The art of Toulouse-Lautrec

Being born into the French aristocracy in 1864, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec could have luxuriated in a life of country comforts at the family chateau in Albi, in the idyllic south-west. Instead, he immersed himself in the seedy demi-monde of gritty Montmartre, producing artworks of astonishing originality, perception and intensity that reflected the lives of the outcasts and bohemians he chose to live among.

In his teenage years, Toulouse-Lautrec was marked as being physically different in a highly visible way. He emerged from an upper class that was notoriously inbred – his parents were first cousins from a long line of close-relative inter-marriage. When Toulouse-Lautrec broke his right leg as a 13-year-old and then his left leg as a 14-year-old, a congenital health condition caused his legs to be permanently stunted. Yet his upper body developed normally, which led Toulouse-Lautrec to look extremely ill-proportioned, as he grew to barely 150 cm or 4’ 11’’ as an adult.

Along with the medieval Marais area, Montmartre was a rare pocket of Paris that had escaped the frenzied, wholesale destruction and reconstruction of the city by Baron Haussmann in the period 1853-1870. Both areas were regarded by bourgeois Parisians as being highly disreputable remnants of ancient slums and modern depravity. With its stain of immorality and cheap rents, Montmartre attracted prurient crowds (including gentlemen from the ‘respectable’ classes) to a salacious nightlife of bawdy cabarets and brothels. Cheap rents also attracted a cohort of unconventional artists – including the 19-year-old Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. The uninhibited debauchery of Montmartre and its easy acceptance of difference (and deviance) made it an embracing home for the distinctly odd Toulouse-Lautrec.

In the Montmartre of the 1880s, to be described by others or to describe yourself as being a chanteuse or a danseuse was to acknowledge your social position in the lower depths. Quite often, these descriptions were simply euphemisms for being a (perhaps part-time) prostitute. Living in such a milieu, moral judgments were largely suspended among the exploited women, who reserved their (often disguised) disdain for the gentlemen who callously abused them. In this sense, Toulouse-Lautrec was not an exploiter. Over the next 15 years, he would create over 6,000 paintings, posters, prints and drawings. The women of the Montmartre demi-monde were very often the subject of his prolific art: they were never painted with disdain (nor with sentimentality) and always painted with empathy, raw truth and a profound sense of their resilience.

By 1892, Toulouse-Lautrec was in bad shape physically. He was in the grip of an alcoholism so relentless that his walking cane was hollowed out to contain a fearsome brew based on breathtaking absinthe. He was also suffering from the degenerative effects of syphilis. Nevertheless, his artistic talents were in full flight. He painted not with photo-realist precision, but with a desire to express the inner and outer nature of his subjects with deep emotional impact. This approach found expression in a lesser-known painting from this period, Femme au boa noir (or Woman in the black boa).

The femme of this portrait looks utterly formidable and is certainly not a woman to be trifled with. Her hard, white face directs a stern and steely stare directly into the eyes of the viewer. There is nowhere to hide: you are fixed in her self-assured glare. As a woman living in a repressive environment, she may well lack structural power, but on a personal level, her ferocious strength is palpable. Her barely-repressed wildness is also expressed through the loose and seemingly spontaneous brushwork. The black boa creates a feeling of mass and substance: there’s no ‘typical’ slender swan-like female neck here. And adding to the rawness, what appears to be a brown stippled background is simply the unpainted, cheap cardboard upon which the portrait is painted. The few grey-white vertical strokes apparently ‘behind’ the woman’s head are calculated to push the white face assertively towards the viewer. This subtle touch effectively adds a third dimension of depth to the painting, relieving the risk of two-dimensional flatness in a painting that has no recognisable background – a highly unusual technique at the time.

Toulouse-Lautrec barely left his beloved Montmartre for two decades. In his final physical decline, he was moved by his enduringly-supportive mother to Chateau Malromé near Bordeaux, where he died at the age of just 36.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s Femme au boa noir is in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

By Brad Allan, writer and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent visitor to France…