Toulouse-Lautrec

Last week, an exhibition of the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec was held in the Wildenstein Galleries, Manhattan. Between the years 1880 and 1890, this artist was often pointed out by habitues of the Moulin Rouge Cafe, Paris, to friends from out of town; a whisper passed from Parisian mouth to Provincial ear. Amazement, incredulity, re-assertion.

"What? A nobleman? That dwarf?"

"But yes, I assure you, and a painter also."

Toulouse-Lautrec, hiding his spindle legs under a square table, would sit with his glass between his fingers, blowing his smoke out into the vacancy of a dream. Born aristocrat, heir to great wealth, his spine had been injured when he was a boy. The inept surgery of the time had left him painfully deformed. Unable to endure the sympathy of his lackeys, he renounced privilege, went to live in Montmartre, painted what he saw there.

In his exhibition, one gets a glimpse of a chalk-faced friend from the Folies Bergeres with gross, pursy mouth and smudged eyes; apaches that glare and glide in the galvanic paint as if rehearsing for a cinema; a group posed, with the sterile absurdity of wax figures, about a table; a bristling gendarme, unable to decide whether to arrest a reveller or have a drink with him; a deputy compounded of a too-small black hat and too many brown whiskers; a lady with a green shadow upon her face.

Toulouse-Lautrec loved life, but few of the living. His own ugliness was stamped on his frame; why should he gloss the deformity that twitched in the minds of those he saw, revealed by an expression, a turn of a head, an angle of a body? He painted with the bitter, malign mastery of a superb satirist. His three chef-d'oeuvres--Le Moulin Rouge, Femme dans un Atelier, La Pierreuse--were included in the Manhattan exhibit.