van de Velde, Meier-Graefe commissioned young poster designers, including Manuel Orazi, to produce advertising for the gallery. In 1902, Maurice Biais created a poster for the Maison Moderne depicting an elegant female client seen from behind, inviting the viewer to contemplate the exhibition with her, illustrating an inkwell and a lamp designed by Maurice Dufrène, small bronze sculptures by George Minne, a porcelain cat by the Danish manufactory Bing & Grøndahl, and, in the background, an armchair by Abel Landry (fig. 1).

Although Biais was also active as an illustrator (contributing to periodicals such as Le Journal pour tous, children’s books, editions of musical scores, and postcards), it was his posters that established his reputation, both in France and internationally. In 1901, he exhibited at Williams in New York, before presenting his lithographs at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1903 (cat. nos. 3794 and 3795).

Mobilized at the front in 1914, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre but returned deeply scarred and injured by poison gas. Leaving for the south of France to seek treatment in early 1926, he died on 8 April at the Gorbio sanatorium, attended by Jane Avril.

The fireplace screen presented here, in vertical format, belongs to the most fertile and modern period of Maurice Biais’s career. The artist layered and stitched together two embroidered and painted compositions on canvas with closely related subjects. Depicting young elegant women in garden settings and limited to a strict black-and-white palette, their highly synthetic treatment already anticipates the early works of Bernard Boutet de Monvel. The type of signature applied in both cases in the lower right corner - written out in full and enclosed within a frame - dates the object to 1902, suggesting that it may well have been among the works exhibited at Meier-Graefe’s Maison Moderne.