Word: lautrecs
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...Danish father and an Anglo-Irish mother, born in Munich, fluent in German and French. When the general histories of modern art mention him at all, it's as a small footnote to the Symbolists and the Postimpressionists, like Bonnard (the nudes in bedrooms) or Toulouse-Lautrec (the music-hall scenes). But one needs to remember that Sickert was slightly older than most of these painters. He was born in 1860; they hardly influenced him at all. The men who did were pre- rather than Postimpressionist: Whistler, Manet and, above all, Degas. Sickert had worked for Whistler as a studio...
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...
...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...
...Forget the Hollywood version. Here's the real Toulouse-Lautrec...