Word: lautrecs
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...