Toulouse-Lautrec (World of Art)

Rating:
Summary: Looking at the art in the mirror
Review: In "Contre Sainte-Beuve," French novelist Marcel Proust separated art from private life. But Henri TOULOUSE-LAUTREC drew on what interested him in art and life, that is, personality through how the model looked and stood: Edgar Degas- and Edouard Manet-type young girl down in the dumps in "La gueule de bois"; his first large-scale dance scene figures in "Un coin du Moulin de la Galette"; model Suzanne Valadon in 3/4 profile with a Vincent Van Gogh-type turban and in the Camille Pissarro-type "Poudre de riz" front portrait; and Jean Antoine Watteau- and Degas-type popular entertainer Jane Avril, without facial details but immediately recognizable by her shoes with bows, stage stance, and tilting shoulders in an all-blue composition except for the yellow-splashed meeting between knees and skirt. With his Paul Gauguin- and Van Gogh-type expressive color areas, he was hard to beat: "L'anglais au Moulin Rouge" lithographing girlish brightness against black, blue, his favorite olive green, purple, red, and yellow; "Le dernier salut" in flat and narrowly ranged blue, purple and yellow, with a Chat Noir Chinese theater-type hearse driver and hired mourners profiled in black; his Moulin Rouge poster, dark violet from richly mixed black, blue, and red scatter sprayed over each other from a heavily charged brush through a sieve, with the foreground figure slightly sinister and the background dancer in gold, pink, and white; his rare landscapes, light in small-scaled and lively colored freshness, playing early Pissarro- and Alfred Sisley-type light and shade; "Routy" put together Frans Hals-style, with Manet-type expressive blacks and lightly sketchy brushwork; his stained glass window for Tiffany's, sketched and designed from Japanese-style ballet dancers around a water lily-covered lake; and "Un examen a la faculte de medecine de Paris," just over a month before he died, in sombre black and green brightened in the window light by a red academic gown and white writing paper and with Honore Daumier-type accurate draughtsmanship and confident brushwork. He applied his Manet-type dramatic profiles and simplified color areas to subjects from a Degas-type working woman's world: "A la toilette" linking the sitter's auburn hair to a mosaicized background and the pale blues of her dress to what was on her dressing table and her shelf, for a heavily downward brushstroked, overall melancholy; "Au Moulin Rouge," with Gustave Caillebotte-type diagonals for depth and with Degas-type cropped snapshot-style lighting from below to bring out a girl's masklike face; and "Au salon de la rue des Moulins," with one girl seen from the back cut off, Japanese- and snapshot-influenced Impressionist style, by the canvas edge. His post-Impressionist color and style lasted into the twentieth century, among others, in the accent diagonals on Edvard Munch's horizontally-shaped program for Jean Gabriel Borkman's acting a Henrik Ibsen play at Theatre de l'oeuvre; blue period color and form in Pablo Picasso's "Frugal meal," "Green stockings," and portrait of Joaquin Mir; color lithographic advertising, science fiction illustrations, and such strip cartoons as "Asterix"; Expressionism; and Auguste Rodin's watercolors. I like the way that author Bernard Denvir has placed the fifteen artistic years of this people's artist so well within what was and would be happening within the art world. His reader-friendly book of straightforward text and well-chosen illustrations sits nicely on the shelf with Linda Bolton's GAUGUIN, Pascal Bonafoux's VAN GOGH, Robert Gordon's DEGAS, Alan Krell's MANET AND THE PAINTERS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE, Bruce Laughton's HONORE DAUMIER, Joachim Pissarro's MONET AND THE MEDITERRANEAN, Richard Shone's SISLEY, Richard Thomson's CAMILLE PISSARRO, and Richard Verdi's CEZANNE.