[Essay] Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque

Have you ever imagined what it would have been like to live in Paris of the 1890s? Would you have spent your evenings in Montmartre, watching cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge? Would you have mingled with the likes of Vincent van Gogh or Paul Cézanne? What would it have been like to be in the center of the art world at the brink of a new century?

 This Spring, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College aims to answer those questions, transporting visitors back to France and into the so-called “Belle Époque.”  With more than 225 works filling the Museum’s galleries, Paris of the era will come to life via the renowned work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Heralded as one of the great modern masters, Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) depicted and advertised in his art the spaces, subjects, and entertainments he loved and enjoyed, creating an array of works that range from paintings and prints to posters and drawings so numerous that they belie the mere decade he worked as a professional artist.

Indeed, if you have ever envisioned the bohemian world of Paris at the turn of the 20th century, chances are your mind’s image is already inflected deeply by Toulouse-Lautrec’s interpretations of it. More than any other artist of the Post-Impressionist era, Toulouse-Lautrec embodied his time, immersing himself fully within the culture he captured so vividly in his art. An expert draftsman, Toulouse-Lautrec’s manner is immediately recognizable:  all one must see is one of his posters advertising the “Moulin Rouge” or “La Divan Japonais” to realize how familiar his imagery remains 120 years after his death. 

Were we to enumerate the most quintessential artists of the 19th century, Toulouse-Lautrec would be high on that list. His renderings of fin-de-siecle (end-of-century) France, which we refer to lovingly — if not altogether problematically — as the “Belle Époque” or “Beautiful Age” have transformed the way we envision the past. Each generation reflects nostalgically on a golden age preceding its own, but any golden age is never golden for all — or all that perfectly golden. Toulouse-Lautrec does not aggrandize his city or its culture; he looks at the world of the 1890s as it was, seeing beauty and excitement in imperfection, in subjects who are outsiders, in the rowdiness of dance-halls and theatres, and in the mundanity of brothels and cafés. With his non-judgmental eye, Toulouse-Lautrec creates portraits of a moment in time, offering us honest entrance into a segment of French society where art, performance, and lust for life took precedence over all else.

From Nobility to Bohemia

Born Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, Toulouse-Lautrec was the scion of an aristocratic French family. His art — cutting-edge, challenging norms, and reflective of the increasing seediness of modern Paris — would at first seem to be an art birthed out of irony; the majesty of the noble class into which Toulouse-Lautrec was born stands in stark antithesis to the avant-garde world he depicted in his most celebrated works. To be certain, his ancestry alone certainly would have anticipated a very different path than that of becoming the artist most associated with bohemian life at the turn of the century. But fate had other ideas in store for the artist:  stunted from birth, he was already an outsider by physical nature, if not by social stature.

The artist began to feel disconnected from his noble lineage early on when two childhood accidents forged the ways in which he would see the world around him and how the world around him would see him. At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered the first of two femur fractures (one in each leg) that never healed properly, stunting his leg growth, while the rest of his body grew at a normal rate. Already an artist from his adolescence, the accidents only further propelled young Henri’s artistic trajectory; while recovering, his relatively sedentary state gave greater freedom to his observational inclinations — as his watercolor and drawing-filled notebooks attest — while his inability to partake in typical youthful activities developed his curious, analytical eye into one that is equally detached and narrator-like.

With the expected aristocratic activities of young men like him unavailable — no sporting, no riding — Toulouse-Lautrec found his solace not merely in art but also in outsidership. By 1882, at 18-years-old, the future master moved to lively Montmartre, the Parisian district that came to define Bohemia, the hub of the city’s art scene and notorious for it cabarets, brothels, and anti-bourgeois attitude toward everything. While Montmartre represented an escape for Toulouse-Lautrec from the uprightness of his aristocratic upbringing, it also offered him entrance into a world in which the purity of making art and indulging in culture seemed to override all other earthly concerns. Montmartre was also, most notably, a small city unto itself within Paris, where peculiarity, abnormality, and difference were admired and represented points of camaraderie rather than disparagement.

In Montmarte, although not in Paris as a whole, Toulouse-Lautrec found his people, his artistic subjects, and his home for nearly the next 20 years. While not eminent or distinguished in his own lifetime in “high” artistic circles (he was inescapably physically “Other”), the artist took to the world and denizens of nonconformist Paris quickly and plotted out a niche for himself as a commercial illustrator of the very life and world in which he was immersed and most comfortably himself. Who better to advertise life in “Belle Époque” Paris than the artist who finally discovered himself as a result of it?

The Narrator of Montmartre

Toulouse-Lautrec was an insider-outsider, granting his viewers of all classes and socioeconomic strata VIP-access to an alternative world in which he was truly a part because of their less-welcoming world of which he was not truly a part. Between 1891 and 1901, Toulouse-Lautrec took full advantage of the medium of printmaking, establishing himself as the go-t0 and foremost illustrator of Montmartre’s artistic and literary scenes. His earliest posters advertising the cabaret shows at the Moulin Rouge, Divan Japonais, Le Jardin de Paris, and Eldorado (examples of which are highlights of the exhibition) were plastered across the city and made him an overnight art-world star.  The storied Moulin Rouge opened in 1899, but it was not until Toulouse-Lautrec made it the subject of his art that it truly became the Parisian attraction that we still recall and re-imagine today.  

A frequenter of the café-concerts, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned by performers and cabaret proprietors alike to create often large scale posters advertising the clubs and their star attractions. Divan Japonais (1893) is among the most familiar Toulouse-Lautrec images and presents his manner exquisitely in an advertisement for the club of that name. Similarly, Eldorado: Aristide Bruant (1892) is a classic image by the artist, a commission by Bruant, a singer and songwriter who took it upon himself to deploy Toulouse-Lautrec’s keen eye to lure customers to Bruant’s new show at Eldorado.

Deeply influenced by the influx into Paris of Ukiyo-e prints by contemporary Japanese masters, Toulouse-Lautrec’s style favors sinuous outlines and flattened passages of color, with forms that read both realistically and abstractly at the same time.  With all shading removed, it takes one’s eyes a moment to realize what is being seen in a Toulouse-Lautrec picture:  there is no depth, you realize, but then you re-focus.  In the aptly Japonisme-influenced advertisement for the shows at Divan Japonais, you might first observe the poster’s two central figures, a red-headed woman, clad all in black, and a top-hatted blonde-bearded, monocled man behind her. Looking to their left, though, you might suddenly discern a cropped, headless, black-gloved performer on stage (at top left), and, below her, you might then notice the gray-toned extremities of musicians and their instruments in the orchestra pit below her.

Along with the name and address of the club, Toulouse-Lautrec has crammed in a lot of visual information (and several Parisian celebrities) here. The performer on stage is Yvette Guilbert, as well-known a star as any at the time, which the artist cleverly acknowledges in his deliberately cropping her head from the advertisement altogether.  Although she is illustrated headless, she is — and would have been — instantly identifiable for her long black gloves and her slender silhouette. In the foreground of the poster, Toulouse-Lautrec represents the even more famous cabaret dancer Jane Avril, but seen here intriguingly as a spectator, watching Guilbert’s performance rather than as a performer herself. Perhaps it is by including a celebrity like Avril among the club’s audience members that Toulouse-Lautrec adds greater credence to the appeal of its shows? It is almost as if the poster exclaims:  “Look! Our stars are so good that even other stars come to Divan Japonais to see shows they are not performing in!” (As a dancer, Avril appears several times in the exhibition, most notably in the equally famous Jane Avril poster of the same year, in which she is seen performing mid-cancan, leg thrust in the air). The man behind Avril also lends an air of artistic cachet to the Divan Japonais experience. He is Édouard Dujardin, a famed art critic, writer, and frequenter of the café-concert scene like Toulouse-Lautrec himself.

With vivid, jam-packed images like these, each one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s illustrations immerses viewers in his world and the world of the 1890s. Writers and publishers realized the value of his draftsmanship, commissioning him to create advertisements for their magazines and journals like La Revue Blanche and to help sell novels like Le Tocsin (The Alarm Bell). Meanwhile, Toulouse-Lautrec would draw almost obsessively the characters of the world he lived in, offering us firsthand access to the settings and personae of avant-garde Paris. The exhibition is chock-full of his original drawings, prints, and even an original lithographic stone, which grants us extraordinary insight into the process by which the prints of one of art history’s most renowned lithographers were made.

As visitors to Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque will learn, the success stemming from the artist’s advertisements were merely the beginning of his fascinating history and body of work. Toulouse-Lautrec’s inimitable style and his clever deployment of the commercial media of printmaking and illustration helped collapse the delicate lines that still separated what was deemed “high” and “low” art. In this show, featuring more drawings, prints, letters, and posters than you can imagine, you will get to know Toulouse-Lautrec, his manner, and his world intimately. 

We cannot wait to welcome you back to the Belle Époque.

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque will be on view February 13 to May 23, 2021 in the Perkins Gallery.