Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

French painter

• Born: November 24, 1864
• Birthplace: Albi, France
• Died: September 9, 1901
• Place of death: Château de Malromé, France

Through the creation of more than seven hundred paintings, sketches, lithographs, and posters, Toulouse-Lautrec vividly recorded the people and activities of Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century and elevated color lithography and the poster to major art forms.

Early Life

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa (tew-lewz-loh-trek mahn-fah) was born into an aristocratic family whose lineage went back to the time of Charlemagne. In separate falls when he was an adolescent, he broke the femurs of both legs. Throughout his life his legs remained small, while his upper body grew normally. He always required a cane to support his four-foot, six-inch frame. After these accidents, he was not able to dance or to ride, the usual activities of his social class. During his convalesence, his mother and a family friend, René Princeteau, a deaf-mute artist of equestrian scenes, encouraged him to paint.

Though tentative in technique, his early pictures, Soldier Saddling His Horse , Trotting Horseman , Amazon , and White Horse Gazelle , are full of life and quite accomplished. They manifest an unfiltered naïveté and are all the more striking for their deliberate use of bold color combinations.

In 1882, Toulouse-Lautrec became a pupil of Léon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat and, in 1883-1887, of Fernand Cormon. Both academicists, they taught Toulouse-Lautrec the principles of composition. His work was thenceforth more controlled. A visit home in 1883 produced the somewhat Impressionistic oil The Artist’s Mother at Breakfast .

In 1885, when he was nearly twenty-one years of age and financially independent, Toulouse-Lautrec opened a studio in Montmartre in the building where Edgar Degas had his studio. Degas became his artistic idol, though in 1894 Degas would harshly accuse Toulouse-Lautrec of imitation. His first lithograph was a song-sheet cover in 1887 for Aristide Bruant, who gave Toulouse-Lautrec his first public showing on the walls of his café, Le Mirliton. Toulouse-Lautrec’s pastel portrait of Vincent van Gogh, whom he had met at Cormon’s in 1886, belongs to the same year.

In 1887, Toulouse-Lautrec painted Portrait of the Artist’s Mother Reading . At first it seems Impressionistic, but, in fact, the subject is not treated as the focus of light; thrust in the foreground, her presence dominates the painting. For Toulouse-Lautrec, “Nothing exists but the figure.… Landscape is only accessory.”

Life’s Work

Toulouse-Lautrec’s art is set against the period known as fin de siècle or la belle époque. Toulouse-Lautrec, who saw beauty in the ugly and heroism in the underside of Paris, reflects both terms. He called himself a historian of life, which he viewed without pity, false moralizing, or self-righteousness. His pictures are precious historical documents and rival novels and histories in describing the life and moral outlook of his generation.

Impressionism influenced Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, yet he more precisely falls in the French drawing tradition of Jacques-Louis David, Jean August Dominique Ingres, and Degas. He did not use shimmering, all-enveloping light as did the Impressionists. He emphasized line, pattern, and pure, unmodeled color without chiaroscuro, as in Japanese art and the then-current Nabi movement. His colors, as are his subjects, are theatrical and often harsh. In his love of line, he differed from other post-Impressionists, such as van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who stressed mass and solidity. By a few deft strokes of line, he penetrated his subjects’ essential character. Toulouse-Lautrec’s gift, as was Degas’, was to capture figures from contemporary scenes in characteristic poses at unguarded moments, always with some caricature. As his friends noted, he would passionately pursue his subjects in the prime of their careers, then drop them.

In 1888, under the spell of Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec began to illustrate the lowest classes of Paris. Montmartre was its focus since the opening of the café Le Chat Noir in 1881. His first important painting was Le Cirque Fernando: Circus Rider , done in the flat style of the Japanese prints he collected. Like Gauguin, whom he had recently met, he preferred a bold distortion of perspective to the Impressionists’ sense of light.

By this time, Toulouse-Lautrec drew for the leading illustrated journals, Courrier Français, Paris Illustré, Figaro Illustré, and Rire. He did this not for money—Toulouse-Lautrec never needed art to make a living—but for recognition. In 1888, too, Toulouse-Lautrec first submitted work for the annual Brussels exhibition of the avant garde XX (the twenty) group. The next year saw his major oils, Au bal du Moulin de la Galette and The Girl with Red Hair . The Moulin de la Galette was one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s café haunts.

The Moulin Rouge’s opening ushered the gay nineties into Paris. This café became the in place for Paris society, including Toulouse-Lautrec and his cousin and companion, Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran. It was the venue of his best-known pieces. His painting Au Moulin Rouge: La Danse (1890) graced the foyer of the café. It is his first depiction of the dancer La Goulue (the glutton: the stage name of Louise Weber) and her partner, Valentin le Désossé. In 1891, the Moulin Rouge commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec’s first poster to advertise the same dancers. He created a sensation by flaunting La Goulue’s scandalous white muslim drawers. The poster both launched her career and gave the artist wider recognition. Désossé dominates the foreground in stark profile, while Toulouse-Lautrec and his friends are silhouetted in back. In the same year, La Goulue au Moulin Rouge featured her famous deep décolletage.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s thirty-one posters are consciously flat, asymmetrical, and decorative; figures are often cropped at the border. His “line, flair, and daring layout” were immediately praised in the press. Jules Chéret, the greatest poster artist of his day, named Toulouse-Lautrec as his successor. Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints were better for his painting skills, but the fluidity and economy of stroke of the lithographic medium added to the descriptive capability of his paintings. He did many identical pictures in both mediums.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s friendship with the rising star Jane Avril is marked by numerous representations of her over several years. Avril admired his art and may have been in love with him. Jane Avril Entering Moulin Rouge , Jane Avril Leaving Moulin Rouge , and Jane Avril Dancing at Moulin Rouge appeared in 1892. In the last, Toulouse-Lautrec used oils in a sketchy manner to render the dancer’s movements. Avril is absorbed in her dancing, her isolation emphasized by the couple in the background who pay her no attention.

In 1892 came a masterpiece, Au Moulin Rouge. In a framework of diagonals appear the artist himself, his cousin Tapié de Céleyran, La Goulue, other friends at the table in the foreground, and the mysterious green-faced lady partially cropped off at the right. In 1892, two posters of Bruant in his familiar black coat and red scarf made the entrepreneur’s profile known throughout Paris.

A Corner of the Moulin de la Galette of the same year is a minor masterpiece. Human forms are set in overlapping planes. The isolation of these denizens of the demimonde is established by the fact that no one’s gaze engages that of another person.

In 1893, Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris again “put her in the limelight,” said the journal Fin de Siècle on September 3. Another poster, Jane Avril at Divan Japonais , announced a new café that opened auspiciously, attracting crowds to hear the songs of Yvette Guilbert, but closed soon after. Avril is in the foreground while Guilbert is shown performing but with her head cropped out of the frame. Toulouse-Lautrec’s frequent use of cropping as well as his ability to focus on one area, allowing all else to appear marginal or distorted, reflects his awareness of the new medium of photography, which was then influencing the art world. On the psychological level, too, Toulouse-Lautrec recorded his subjects as a camera, with emotional detachment.

Also in 1893, Toulouse-Lautrec did a painting and poster, Loie Fuller at the Folies Bergère , of an American to whom he was briefly attracted for her whirling, serpentine “fire dance.” His paintings won the approval of Degas and an invitation to join and exhibit for the Independents, a prestigious society of engravers.

Around 1893, Toulouse-Lautrec’s interest turned to faces, especially as highlighted by the gas-flares of theaters, rather than the human form as a whole (now often merely sketched in). In this year, his theater prints for L’Escarmouche appeared, as did eleven litho-portraits of Paris show-people for a Café-Concert album and a poster for the book Au pied de l’échafaud (1893; at the foot of the scaffold), which was the memoir of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Faure, the chaplain to thirty-eight condemned men. The silhouetted spectators behind the condemned man’s harshly lit face are reminiscent of the first Moulin Rouge poster.

Already in 1892, Toulouse-Lautrec had painted prostitutes, most notably Woman with Black Boa , whose hard smile betrayed a calculating coldness. Two years later, he set up his studio in the newest and finest brothel, remained there for several months, and produced fifty oils and hundreds of drawings. The last and unquestioned masterpiece of this group names the brothel: The Salon des Moulins . Early in that year, Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster for a new book, Babylone d’Allemagne , “papered every wall in Paris,” according to Fin de Siècle of February 18, 1894.

Toulouse-Lautrec also did lithographs for the Revue Blanche . His chief occupation for nine months, however, was the album of sixteen lithographs of Guilbert performing her risqué half-spoken chansons. The album had caused a scandal for its deification of a mere café diva. Critics called Guilbert the ugly made uglier. She herself complained at Toulouse-Lautrec’s unflattering caricatures of her red hair, uptilted nose, and thin lips but still autographed the hundred copies. In addition, a charcoal and an oil of Guilbert displayed her odd, angular appearance and her trademarks: a low-cut gown and long black gloves.

In London in 1895, Toulouse-Lautrec sketched Oscar Wilde at his celebrated trial. In Paris, his large (five-foot square) oil entitled Marcelle Lender Dancing the Boléro in “Chilperic” and several drawings of her back reveal his then current female interest. An album, Thirty Lithographs , contained bust-only studies of Jeanne Granier, Lucien Guitry, Jeanne Hading, Sarah Bernhardt, and other stars of the stage. In this same year came his oil of La Clownesse, Cha-U-Kao , whose name derives from chahut-chaos, a wild dance popular at the Moulin Rouge; La Danse de La Goulue ; and a portrait of cabaret singer May Belfort. The girl in La Toilette (1896) may have belonged to the dancers at Les Moulins. Herein Toulouse-Lautrec returned to a more modeled style. Important works in this year include an oil and a poster Mademoiselle Eglantine’s Troupe dancing the can-can. Eleven prints of life in the brothels appeared in the women’s journal Elles. Toulouse-Lautrec showed that these girls, portrayed conversing with clients and serving them chamomile tea, were not uniformly lewd but had “exquisite feelings unknown to virtuous women.”

An exhibition of lithographs at Maurice Joyant’s Paris gallery first engendered a still-prevalent pejorative interpretation of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life and art. The critic A. Hepp wrote, “The odd, deformed and limping man was evident in the works.” Edmond Goncourt added, “All his drawings seem to reflect his own caricature-like deformity.”

Certainly, Toulouse-Lautrec’s deformity affected his outlook. An alternative view, however, recognizes that Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, Degas, and others had already established the lower classes as a subject of art. Thus, though Toulouse-Lautrec often joked about his appearance, was sensitive to others’ comments, and felt less exceptional in the rough society that he portrayed, he was not morbidly alone in drawing on that society for his work. Rather, he was accepted in that company for his coarse wit and generosity as a congenial, nonthreatening presence.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings of lesbians in 1897 raised the forbidden to the level of art by their compassionate detachment. He was drinking heavily and reached a nadir early in 1899. On March 17, an alcoholic and suffering from venereal disease, he entered St. James Clinic at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, where he remained until May 20. While in the clinic, he nevertheless contributed twenty-two animal prints to the Histoires Naturelles of his friend Jules Renard and did a series of circus scenes from memory. After his release he recuperated by the sea, traveled, and painted The Englishwoman at the “Star,” Le Havre in 1899. There then followed (1899-1901) a series of lithographs on the world of the racetracks, of which the best known is The Jockey , in color. He painted La Modiste in 1900.

After seven months with his mother at Malromé in 1900, he returned to Paris in 1901. His last painting is the unfinished Examination Board , in which the figures are not outlined but solidly modeled. The examinee is his cousin Tapié de Céleyran. His last months were spent at Malromé, where he died in September, 1901.

Significance

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a post-Impressionist who, in altering what he saw in order to increase its impact on the observer, presaged the more subjective twentieth century German expressionism. His influence can be seen in the work of Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Amid the emergence of new movements in art such as pointillism, symbolism, and primitivism, he ascribed to no school. His most original achievements were in color lithography and poster art. Toulouse-Lautrec preeminently lived the French writers’ slogan, that an artist must be of his time.

Bibliography

Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. 2d ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Chapter 22 contains a brilliant appreciation of Toulouse-Lautrec, placing him in the larger context of fin de siècle art.

Cooper, Douglas. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1952. A short biography. Includes twenty-six illustrations, ten in color; available in most museum shops.

Fermigier, André. Toulouse-Lautrec. Translated by Paul Stevenson. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969. The best and most accessible biography; includes more than two hundred illustrations.

Frey, Julia. Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life. New York: Viking Press, 1994. Readable and comprehensive chronicle of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life. Frey attributes Toulouse-Lautrec’s self-destructiveness to family conflict and his despair over his dwarfism. Includes eighty-four photographs and fifty color plates of the artist’s work.

Thompson, Richard, Philip Dennis Cate, and Mary Weaver Chapin. Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Catalog of an art exhibit presented at the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. The exhibit, and catalog, focus on Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrayal of Montmartre, placing his posters, drawings, and paintings within the context of the area’s art scene and nightlife between 1885 and 1901. The book includes 370 color plates, reproducing works by Toulouse-Lautrec, and by Picasso, van Gogh, Degas, and other artists whom Toulouse-Lautrec influenced.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de. The Posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. Edited with an introduction by Edouard Julien. Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1966. A short text, but fine color copies of all thirty-one posters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Toulouse-Lautrec. Text by John Nash. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1978. A volume in the Great Artists series, this concise biography rebuts the theory that Toulouse-Lautrec’s deformity embittered his life and influenced his choice of subjects. Sixteen color illustrations with excellent commentaries.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Toulouse-Lautrec: His Complete Lithographs and Dry Points. Edited by Jean Adhémar. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965. A thorough biography emphasizing his lithography and posters. Complete in its reproduction of 350 lithographs.