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                                                                                ART, Page 76

Cutting Through The Myth


A show sweeps aside the Hollywood image of Toulouse-Lautrec and
takes a full, clear look at his vibrant achievement

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The retrospective of some 170 paintings, prints and
drawings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, after an earlier run at
London's Hayward Gallery, rounds off the great series of
overviews of 19th century French artists given us by French,
American and English museums over the past 15 years. Every one
of these -- Manet, Courbet, Cezanne, Seurat, Monet, even the
disappointing Renoir -- has altered the way one thinks about the
achievements of French art and deeply revised one's view of the
individual painters. The Toulouse-Lautrec show, curated by an
English art historian, Richard Thomson, and two French ones,
Claire Freches-Thory and Anne Roquebert of the Musee d'Orsay,
is no exception. A few important paintings could not be had, but
Lautrec has never been seen as fully as this before, or put as
firmly and intelligently in his contexts, both aesthetic and
social.

    Lautrec needed this show -- desperately, almost. Being a
myth is hard on a painter, and worse for his work. And for most
people, thanks not only to Hollywood but also to ideas about his
work that emerged nearly as soon as it did, Lautrec is a myth
-- the crippled, dwarfish child of aristocratic birth,
condemned to deformity by his own family's inbreeding, who
defied his father and fled from the confines of his class to
join the outcasts in Montmartre, becoming the peintre maudit of
French bohemia, recording its life and seedy joys as no artist
had ever done and dying, at last, of drink at 36. What a recipe!

    And what misunderstandings it has produced. Chief among
these is the idea of Lautrec as a cross between isolated genius
and man of the people, whose deformity (and the sense of
outsidership it fostered) resonated with his marginal subjects
-- the whores, dancers, cabaret singers, the proletariat in
search of cheap lurid pleasure, in sum the Montmartre demimonde
-- to produce a truly "compassionate" art. This is largely a
sentimental fiction, as Thomson argues in detail in the show's
excellent catalog.

    Lautrec was an astoundingly precise observer; his ability
to capture pose, expression, the slightest nuance of body
language in a single inflection of line was extraordinary, and
can only have come from the combination of an unflagging
interest in human behavior and sharp reductive power. But he was
about as compassionate as a rattlesnake. Lautrec's attitude to
the lower classes he chose to paint was dominated by his
instinct, as an aristocratic French male, for keeping a certain
distance from them and seeing them from above -- or at least,
from a spot well to the side of their lives. His work does not
"identify," as the cliche goes, with the folk at the Moulin
Rouge. He watched them as one might watch fish in an aquarium,
fascinated by their colors and movements and finding irony in
their routines of spawning and social display.

    Anarchists like Felix Feneon praised his work for its
social insight, and a journalist in 1893 credited him with
creating "the epic of the lower classes" -- a visual equivalent,
as it were, to Zola, Balzac and other literary realists whose
project was to record the "real" France, top to bottom. But
there is no echo whatever, in Lautrec's paintings or in his
recorded remarks, of the political ferment that pervaded the
intellectual and street life of Paris in the 1890s. And in terms
of sexual politics, the seedy, overheated rooms of Lautrec's
brothels are not much different from the satin bower in which,
rather more than a century before, Boucher painted the rosy
buttocks of the royal mistress Miss O'Murphy. It's just that
they smell more real, even as Lautrec takes his sardonic delight
in aestheticizing them in a different way, as emblems of what
the age called decadence.

    The right word for Lautrec's art is not directly
translatable: faisande, the strong gaminess, caused by rot, of
a well-hung pheasant. It is everywhere in his work. You see it
in the smearily defiant look and plunging neckline of La Goulue
barging into the Moulin Rouge on the arms of her two women
companions; in the arrogant set of Aristide Bruant's head above
the bogus worker's costume he wore to perform his argot songs.
It is written all over the seamed face and pouched eyes of the
English tourist who has just accosted a pair of girls in the
Moulin Rouge and is making a none-too-silken proposition to one
of them, who recoils slightly.

    In Lautrec, professionalism and unsparing wit go hand in
hand. He longed for professional recognition -- and got it, at
last, from the implacable Edgar Degas, who in 1893 took a hard
look at his work and pronounced, "Well, Lautrec, you're clearly
one of us." Practically the only area of art he never worked in
was sculpture; in the rest, he crossed boundaries with elegance
and fluency, turning himself into the most inventive poster
artist of his age in images that seem to bridge the
epigrammatic world of the Japanese wood block and the
declamatory, populist one of emerging mass media.

    Think of Lautrec and you think, first, of line --
graceful, nervous, stabbing out to kill from behind a screen of
negligent-looking spontaneity. His energy was abrasive, and
where it touched the world, it threw off hot, stinging little
sparks like an emery wheel. When his poster Queen of Joy, 1892
-- advertising a now forgotten novel by Victor Joze -- with its
mordant image of the courtesan kissing the fleshy nose of a fat
banker, went up on the walls of Paris, a pair of stockbroker's
clerks were sent out to tear down every one they could find.

    In such works Lautrec comes close to his idols Daumier and
Goya. He would not generalize; every figure acquires a specific
energy, and each countenance is its own face, not merely a mask
of passion or a symbol of social role. A little bareback rider's
squinched-up face above the massive, churning crupper of a
stallion in the Cirque Fernando, 1887-88; the Cyrano nose and
signature black gloves of Yvette Guilbert; the weird cadaverous
prancing of Valentin the Boneless -- these images live on as
obdurately as the traits of Dickens' characters.

    But as this show makes clear, the high point of Lautrec's
art is not the cabaret scenes, bursting with character and
morose, raucous appetite, so much as the late brothel pictures,
which fluctuate with such marvelous ambiguity between desire and
repulsion, between the sentimental and the caricatural, while
preserving (for the most part) a strict and innately
aristocratic distance. One side of Lautrec was a goatish, little
skeptic who regarded sex as a semiexcretory function -- "To make
love," he once said, "it doesn't matter what you're with --
anything will do." The other side was extremely tender, and it
comes out most clearly in the paintings of lesbians (a favorite
literary topic in Paris in the '90s, but rarely treated in art
with anything like Lautrec's sympathy).

    Except to amuse his friends, Lautrec rarely drew couples
actually copulating; the character of his brothel scenes is that
of inaction, waiting, even boredom, and in this they were
perfectly true to the social world they addressed, since most
of the life of a girl in a maison close was taken up with
sitting around. The tedium of the big-city seraglio becomes
monumental, almost Egyptian, with In the Salon at the Rue des
Moulins, circa 1894.

    Lautrec prepared this painting with the kind of care he
had learned to give historical subjects during his student
training at Cormon's academy. There are six immobile figures:
one standing with her chemise hiked up as though getting ready
for a medical inspection; the other five sitting in postures of
frozen relaxation on the big plum-colored sofas. Madame presides
in her lilac dress, like a weary priestess at a rite. The
self-conscious geometry of the poses, dominated by the black
angular legs of the girl in the foreground, reinforces the plush
silence.

    This, one realizes, is Lautrec's sardonic revisitation of
the timeless Arcadia, whose images in older French painters
like Puvis de Chavannes he had mercilessly parodied as a
student: a classic instance of how an artist may be
unconsciously captivated by the very thing he had sought to
escape.