Why They Went Wild Over the Divine Sarah
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When “the Divine Sarah” died in 1923, a million people lined the streets of Paris between the Madeleine and the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt to see her cortege wend its way to the Pere Lachaise cemetery – an impressive turnout for an actress in her 79th year.
A mere quarter-century later, however, Marilyn Monroe, in “The Seven Year Itch,” would point out that Bernhardt’s attendance records paled in comparison to her own vital statistics. More people would view her character’s Dazzledent toothpaste ad on television in one night, she says, than saw Bernhardt perform for her entire career. Still, she muses, “I wish I were old enough to have seen Sarah Bernhardt. Was she magnificent?”
This clip, on a continuous loop, is the opening attraction in the Jewish Museum’s suitably extravagant tribute to the actress, “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama.” The first exhibition of its kind in America, it shows that Bernhardt was magnificent by many different standards. Most striking were her extraordinary talent and beauty – and an ego to match.
Marilyn’s musings reflect the transience of theatrical reputation, especially before the advent of recording devices. Accomplishments in interpretive mediums are more friable than those in creative ones. Whatever might have been timeless about Bernhardt’s Camille, the doomed demimondaine of “La dame aux camelias,” her heightened naturalism would have seemed absurdly dated in its artifice by the time Greta Garbo took the same role – as would Garbo’s method if it were applied on stage or screen today.
Bernhardt’s career straddled many technological divides, however, and she changed the course of the various arts with which she interacted. She was in a way the first movie star, performing in a number of early silent films: “Hamlet” (1900), her most notorious trouser role on stage; “Queen Elizabeth I” (1912), and as Camille in the first filmed “La dame aux camelias” (1912).
As early as her 1880 trip to America, Bernhardt visited Thomas Edison to have one of her legendary declamations recorded on his newly invented phonograph. And she was extensively, often exquisitely, photographed – the exhibition boasts about a dozen original albumen prints by Felix Nadar and his son, Paul, lent by France’s Bibliotheque Nationale.
Bernhardt depended for her propaganda on original art in a way that today’s stars don’t – which is what makes this such a lively, engaging show. It often happens that historical exhibitions turn a museum into a surrogate for a book or documentary. But the Jewish Museum show is rich in visual treats that advance our idea of how Bernhardt was perceived and promoted herself.
An exquisite Symbolist portrait by the British painter Dudley Hardy, a 9 1/2-inch-by-6 1/2-inch panel from 1889, captures in miniature her dusky eyes, red frizzy hair, and slinky physique. A lithograph of Bernhardt as Phedre by Toulouse-Lautrec (one of his two images of the actress) makes the star an ethereal presence next to a dark, shadowed nurse. With deft economy, every line depicts a body caught up in the drama, from a fist fastening on the nurse’s arm to the heaving shoulders to the terrified articulation of the face.
Bernhardt and Art Nouveau were made for each other. The actress was notorious for – and exploited to the hilt – her serpentine form. Caricatures pick up on her extreme skinniness, anemic complexion, and gaunt features. The exhibition includes a whole set of the highly stylized posters created under contract to Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha, which made the revolutionary young Czech’s career. A pulsating, dynamic little woodcut by the British graphic artist and painter William Nicholson from 1897 captures some sense of Bernhardt’s charismatic stage presence, even in maturity.
Bernhardt’s Jewishness was also lampooned early in her career. She herself was baptized and sufficiently Catholic to have wanted to be a nun before entering the Conservatoire and Comedie Francaise. But her courtesan mother was a Dutch Jewess. Bernhardt blended a sense of otherness and Frenchness, playing on her exoticism in the roles she chose, in the way she performed them, and in the conduct of her highly public personal life.
But while early caricatures like Andre Gill’s “Sarah Bernhardt as a Sphinx” (1878), published in La lune rousse, trade in anti-Semitic stereotypes – giving her a hooked nose actually alien to her features – she had become such an institution by the time of the Dreyfus Affair that she was not singled out for further attack.
You could say Bernhardt was the Madonna of her age – a Svengali of constant reinvention, a relentless self-promoter, an inveterate crosser of boundaries. Bernhardt straddled the divide between Judaism and Catholicism, between sexualities (she was openly bisexual and prolific in trouser roles). She also juggled high and low – as represented by Racine and Victorien Sardou – and, to the chagrin of satirists, was not only an actor but an active self-manager, producer, and impresario.
She was also an accomplished sculptor and painter, and the show includes key examples of her artwork. Her portrait bust of her lover, the painter Louise Abbema, is done in a tame Beaux-Arts style, but she also made more inventive, Symbolist sculptures such as “Fantastical Inkwell (Self-Portrait as a Sphinx)” (1880) and “Algae” (1900), an organic scepter advanced in Art Nouveau style.
The exhibition also captures the expectations of the throngs who watched her perform and took home such souvenirs as buttons, postcards, and even serving utensils engraved with her personal motto, “Quand Meme” (the handles evoked her initials and her legendary serpentine form).
As it turns out, Marilyn might not have done her math; Bernhardt’s performances reached phenomenal live audiences. On her 1905-06 tour of the United States (her sixth), when she traversed the continent in a private train, she visited 156 cities. Breaking the cartel of the Theatrical Syndicate, the Shubert brothers had her perform in circus tents and the gargantuan Hearst Greek Theatre. Tens of thousands watched her renditions in French of Racine’s “Phedre” and of contemporary melodramas written with her in mind: Sardou’s “La Tosca” and “Theodora,” Edmond Rostond’s “L’Aiglon,” Jules Barbier’s “Jeanne d’Arc,” and “La dame aux camelias” by Alexander Dumas fils.
One flaw of the show is that, apart from a 1910 recording of “L’Aiglon,” the voices that fill the space aren’t those of Bernhardt herself but of her thespian descendents: Monroe, Judy Garland imitating Bernhardt in “Babes on Broadway,” and Nicole Kidman in her Camille-esque role in Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 “Moulin Rouge.” The svelte Ms. Kidman, with her frizzy red hair, demonically expressive eyes, and milky complexion, not to mention a genius for acting that’s at once naturalistic and stylized, incarnates a fantasy Bernhardt. Ms. Kidman plus Madonna: no wonder the 19th century went crazy.
Until April 2 (1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, 212-423-3200).