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Toulouse-Lautrec early
years were spent on family estates near Albi, with Paris becoming
his home in 1872. The victim of a genetic bone condition that made
him vulnerable to fractures, he walked with a cane by age thirteen
and grew to be only four feet eleven inches tall. Always of frail
health, his adulthood was marred by his physical handicaps and also
by alcoholism. Yet during his brief life he managed to create his
own immediately recognizable style, and to evoke in his inimitable
way a world full of gaiety and humor.
Lautrec was the archetypal
bohemian artist of the belle époque, the last decade of the
nineteenth century, when Paris flaunted its song, dance, sports, and
fashion. He lived during the height of what have been called "the
banquet years" of Paris - the fat years of leisure when the city and
her inhabitants took up ways of behaving, thinking, playing, and
perceiving that begot the twentieth century before its time.
Along with van Gogh, Lautrec is
perhaps the most memorable artistic character since Rembrandt, a
status recognized years ago by novelists and the film industry.
Certainly his "image," in his own time and since, has contributed to
the continuing stereotype of the modern artist as an
antiestablishment bohemian.
An aristocrat from the country,
he lived a dissolute life in the city and chose his environs as his
subjects - cabarets, bars, and bordellos. These forms of popular
leisure had been the subject matter of much modern painting for some
time. They were also themes which Lautrec lived, and he brought to
them a new objectivity, sometimes empathy, always an incisive wit.
For all his rebelliousness, however, Lautrec was a serious and
industrious artist, producing an enormous body of work: his
well-known posters of cabaret stars, vignettes of life in the
brothels, brilliant portraits of his friends, and paintings of the
theater, circus, and music hall.
Toulouse-Lautrec career
began around 1890, a time that saw the opening of the Paris World's
Fair, lighted by electricity and landmarked by the just-completed
Eiffel Tower (1889); the flourishing of Japonisme and interest in
other non-western cultures stimulated by the fair; the opening of
the Moulin Rouge (also 1889); and continuing sallies against the
Academy by artists' exhibiting groups such as the Incohérents, the
Indépendents, and their journalistic mouthpieces.
From this Parisian banquet of
sights and ideas, Lautrec derived the primary themes of his work. He
was serious about printmaking in the old tradition of the
peintre-graveur, and considered it no less a part of his
oeuvre than the supposedly higher art form of
painting. He was remarkably open to the unorthodox types of
commission that his graphic success won him, illustrating songs for
music publishers, menus for friends, and theatre programs, and of
course designing posters for books, journals, plays, art
exhibitions, café and theatre stars, and such banal products as
domestic furnishings, confetti, printing ink, and bicycle chains.As
art that touched the public's everyday lives, Lautrec's posters were
effectively a form of antiacademic propaganda. By taking his work to
the street, he engaged in a subtle but classic form of anarchism, an
act of revolt more real than the exhibitions and salons of the
avant-garde ever were. |