© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
Henri De Toulouse Lautrec 1864-1901
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa was born in Albi, Tarn in the Midi-Pyrénées Region of France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years and suffered from a tradition of intermarriage. The Comte and Comtesse were first cousins, and Henri suffered from a number of congenital health conditions attributed to this. A younger brother was born to the family on August 28, 1867, but died the following year. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric and his mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick, and during his convalescence, his mother would encourage him to paint which he had begun by the time he was ten years old. Today, the family estate houses the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec.
At age twelve Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteen his right leg. The bones did not heal properly, and his legs ceased to grow (modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder along the lines of osteoporosis or osteogenesis imperfecta). He reached maturity with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall. Nature compensated Lautrec, however, with the full attributes of manhood, namely a thick beard, a rich voice and a lively libido. He was fond of saying, "I may only be a small coffee-pot, but I have a big spout"!
Toulouse-Lautrec lived completely for his art and loved the bohemian life that he depicted in his work. His life settled into a regular pattern: He would sit late into the night at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking cocktails, meanwhile making swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into brightly coloured paintings. The Moulin Rouge with its dance halls and nightclubs, the circuses, the racetracks, the brothels, which he frequented, and the prostitutes were all memorialized on his canvasses or made into lithographs. He preserved his impressions of these places and their celebrities in portraits and sketches of striking originality and power.
Lautrec soon branched out into several new directions. He regularly contributed illustrations to magazines and in 1891, he was commissioned to design a poster for the Moulin Rouge, a club he had frequented since its opening night two years earlier. This was the famous La Goulue poster, showing the dancer in action behind the caricatured silhouette of Valentin Desosse.
To convey the frenetic and artificial atmosphere of these pleasure spots in this and other works, he chose sharp and blatant colours and adopted a drawing style that was almost grotesque in its exaggerations.
He applied the same techniques to the striking posters he designed (1890s) to advertise night spots and to immortalize the style and mannerisms of their most celebrated performers, including the dancers Jane Avril and Loie Fuller and the singers Aristide Bruant and Yvette Guilbert. In creating these famous works Toulouse-Lautrec greatly advanced the art of colour lithography. His surviving drawings and sketches for the posters give the effect of speed and casualness, but in fact they represent a painstaking discipline and mastery in their extended use of line and reduction to essentials. The linear and uncluttered appearance of these works, as well as their flat, almost two-dimensional quality, owed much to Japanese art.
Lautrec was soon acclaimed as the foremost poster artist of Paris. Throughout the decade he produced many prints for collectors' albums, menu-cards, theater programs and book illustrations. He took his work seriously, and gained great professional respect from the Parisian printers. Though he would often arrive in the morning still dressed in his evening clothes, he would work right through the day without a break.
In the 1890s, Lautrec became fascinated by the theater and began to mix in more high-brow circles. He became friendly with the painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, who contributed illustrations to a modern art magazine called La Revue Blanche. Lautrec also became infatuated with Misia Natanson, the flamboyant wife of one of its proprietors, and he depicted her in a poster that he designed for the magazine in 1895. His passion was however, unrewarded and Lautrec never experienced a sexual relationship with a woman of his own class.
To satisfy his desires he visited the expensive brothels of central Paris. The prostitutes proved to be good models as well as bed-companions, since they spent much of their time half-dressed. Lautrec even maintained a studio in one of the brothels, which allowed him to observe and draw at his leisure. Many of his drawings and paintings reveal their monotonous existence,waiting for clients, making beds, eating meals, and playing cards.
In order to join in the Montmartre life - as well as to fortify himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance, Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily, so that by the time he was 30 his health was deteriorating fast. In 1893 Dr. Bourges had married and Lautrec had moved back in with his mother, where he allowed his VD treatment to lapse. His drunken behaviour and the subjects he painted caused tension within the family and his uncle even set fire to some of his canvasses at Albi. Lautrec's private income was reduced, which forced him to work to make a living, but his painting was at a transitional stage and he was unable to concentrate on developing a new style. It must have been obvious to all concerned that he had become an alcoholic.
Friends rallied round and tried to get Lautrec away from Paris and all its temptations. Maurice Joyant, an old school-mate, would take him to the coast for yachting weekends and they twice visited England together. In 1898, Joyant arranged a one-man show for Lautrec in Goupil's Regent Street gallery. The exhibition was a total failure, but Lautrec did not care as he had lost all interest.
In 1897, while visiting the Natansons, Lautrec had suffered hallucinations and fired a pistol at imaginary spiders. He was unable to control his drinking and in 1899, after his mother left Paris for her country estate at Malrome, he fell under the influence of a livery-stable owner, who encouraged his weakness. By now he was a pathetic sight. He would sit all day drinking in a wine-merchant's shop and one day he was found burning newspapers in the lavatory bowl.
After a violent attack of delirium tremens in February 1899, Lautrec was committed by his mother to a private clinic in Neuilly, just outside Paris. The terror of being locked up for good seemed to spur him to a rapid recovery. He even started drawing again, mainly remembered circus scenes, as if to prove that he still had all his faculties. Finally, the Countess removed him from the sanitarium and Paul Viaud, an impoverished cousin, was paid to supervise him.
Viaud tried to distract Lautrec with holidays on the coast and visits to the opera, his late enthusiasm, but it was too late. At 36, he already looked like an old man, and in the summer of 1901, while taking the sea air near Bordeaux, Lautrec collapsed. His mother took him back to Malrome, where he died on 9 September 1901, just before his 37th birthday. He was buried in Verdelais, Gironde, a few kilometres from his birthplace. His last words were reportedly "Vieil imbécile!" ("Old fool"), in reference to his father, who was present at the scene.
After his death, his mother, the Comtesse Adèle Toulouse-Lautrec, and Maurice Joyant, his art dealer, promoted his art. His mother contributed funds for a museum to be built in Albi, his birthplace, to house his works. Before 2005, his paintings sold for as much as $14.5 million.
His oeuvre includes great numbers of paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and posters, as well as illustrations for various contemporary newspapers. He incorporated into his own highly individual method elements of the styles of various contemporary artists, especially French painters Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin. Japanese art, then coming into vogue in Paris, influenced his use of sharp delineation, asymmetric composition, oblique angles, and flat areas of color. His work served as inspiration for van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Georges Rouault.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/toulouse-lautrec.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/toulouse-lautrec/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec
http://www.renoirinc.com/biography/artists/lautrec.htm
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/t/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec/index.html
http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/Lautrec/Lautrec.shtml
Apart from the traumatic accidents, Lautrec's early years were relatively uneventful. Much of his childhood was spent at the Chateau du Bosc, the home of his grandfather. His cousins provided company, and the days were spent playing croquet and badminton, collecting toy horses-and-coaches, and learning Latin and English.
Early in 1882, Lautrec moved to Paris with his mother. Here, he entered the teaching studio of Leon Bonnat, a painter of portraits and historical subjects, who thought Lautrec's drawing was "atrocious", and tried to strengthen his sense of form. When Bonnat closed his studio a few months later, Henri and the other students enrolled with a successful history painter called Fernand Cormon, who was much more positive about his talents.
By 1885, Lautrec was beginning to find his feet as a young painter in Paris. He had discovered Montmartre, a village suburb in northern Paris, mid-way between the fashionable boulevards and the outer industrial districts, which was rapidly becoming a center of popular entertainment and a haven for artists. Lautrec wanted to work there, but his parents disapproved, and refused to give him the money to rent a studio. So he moved in with Rene Grenier, a gentleman-painter from Cormon's. Grenier and his ex-model wife Lily were good companions who took Lautrec to parties, dance-halls and cabarets, and photographs of the time show him dressed up with his friends in exotic costumes.
In 1886, Lautrec's parents provided him with a big enough allowance to rent his own studio and share a flat with a medical student friend, Henri Bourges. Both flat and studio were in Montmartre, the centre of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to depict in his work. Here, the little artist, with his pince-nez, bowler hat and walking stick soon became a familiar sight, particularly at night, and he was declared "the soul of Montmartre".
Meanwhile, another set of friends at Cormon's studio, Emile Bernard, Vincent van Gogh and Louis Anquentin, widened his horizons artistically and helped him find his own style. Dating from this time are several psychologically penetrating portraits, especially of his mother, that show in their color and brushwork his absorption of impressionism.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: