Post-Impressionism - I 

Death last September has made a giant out of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a “ridiculous little man whose deformity is reflected in each of his drawings,” according to Goncourt. This broken, limping “midget” foundered in the irrational evasions of alcohol and in the illusoiy consolations of prostitutes. At the age of thirty-seven, emaciated and shriveled up, he died in the arms of his devoted mother at the family home in Malromé, in the Gironde.

Sharing the opinions of the masters, the poet André Rivoire states, “When the public knows the work that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec always guarded so jealously from it, it will understand what the world of art has lost with his premature death; it will also see what it has gained from the frantic life that hastened this death.” Fervent young artists, such as the Nabis painters and Steinlen, Valadon, and Picasso, admire and imitate the graphic vigor and severity of Lautrec’s lithographs and forceful posters, the vibrant nervousness of his raw touch, the virulence of his colors, the boldness of his Japanizing compositions.

Lautrec moved away from the Impressionists around 1895. He joined the Nabis and the Revue blanche founded by the Natan-son brothers and remained hostile to Expressionist theory. He was as Realist as they come. Drawing must be forceful. It must seize the allure and the characteristic traits of the model. Color is needed only to render the atmosphere in which the drawing appears. Concentrating on night, on scenes and stages of shows in Montmartre and on artificial gas and electric light, Lautrec demonstrates an almost malevolent boldness in the use of pure colors parodying the subject.

Through Lautrec, Expressionist humanism can be understood. It is a caricature that bears the imprint of the compassion of the painter, who in the case of Lautrec was the most complex and least duped by prostitutes and nocturnal high-lifers, by the riffraff and the frenzied population of Montmartre and Batignolles. "Ah, Lautrec, we can see that you belong to the building!" Degas exclaimed, when he first gazed on the paintings of the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Rouge nearly a decade ago. More than Manet, Renoir, Degas, or even Van Gogh, this deformed aristocrat, who was just over four feet tall, knew how to adapt to the spirit of the people of the Butte—the Butte, which reduces life to its simplest expression, does away with everything that complicates it and, continually finding bacchic hallucinations in drunkenness, transforms disdain into indulgence and mixes gaiety with sarcasm.

Lautrec coined strong words, as well as brush strokes, about these evils: “He looks like a sole, with eyes on the same side of the head,” he said about a dancer; “This one,” he said of a drunk, “looks as though he were coming with wine from the cave.” He was a student of Princeteau, Bonnat, and Cormon, who had been influenced by Daumier, Forain, and Degas. He succeeded during the belle époque: He reconciled art with the street and its diversions, the cabarets, the “café-concerts." He became a painter with a cutting edge.

Tristan Bernard says that Lautrec’s eyes belonged only to Lautrec, but that his look was so piercing that he dominated all others. More than five thousand drawings since childhood, four hundred and forty prints and posters, two hundred and seventy-five watercolors, and sever hundred and thirty-seven oi1 paintings—that is the prodigious output he left to Countess Toulouse-Lautrec, who wants tc will them to the Luxembourg that so academic museum. Ii view of the reticence of the mu seum’s directors, the art histori an Maurice Joyant (a childhoo! friend of the painter who alway encouraged him, especially dui ing his detoxification cure thre years ago, to take his chalks an brushes in hand again an make a fascinating series on th circus, where humor conflict with bitterness) sought, with th help of a young cousin of th painter, Gabriel Tapie c Celeyran, to have them taken the Albi Museum instead.

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - La Clownesse Cha-U-Ka-O im Moulin Rouge