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Memoir · Sarah Bernhardt play poster
1978 poster for the play Memoir, about the final years of Sarah Bernhardt.
Poster Child reproduces the 1978 Memoir poster — Bernhardt as subject, Byrd as theatre mythographer.
Memoir dramatized the final year of Sarah Bernhardt’s life and opened at the Guelph Spring Festival in Ontario in 1978. Byrd built the poster on Alphonse Mucha’s celebrated drawings of Bernhardt — Mucha being the first of the poster artists he fell in love with after moving from fine art to graphic art.
The 1978 sheet is a companion to Byrd’s 1971 Triton Gallery self-portrait poster, which likewise reworked a Mucha–Bernhardt composition.
Sources: Poster Child · Theater (p. 119).
Sources
• Poster Child (p. 119)
• Poster Child · Theater chapter; Wrapping Up (p. 119)