Toulouse Lautrec [antikvár]

Introduction ii A t last, 1 looked Lautrec straight in IX. the eyes. Oh, how fine, large, richly warm and astonishingly, luminously bright they were! I kept on gazing into them and suddenly Lautrec became aware of it and took his spectacles off. He knew his one magnificent feature and he offered it to me with all his generosity. And his gesture showed me his ludicrous, dwarfish little hand, which was so square and attached to extraordinarily short marionettish arms." This was how the cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert remembered the first of many meetings with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. She was not the only one to be won over by the performance of vivacity and wit that defiected attenUon from his deformity. However, she was more perceptive than some in recognizing so quickly the tragedy behind the eyes. And she was to show a creditable lack of vanity in her realization that the drawings he did of her were not mere representations. Both were famous by the time he began to work from her, and she ignored the opposition ofher various friends and advisors, only mUdly reproving him for his most outrageous distortions. Her stage persona was itself a kind of caricature, a medium for satire and innuendo by which she deflated social pretensions and hypocrisy. The ends of artist and performer were thus compatible, Lautrec's primary purpose being an analysis of personality, more particularly of those aspects of human nature revealed when behavioural niceties are discarded. More than any other artist of this period he chose to operate in the seedy areas shared by polite society — the nwnde — and its vulgar counterpart — the demi-monde, wilfully specializing in the world of prostitutes, petty crooks, roués and the fashionable men who moved imperturbably among them. Tb some extent Lautrec shared the latter's air of detached observafion, but his engagement was more pronounced — his gleeful bohemianism caused his early death at the age of thirty-six. Ironically, his lifestyle has led him to be identified with the romantic notion of/in de Photograph of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (detail) Date unknown sieete gaiety. But although his art does in some ways encapsulate an exuberant period on which Paris stiU capitalizes, it frequently strikes a note of cautionary melancholy that makes it ultimately impossible to define as either simply characteristic of the milieu or as his own peculiarly private view. Early life Lautrec's separateness, the quality that pervades so many of his paintings, was materially affected by the circumstances of his childhood. He was born in 1864 at Albi in south-west France, an aristocrat in a century when the majority of effective power was increasingly controlled by the middle classes. His quixotic father, Count Alphonse-Charles de Tbulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, seems to have charged through life from one eccentric gesture to the next, his extravagant adventures outdoing even those of his son in his later, drink deranged years. Although neither he nor his parents were aware of it, Henri suffered from a bone deficiency, quite possibly the result of inbreeding. This was aggravated by the onset of puberty, with its sudden acceleration of growth, and when he broke both thighs in two successive yeai'S, each the result of an unspectacular fall, the bones failed to join up properly. The result was that his legs stopped growing, although his torso and head were of normal proportions, and his fuU adult height was only five feet (152.4cm). When it became clear that the accidents that caused his son's misshapeness would preclude him from a life devoted mainly to horses and hunting, the coimt ceased to take an active interest in Henri's development. He and his wife were largely estranged, maintaining little more than a marriage of appearances, and thus the supervision of the boy's upbringing fell almost entirely to his mother, the Coimtess Adele, who withdrew him from school to undergo a variety of cures. He met his misfortunes with a natural buoyancy of spirit that was to remain as the core of the charm he