Cutting Through The Myth

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.