Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [87]
Seurat died at the age of 31, three days after exhibiting the painting in an unfinished state. His mother hung “Le Cirque” over his deathbed. He was such a radical individualist that he never sought followers, saying, “The more numerous we are, the less originality we have.” Yet when he died, Pissarro wrote, “You can conceive the grief of all those who followed him or were interested in his artistic researches. It is a great loss for art. ”
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: POSTERS OF PARIS. Toulouse-Lautrec’s work was so similar to Degas’s in style and content that he might almost be taken for a mini-Degas. Lautrec made his own sizable contributions, however, in lithography and poster art, two media he virtually invented. Although Degas, resentful of being ripped-off, was known for his sarcastic putdowns of Lautrec, he accorded him Impressionism’s ultimate accolade, saying at a Lautrec exhibition, “Well, Lautrec, it’s clear you’re one of us.”
The art of the two men was indeed similar. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) drew his subjects, like Degas, from contemporary life: Parisian theaters, dance halls, and circuses. Both artists also specialized in portraying movement and private moments through slice-of-life glimpses with abrupt, photographic cropping. The novel, asymmetric compositions of both derived from their mutual admiration of Japanese prints.
“Only the figure counts,” Lautrec said. “Landscape is, and should always be, only an adjunct.” Virtually all of Lautrec’s paintings are of figures in interior night scenes lit somewhat arbitrarily by glaring, artificial light. His primary interests were the demimonde actors, entertainers, acrobats, and prostitutes, whom he caricatured to highlight their essential attributes.
Lautrec also caricatured his own deformed appearance in bitter self-portraits. Born to France’s most blueblood family — the 1,000-year-old Counts of Toulouse — Lautrec was a self-imposed exile from high society due to a childhood tragedy. As a teenager, he broke both legs, which atrophied, giving him a five-foot stature with a child’s short legs, the powerful torso of a man, and a grossly disproportionate head. As a teenage invalid, Lautrec abandoned his love of riding and shooting for his interest in art, although his teacher pronounced his early drawings “simply awful.”
The adult Lautrec led a life of notorious dissipation. Alcoholic and syphilitic, he consorted with bohemians and social outcasts. For his series of paintings of bored prostitutes lounging around dreary bordellos, he lived in a brothel for a time.
Lautrec’s most original contribution was in the realm of the graphic arts, for he singlehandedly made the new form of lithography and the poster respectable media for major art. Beginning about 1890, he designed posters of bold visual simplicity, which “took possession of the streets,” as everyone agreed when they first appeared.
Toulouse-Lautrec, “At the Moulin Rouge,” 1892, Art Institute of Chicago.
NIGHT LIFE. Lautrec’s chronicle of Parisian nightlife — seen, he said, from “elbow height” — perfectly captures the malaise and decadence of the fin-de-siècle period. He uses harsh lighting and dissonant colors to convey the era’s surface gaiety and underlying melancholy. Lautrec went every night to the music hall to paint and even included himself (the short bearded figure at rear), along with a host of grotesque individualized portraits.
CEZANNE: THE PLANE TRUTH. In 1874, a critic dismissed Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) as “no more than a kind of madman, with the fit on him, painting the fantasies of delirium tremens.” By 1914, “the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form,” was how another critic hailed him. In the intervening forty years, Cézanne ignored