Life of Lautrec

Three years ago Gerstle Mack's Paul Cezanne was published and accepted almost at once as a definitive biography. Painstaking and fully documented, it presented Cezanne as a great intuitive inventor in the art of painting; and its sympathetic account of the artist's crotchety life cleared the air of much second-rate chatter. Biographer Mack's new subject is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa,* who died of drink and exhaustion in 1901, aged 36, the greatest French master of line between Daumier and Picasso.

Most important single fact about Toulouse-Lautrec is that both his legs were broken and stopped growing when he was 14. His noble father, Count Alphonse, who was interested mainly in falcons and thoroughbred horses, promptly lost interest in Henri. Among the best things in Gerstle Mack's book are excerpts from young Lautrec's whimsical convalescent letters, a quaint "Zig Zag Journal'1 he kept at 16, his first sassy comments on art exhibitions in Paris. But as Lautrec became mature and bitterly familiar with his deformity, the pleasures of cafe conversation took the place of writing. This made things difficult for his biographer.

Doll-like, repulsively big-nosed, black-bearded and bespectacled, Lautrec loved circuses, dance halls, race tracks. Several brothels came to regard him as a kind of mascot. His home and native element was Montmartre. Biographer Mack has tried conscientiously but has failed to reanimate this legendary quarter. He ploughs without inspiration through genealogies of the successive owners of peripheral cafe-concerts where Lautrec occasionally had a drink. It is interesting to learn that Jane Avril, the delicate dancer of the Moulin Rouge whose skull-like face Lautrec loved to draw, still lives and remembers him. Mr. Mack's research on other entertainers and sporting characters is praiseworthy and necessary. But Lautrec's garish, glamorous and vicious milieu remains sunk beneath two generations and the War.

* Toulouse-Lautrec, Knopf ($5).

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