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