Modern Art and Visual Culture 1660-1900

T A I C R H T -L ' "A M R " A ( ): R H H T -L S : A I C M S , . 12, N . 2, T H B B M C (1986), . 114-135 P : T A I C S RL: :// . . / /4115937 A : 10-01-2017 00:50 TC

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The A r t Ins t i tu te o f Chicago

Rediscovering Hen r i de Toulouse‐Lautrec's "At t he Mou l in Rouge" Author(s): Reinhold Hel ler and Hen r i de Toulouse‐Lautrec Source: A r t I ns t i t u t e o f Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 , The Helen B i r ch Ba r t l e t t Memoria l Col lect ion (1986), pp. 114‐135 Published by: The A r t Ins t i t u te of Chicago Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4115937 Accessed: 10‐01‐2017 00:50 UTC

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H -L '

A M EINHOLD HELLE ,

P A G L L ,

C

HO E . A , - - . , , . , P - I - G 1880 P P 1900- - , , - , - . . I - , , - , , - . - , : , , .

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, L ' , . O , : - . M . A I ' D C , D K , .

B , . P A I 1928, A M D 1924 J 1925 L - A C C . F , F C B C

115

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Rediscovering

At the Moulin Rouge R E I N H O L D H E L L E R ,

The University of Chicago

HOSE works of a r t with which we are the m o s t familiar often are the ones weactually know least.

As we confront these objects, o u r expectations‑ molded by prior knowledge and beliefs‐obscure the reality before us. We confuse, in tu rn , many a r t works with the biographies of their makers. The lives of artists, especially of those who were working during the Post‑ Impressionist era‐extending roughly from Seurat and Gauguin in the 1880s to Picasso in his initial years in Paris around 1900‐are encased in anenvelope of myth and legend that associates the ar t with an imagined bohe‑ mianism accented by sexual license, alcoholic excess, ge‑ nius merged with insanity, and deaths that are roman‑ tically youthful due to suicide or mysteriously decadent diseases. The a r t becomes a means of vicarious escape from our o w n lives into a novel and suggestive world whose diabolic excess wecontrol through o u r ability to leave our aesthetic daydreams at will and thus avoid the final fates of those artists wehave admired. In this proc‑ ess, the artworks lose their physical reality and become specters of themselves, ghostly apparitions of a cult whose shrines are the hushed halls of museums or gal‑ leries and whose sacred texts are the biographies, novels, and films filled with illustrations serving as rememo‑ rative substitutes for the ar t itself. Yearning for the famil‑ iar, we blind ourselves with comfortable precognition: Welook through, n o t at, the works of a r t weknow best andpermit their aura to overshadow their materialreality.

Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge (fig. 1), one of a series of Post‐Impressionist master ‑ pieces in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, surely has earned its place among such icons of comfortable familiarity. Illus‑ trated and discussed in the many volumes of writings on the legendary crippled, pathetic, but laughing dwarf of Montmartre; included in the numerous exhibitions of Lautrec’s work that draw visitors by tens of thousands; among the m o s t sought‐out paintings at the Art In‑ stitute, At the Moulin Rouge is awork wemay even find too familiar and one weavoid with some sense of embar‑ rassment because of its, and Lautrec’s, popularity. Our faith in ou r familiarity is misplaced, however: the paint‑ ing is n o t what we have wanted it to be. Much of what wehave thought to bet r u e about it for over eighty years is false. Recent examinations of the painting by the Art Institute’s Department of Conservation, particularly by conservator David Kolch, reveal a painting we have never seen.

Before we t u r n to those findings, we should review what we have believed and what we do actually know. Prior to entering the collections of the Art Institute in 1928, At the Moulin Rouge was displayed at the museum from December 1924 to January 1925 in a Lautrec ex‑ hibition organized by the Arts Club of Chicago. From the works in that exhibition, Frederic Clay Bartlett and other Chicago collectors selected those that today form

115

HE A IN I E F CHICAG L ME 12, N . 2

A

HE HELEN BI CH BA LE MEM IAL C LLEC I NThis content downloaded from 132.239.90.237 on Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:50:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

G 0 VOLUME 12, N O . 2 ‑

Mmeum fludzéf

T H E H E L E N B I R C H B A R I L E E I M E M O R i A L C O L L E C T I O N

FIGURE 1 H T -La (F , 1864-1901). A M R , 1894/95. O a a ; 123 141 . T A I C a , H B Ba M a C (1928.610).

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A I ' L -

.1 B C , 1902, L ' . I , L ' , J , G -J , L ' , C A -L , " ... I ."2 J , .3 A 1902, A L A I .4 H , - , 1914, G -J - .5 A G -J , . 1914 - A .6 1924 C L ' . , A I ' - , ,

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116

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the core of the Art Institute’s enviable Lautrec collec‑ tion.1 Before being purchased for the Chicago museum, the painting had been owned by Parisian collectors and a r t galleries since 1902, the year following Lautrec’s death. It was ceded, alongwith other works in Lautrec’s estate, to Maurice Joyant, codirector of the Galerie Manzi‐Joyant in Paris and ex e c u t o r of the estate, by Lautrec’s father, Count Alphonse deToulouse-Lautrec, “with all my heart andwithout regret . . . [because] you believe in his work more than I do and because you have been proven right.”2 Joyant then apparently sold the painting to his partner, Manzi.3 Also in 1902, At the Moulin Rouge seems to have been included among the group of some fifty works by Lautrec exhibited at the April Salon des Inde’pendants.4 However, after that ex‑ hibition, the painting was n o t displayed in public again until 1914, when the Galerie Manzi-Joyant held a r e t r o ‑ spective exhibition.5 Although it may have been available in the intervening years at the Galerie Manzi‐Joyant, for twelve years the painting essentially disappeared from public View. The 1914 exhibition was followed by an ‑ other decade during which At the Moulin Rouge was again largely unseen" No t until after the 1924 Chicago exhibition did the painting become a consistent part of Lautrec’s oeuvre in shows devoted to his work. Then, and particularly after it entered the Art Institute’s collec‑ tions, the paintingwas on cons tan t public display, either on loan to numerous exhibitions in the UnitedStates and Europe, or in the Ar t Institute itself. The early exhibition history of the painting, there‑

fore, is one filled with lengthy gaps during which it was n o t available to the public. Moreover, to this history of invisibility m u s t be added even mo r e significant years, because At the Moulin Rouge was apparently never ex ‑ hibited prior to 1902, when Manzi purchased it.7 Today universally identified asone of Toulouse-Lautrec’s m o s t important works, and one of the few large paintings created by him, it seems never to have been shown by him either in anexhibition devoted to his o w n a r t or in group exhibitions such asthose of the Salons des Indé‑ pendants to which he consistently contributed. During Lautrec’s lifetime, the painting remained in his studio. Lautrec’s seeming reluctance to exhibit it deprives us of documentation that could establish the year in which he created it. Nonetheless,At the MoulinRougehas consis‑ tently been assigned to 1892 since Maurice Joyant first listed it among a group of eight paintings with this title created in that year.8 These eight paintings are clustered around agrouping of four that explore various aspects of the nocturnal life of the famed Montmartre music hall and that were exhibited in 1893 at the Galerie Goupil, which Joyant managed at the time.9 The painting now in the Art Institute was n o t among them, however. None‑ 116

FIGURE 2 Henri deToulouse‐Lautrec. Le Divan japonais, 1892/93. Lithograph in four colors; 80 x 61.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison Collection (1949.1002).

theless, in Joyant’s biography and monograph on Toulouse‐Lautrec, which in 1926 established authorita‑ tively the compass and the chronology of Lautrec’s works, he discussed the Art Institute paintingasif it had been anessential component of the 1892paintingsuite he had exhibited in 1893:

The renewal of the Moulin Rouge [under the new manage‑ m e n t of Joseph Oller in 1892] asnew performers preferred by Lautrec were hired inspired him [to paint] . . . La Goulue and her Sister, The Dance or The Beginning of the Quadrille, La Goulue and her Sister Entering the Moulin Rouge, The Dancers, and finally: Au Moulin Rouge with several of his friends seen with La Macarona at a table.‘°

Joyant categorically stated: “This painting is one of the mo s t impor tan t o f all works by Lautrec. . . . I t serves as

L

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, , M. E D , , I , L M , - , M G M C ; , - : M . N C. ; : L G L ' D . G. C , -L .11

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, D G . H - , , - - J A , J "L ' ... , , - ."13 J A - D , , 1893 , L D J ( . 2), A M , ( . 3, 4), L . A - J A I L G , - L M F , L G J L G M ( . 5), .

J J A L M F A

FIG E 3 H -L . F

D (J A ), 1892/95. O ; 59.7 39.4 . , ., M . M . M .

FIG E 4 H

-L . J A , 1892/95. O . A , F , M -L .

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the summation of all his studies of the Moulin Rouge.” Hewen t onto identify the persons seen inAt theMoulin Rouge:

Seated around the table, from left to right, are M. Edouard Dujardin [a Symbolist poet, critic, and dramatist associated with the Revue Wagnerienne and the Revue Indépendante], La Macarona [a dancer], Paul Sescau [a professional photog‑ rapher], Maurice Guibert [a proprietor of the vineyard of Moét et Chandon champagne]; in the foreground to the right, seen full-face: Mlle. Nelly C. [a name otherwise unknown]; in the central part: [the dancer] La Goulue adjusting her hair and silhouettes of [Lautrec’s cousin] Dr. G. Tapié de Céleyran, and of Toulouse-Lautrec himself wearing his bowler hat.‘1

Joyant’s ability to identify with certainty various fig‑ ures in the painting lends his information the quality of authority, ashe intended, but this authority15under‑ mined by his failure to even mention other figures. Joyant’s writings about Lautrec are filled with personal reminiscences about the artist and the people he be‑ friended.12 Joyant should therefore have been able to identify with little difficulty the woman seen from the

Rediscovering Lautrec

back, seated between Dujardin and Guibert. Her com ‑ plex knot of fiery redhair, her tall hat of tulle and ostrich feathers, the gesture of her hand with little finger dain‑ tily extended‐all these are identifiably the attributes of the dancer Jane Avril, described by Joyant himself as “Lautrec’s m o s t intelligent and complaisant model . . . with her very fine but pale facial features, angular, al‑ mo s t simian i n figure and m o v em e n t” 1 3 Jane Avril ap‑ pears in the company of Dujardin, for example,m the 1893 poster for the music hall, Le Divanjaponais (fig. 2), in a pose quite similar to hers1nAt the Moulin Rouge, a n dm t w o painted sketches (figs. 3, 4), also closely related to her figurein the paintingand certainly used by Lautrec asheworked o u t the composition. Another fa‑ miliar dancer whom Joyant knew and failed to identify in the Art Institute painting is the woman seen in profile near La Goulue in the background, and easily recog‑ nized asLa Mome Fromage, so closely associated with La Goulue as to be called her sister by Joyant in the painting of La Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge (see fig. 5), aswell aselsewhere. Joyant simply ignored the figures of Jane Avril and La

Mome Fromage when he named the personnages of At

FIGURE 3 Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec. Femme deDos (lane Avril), 1892/95. Oi l or gouache on cardboard; 59.7 x 39.4 cm . Upperville, Va., collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

FIGURE 4 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. [cine Avril, 1892/95. Oi l or gouache on cardboard. Albi, France, Musée Toulouse‐Lautrec.

117

. , , - " . C.," . , , J : E ( A - ) .14 1895 ( . 6), , - - A 3, 1895, ( . 7). , , ( . 8) G ' 1898.15 H , A , ' G ' "E 6" 1894 ( . 9). .

D J ' A , , :

A B , I , 1895 , . H - . , ' , E ... . .. 16

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' J ' , - ( . 8) 1913 G C :

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C ' , A , - ,

FIG E 5 H - . G E -

, 1891/92. ; 79.4 59 . A . : . G. D , - ( , 1971), . 2. . 243.

118

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the Moulin Rouge. More problematic, however, is his identification of the large right‐hand foreground figure as“Mlle. Nelly C . , ” someone whose name is connected with Lautrec at no other time. The name is, in fact, a fiction that permitted Joyant to hide the actual identity of the person depicted: the English (or perhaps Amer‑ ican) dancer May Milton1“Lautrec created a poster for h e rIn 1895 (fig. 6), apparently for a t o u r of the United States, and used its composition for a black‐and-white lithograph illustrating her dance1nthe August 3,1895, issue of Le Rire (fig. 7). Moreover, in addition to printed sketches for the poster, he painted her portrait (fig. 8) and exhibited it at the London branch of Goupil’s in 1898.15Her strange hat, perched on her head like a giant Art Nouveau insect with fibrous antennae and winglike bows, also appearedin Lautrec’5cover of the sheet music for Yvette Guilbert’s song “Eros Vanné” in 1894 (fig. 9). The features of the dancer seem to linger1nthose of the wearer of the hat as well.

Despite Joyant’s failure to properly identify May Milton asthe major figure in At the Moulin Rouge, heis the source of the mos t information about her, but his description is tinged with distaste and notes of disdain:

At the same time [as Lautrec discovered May Belfort, the Irish singer, in 1895] he also hunted down May Milton, but this May was no more than adancer. Her pale face was clown-like and reminded one of nothing somuch asabull dog. Nothing in her face was attractive, but her movements’ suppleness, her purely English choreographic training . . . [were] a so r t of revelation to us then. . . .“’

Others inform us that May Milton became the close friend of Jane Avril and that the t w o were in each other’s company constantly, so that the lime‐green face of May Milton, complementing the red‐orange hair of Jane Avril in the painting, may serve as a commentary on their relationship. After 1895, however, Milton disappeared from the retinue of Lautrec, possibly after leaving for her American tou r. With May Milton seemingly moving off the canvas and away from the central group, the painting could well symbolize her departure from the milieu of the Moulin Rouge. Neither Miss Milton’s brief appearance on the stages

of Montmartre n o r her departure suffice to explain Joyant’s negative references to her, or certainly the vi‑ tuperative description of her portrait (fig. 8) written in 1913 by Gustave Cocquiot:

I remember having seen‐with what a shudder [frisson]‑ this [portrait of] May Milton . . . with her yellowish‐white complexion that left the impression of a bladder skin thinly stretched over some magma alternating between yellow and whitish green. This painting is of a hideous te r r o r. This mouth, rubbed red, drops open like a vulva, lacking reserve, without solidity. It opens and lets en te r whatever will! And the painter of this dreadful image was a lover of women! What entangled sadism! . . . or perhaps a so r t of sermon addressed to other men? It is a singular problem.”

Cocquiot’s bizarre, deprecating c omm e n t s suggest that hewas thinking of the apparition of May Milton at the right of At the Moulin Rouge more than of her other portrait, and that he was attempting to impart an ap‑ otropaic value to i t , again as if something about the

FIGURE 5 Henri deToulouse‐Lautrec. Lu Goulue En‑ tering the Moulin Rouge, 1891/92. Oil on cardboard; 79.4 X 59cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: M. G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York, 1971), vol. 2. p. 243.

FIG RE 8 H -L . M M , 1895. O ; 65.9 49.2 . A

I C , K L. B (1949.263).

FIG RE 6 H -L . M M , 1895. L ; 83 62 . A I C , C H. H C (1948.451).

L

FIG RE 7 H -L . M M , 1895. L . P L R , A . 3, 1895. N , H L. . P : N R , N .

119

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Top left FIGURE 6 Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec. May Milton, 1895. Lithograph in five colors; 83 X 62cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Collection (1948.451).

, , . / ' Left ®/ / /. / / ' FIGURE 7 Henri deToulouse-Lautrec. May Milton, 1895.

/ / '/ Lithograph in black. Published in Le Rire, Aug. 3, 1895. ‘ New York, collection of Herbert L. Schimmel. Photo: "MWWM Nathan Rabin, New York.

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M M . : M M ' J A ? A , , L F ' , " " . J ' C ' , , " ," - , - : . ,

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FIG E 9 H -L . E

, 1894. L ; 49.6 33.9 . A I C , C H. H C (1949.991).

120

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memory of May Milton was sounpleasant or scandalous asto require rejection and condemnation. What this might have been15open only to conjecture: might Miss Milton’s relationship with Jane Avril have been a lesbian one? At the time of the painting, in his depictions of prostitutes, Lautrec demonstrated definite interest in what the French identified asl’umour unglais, but polite society would surely have condemned such relationships outside the “perverse” atmosphere of the brothel. Joyant’s and Cocquiot’s references to vulgarity, ugliness, troupes of dancing‘‘girls,” overly receptive female geni‑ tals, and sermons to m e n can all serve asdisguised refer‑ ences to what they did n o t wish to mention overtly: female homosexuality. Similarly, if the figure on the

Paroles de

MAURICE Vt;J)0NNAY

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120

,,,cover of “Eros Vanne (fig. 9) can be associated with the English dancer, the song’s rhythmic ennui, its celebra‑ tion of the tired sensibilities of névroses, of “secret ma‑ neuvers to resuscitate senses n o w defunct,” and of “the quest for novel frissons [thrills],” all cause aneros:

Very old, worn o u t and satiated Despite my twenty years, because 1 was born on a bed of tarnished roses and 1 am an exhausted Eros!18

Thus, the song may signal forbidden erotic pleasures shared by t w o w o m e n such asthose Lautrec depicted in At the Moulin Rouge. With one of the w o m e n in pseudo-masculine dress, the potential for identifying them as lovers and, by implication, asJane Avril and May Milton, c a n n o t be readily dismissed.

The conclusion wetentatively reach m u s t remain con ‑ jecture, but it is one invited by the t o n e and c o n t e n t of Lautrec’s ardent defenders as they discussed May Milton. Their need to denigrate‐even annihilate‐her memory appears to bethe predominant motive, amotive that may explain the history of “vandalism” At the Moulin Rouge has suffered. The painting clearly shows, even in reproductions, that it is composed of t w o canvas segments: arectangle measuring approximately one hun‑ dred and twenty‐four by ninety‐four centimeters and containing the group seated around the table; and a re ‑ verse‐L‐shaped segment, somewhat irregularly edged, measuring in its lower a r m some twenty‐seven cen‑ timeters high while its vertical portion is approximately sixteen centimeters wide and contains m o s t of the figure of May Milton. Despite the easy Visibility of this seg‑ mentation, it was n o t mentioned by Joyant or by M. G. Dortu in her six‐volume catalogue of Lautrec’s paintings and drawings compiledin 1971to supplantJoyant’ssixty‑ year‐old listings.‘9 Virtually all the literature on the painting, in fact, has been remarkably silent concerning the mounting of the t w o canvas segments on a n e w sup‑ porting lining canvas, the filling in with plaster of tack‑ ing holes surrounding the rectangle, and the efforts to touch up the junctures to make them less obtrusive. The first, and little noted, published mention (there are u n ‑

FIGURE 9 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Eros Vanne, 1894. Lithograph in black on t a n wove paper; 49.6 x 33.9 cm. The Ar t Institute of Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Collection (1949.991).

L

A I ' 1930 ) 1956 D C :

I - . B L , . .... - .20

, E M I 1860 , , - , E D J - - , G B. M M . D ' :

. A M ... , L . D , 1902.21

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, 1895, L 1892 . I , L , . , , -

, L - , . ; . A M , 1892; , , L- , .

1985 A I D K - L ' .23 , . I , , - , . L ' , , - . - , - , . - . - ; " " - , , - . L . 1902 , L- - , ( ), . - - , . F , A I .

- , , , , , ? -L - M M , ? J ' ? D -

121

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published ones in the Art Institute’s conservation and curatorial files dating back to the 1930s) is contained in a 1956 book by Douglas Cooper:

In its original form this picture was astraightforward con‑ versation piece in which the spectator was imagined close to the table and looking down on the scene from just behind the back of the woman with orange hair. But Lautrec mu s t have felt that this conception was t o o illustrative and banal, for at a later stage he enlarged his canvas. . . . Then he brought all the pictorial science at his command into play in order to transform the impressionistic or photographic im‑ age izigto ano less realistic but pictorially more effective one.

The joining of the t w o segments to transform a genre scene of people in a café, such ashad become common since EdouardManet and the Impressionists began their systematic exploration of this theme during the 18605, into a more radical composition, with a partial figure pushed to the edge of the canvas‐that is, linked to the a r t of Edgar Degas and Japanese woodcuts‐was n o t discussed further until twen ty ‐ two years later, when Gale B. Murray reviewed Mme. Dortu’s catalogue:

No information is offered asto the way works may have been repainted or otherwise altered. Au Moulin Rouge . . . is again am o s t significant example, for at one point Lautrec radically enlarged and revised the painting by adding an extra piece of canvas and the prominent figure to the right. Dortu makes no mention of this fact and evidently did n o t find the reproduction of this painting in its original state, published in 1902.21

The photograph to which Murray referred (fig. 10) was republished shortly thereafter when the Art Institute organized alarge exhibition of Lautrecpaintings in 1979. In the catalogue, Charles Stuckey and Naomi Maurer referred to the photograph and, after identifying “Mlle. Nelly C.” for the first time asMay Milton, argued that the original painting of 1892 was revised by Lautrec after he me t Milton in 1895.22 The dating of the painting to 1892, first supplied by Joyant and accepted by everyone after him, was thereby revised, but n o t rejected, largely on the basis of its subject mat te r. The conclusion that, in 1895, Lautrec was dissatisfied

with his 1892 composition and revised it by expanding it is the one wewould m o s t readily seek. In this case, it also conforms to our image of Lautrec asanartist who moved from a relatively traditional realism toward a more radically stylized ar t , especially in his lithographs. The figure of the woman c u t off by the edge of the canvas, her face tinted green and yellow, seems a jarring contrast to the more naturalistic rendering of the re ‑

Rediscovering Lautrec

mainder of the painting, and thus appears to justify the conclusion that Lautrec painted this work in t w o cam‑ paigns, separated by three years. That conclusion iswhat the logic of a r t history and biography demands; but that conclusion is also totally wrong. At the Moulin Rouge was painted all at one time, but n o t in 1892; asweshall see, it was later cu t , the L‐shapedsegment was removed, and still later it was added back o n t o the rectangle from which it had been separated. The examination of the paintingduring the fall of 1985

by Art Institute conservator David Kolch shows in‑ controvertably that Lautrec’s original painting was cut up.23When the t w o canvas segments were inspected, the paint surfaces and manner of application were seen to be similar. In certain areas, such asthe ballustrade at the lower left, which would have had to bepartially painted over to make adjustments if the painting had been ex‑ tended, no sign of overpainting is to befound. Lautrec’s practice of using paint thinned with turpentine until it soaked into the ground of the canvas would have made the duplication of surface qualities extremely difficult, if n o t impossible, without r emnan t s of this process re ‑ maining visible. X‐radiographs of the painting, more ‑ over, showed that brushstrokes of objects such as the bentwood chair extended from one canvas segment into the other. To the evidence of paint surface and brush‑ strokes can beadded that provided by the weave of the canvas. Running horizontally through the canvas atsev‑ eral points are noticeably heavy threads; these “fat threads” cross the vertical seam joining one canvas seg‑ me n t to the other, thereby demonstrating that the t w o segments were once of one piece, n o t t w o distinct can‑ vases later joined. The canvas painted by Lautrec mus t therefore originally have been at least its cur ren t size. The rectangular portion of the table group was later c u t away and restretched to create the painting seen in the 1902 photograph, while the L‐shaped portion was u n ‑ stretched, folded diagonally near its center (paint loss here indicates this), and presumably stored away. Re‑ joined again later to its severed segment on a lining can‑ vas, the seams resulting from this process were painted over to minimize and hide them. From this procedure of dismemberment and rejoining, the painting now in the Art Institute resulted. Themajor question arisingfrom this previously unrec‑

ognized process is, obviously, who c u t the painting and when, aswell aswho patched it back together and, again, when? Was it Toulouse‐Lautrec who initially re ‑ moved the figure of May Milton and then preserved the canvas fragment with her on it, so that the executors of his estate were able to rejoin the t w o pieces? Or did Joyant both c u t and then again patch the painting after the artist’s death? Documentation that would defini‑

121

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tively answer these questions does n o t seem to exist, and there are also no critics’ descriptions of it during Lautrec’s lifetime to provide clues as to its appearance then. But, by examining once more the painting itself, the information concerning it supplied by Joyant, and the photograph published in 1902, we can arrive at a reasonable conclusion asto the probable circumstances and dates of the creation and alteration of At the Moulin Rouge. As we now know, the photograph thought to repre~

sent anearly stage of Lautrec’s painting has been proven to beinstead a“second stage”‐in which the canvas was cu t down and split in both dimension and content, with the offending image of May Milton removed. If the can‑ vas of the painting itself today continues to testify to us that, in its original conception, May Milton, whom Lautrec m e t in 1894 or 1895, was very much a part of it, the photograph of the reduced version (fig. 10) provides uswith adate‐1902‐prior to which the dismember‑ me n t took place. The circumstances of the photograph’s publicationmay also tell uswhy this seeming “vandaliz‑ ing” of anartist’s work happened at all. The photograph was publishedalongwith those of thirty‐six other works by Lautrec in the April 1902 issue of Le Figaro Illustré, an issue under the editorship of the Galerie Manzi‑ Joyant and devoted to a celebration of Toulouse‑ Lautrec’s work. The publication date coincidedwith that year’s Salon des Indépendants (March 29‐May 5, 1902), referred to above, where in the central gallery there ap‑ peared amemorial collection of the artist’s paintingsand lithographs. Insofar asthey can beidentified, nine paint‑ ings listed in the catalogue were either then owned by Manzi or Joyant, or had recently been sold by their gallery. Many of these were included among the illustra‑ tions in this issue of Le Figaro Illustré, and presumably paintings such asAt the Moulin Rouge, recently turned over to them by Count Toulouse‐Lautrec, were among the forty or fifty additional paintings said to have been exhibited bors catalogue at the Salon.24 The other paint‑ ings illustrated in the special issue of the magazine were exhibited in the large retrospective of 200 works by Lautrec that took place atthe Galerie Durand‐Ruel from May 14to May 31, 1902. This exhibition excluded works from the Manzi‐Joyant inventory; these may, therefore, have remained available for viewing at their gallery. The selection of paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and the thirty‐seven illustrations all functioned asadvertise‑ ments of gallery inventories at a time when the artist’s name continued to a t t r a c t public curiosity, still only months after his death. The presentation of Lautrec to the public of 1902 n o t

only served commercial ends but also existed in the con‑ t e x t of a mo re encompassing debate concerning the 122

FIGURE 10 Henri deToulouse‑ Lautrec. A Ride at the Moulin

Rouge. Photograph published in Le Figaro Illustré, April 1902. Photo:

New York Public Library.

health, or lack of it, of modern a r t and of the bohemian existence, whether realor imagined, of many contempo‑ rary artists. Lautrec’s death in 1901 was surrounded by sensationalized gossip, fed in part by memories of his confinement to amental hospital for three months dur‑ ing 1899. His stay in an asylum for detoxification, his reputation for sexual libertinage, and his association with entertainers of various types sufficed to make the artist’s death at the age of thirty-seven asubject of popu‑ lar conjecture and tongue clucking, particularly when these were combined with the fact that hewas “the last descendant of one of France’s m o s t noble and oldest families.” “He died horribly,” summarized the LyonRé‑ publicain, “ruined in body and mind, in an insane asylum While subject to periodic fits of raging mad‑ ness.”25 Toulouse‐Lautrec’s ancestry, physiognomy, life, death, and art‐both its con t en t and technique‐seemed designed to demonstrate the truth of the then highly popular theories about the degeneracy in modern a r t and literaturepropagatedby Max Nordau in his book Entar‑ tung.26 It was to counte r the image of Lautrec as an insane artist that Manzi‐joyant published the richly il‑ lustrated issue of Le Figaro Illustré. In this carefully orchestrated denial of suchcharges, in

texts alternating between factual description and poetic metaphor, such Parisian critics as Arsene Alexandre (who had befriended Lautrec and had already written defenses of the artist), Julien Leclerq, and Roger Marx, and such German critics asJulius Meier‐Graefe, Her‑ mann Esswein, andJulius Elias, admitted the alcoholism of their hero, but also identified him asamodern Dante who descended into the inferno of Montmartre and in‑ cisively depicted what he witnessed. Thus, Alexandre w r o t e in 1899, “ I n his thirst for truth, this strange and intrepid small man descended into hell, and his bristling hair was singed [by] the abomination of alcohol.” Over his entire oeuvre, Alexandre continued, should be posted the warning inscription of Dante’s Inferno: “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate! [Abandon all hope, you who en te r here!]”27 This argument, which literally detoxified Lautrec by asserting his sanity and his noble na tu re in the midst of adegenerate milieu, was

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They say hewas a repulsive dwarf with ahorridly large head; and in reality hewas only apitiful boiteux [cripple]. They say he was a slovenly debaucherer, but he was a member of [one of] France’s noblest families, was always on the best of te rms with his parents, lived in ideal circum‑ stances that made him financially independent and disdainful of the tainted cash offered by dealers, and he was a noble man in every way: his mannerisms were n o t without a certain delicacy, and asa conversationalist he was unsur‑ passed. They go on to say that he lived in brothels and that hehabituated the saloons and bars of the Boulevard de Clichy and of the lower city. Weshould add that hewas a constant patron of the Chat Nair and the cabarets later emulating it, that hewas the particular friend of Rodolphe Salis, the chansonnier gentilbomme [gentleman singer], that

heknew the best and least actors personally, that hewas welcomed in the boudoirs of the m o s t genial and beautiful actrices and singers. It was in that world that he found his life’s element asartist and asthinker. He knew life, and knew best la basse bumanité [human lowlife], and this life left its mark on him‐one day more harshly than this weak body born of a genetically exhausted nobility could bear. It attacked his nerves first, and he sought the narcotic of strong drink. But then they say: Lautrec died of alcoholism in an insane asylum. In reality, tuberculosis ended his life and hedied in the arms of his mother. I was privileged to see a letter written by this loving mother in which she said: “. . it was astonishing to us to see how, in spite of his illness, his intelligence and the lucidity of his mind remained soextraordinary. It was phthisis that took him away from us.” Then, last of all, they say: Lautrec was n o t apainter! I could claim with just asmuch justification that in modern Prussia there are no generals.28

123

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Through a selective denying and affirming of general conceptions about Lautrec, mixed with irony and n o t a little pathos, the reputation of the man was defended from his attackers. If Lautrec the man could beretrieved from ignominy by asserting his normality, even his no ‑ bility, in amilieuof depravity, then much the same argu‑ men t could beeffective for his a r t . Judged by his detrac‑ t o r s to beaperverse and pornographic caricaturist, n o t a t r u e artist or painter, Lautrec was situated by his ad‑ mirers in apantheon of artists and writers who recog‑ nized the bizarre beauty of ugliness. Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others were cited to establish the sanity of Lautrec’s observations, and his a r t was given anhonored genealogy that encom‑ passed the entire Middle Ages aswell asa noble ancestry of individual geniuses:

Is it really necessary to indicate by citing names this series of geniuses, of unique talents, of free spirits in whom was perpetuated [the medieval] judgment‐pessimistic, tragic, comic, laughing, loving‐of the spectacle of life? Brueghel the Elder in Flanders, Holbein in Germany, Rembrandt in Holland, Michelangelo in Italy, Velasquez and Goya in Spain, the designers of woodcuts in Japan, Daumier in France: none of them hesitated before the horror and the ugliness that confronted them to express the truth of their observation and the profundity of their thought.29

Safely surrounded by universally praised tradition, Lautrec’s example then became a means of attacking the very bourgeois mentality and capitalist society that had been mounting anattack on the artist. Not he, but so‑ ciety, was decadent, nearing its o w n demise and an ‑ nouncing its own death. Lautrec was the genius, the nineteenth‐century Dante, who depicted this “divine comedy” of a dying century and a dying civilization. The milieu, n o t the artist, was crippled in body and mind, it was arguedwith mixed Darwinist and anarcho‑ socialist conviction, and Montmartre was the site in which was concentrated its modern inferno, “the neu‑ rosis of perverse orgies, the delerium of weakened senses whipped into arousal, the harsh biting laughter of des‑ pair drugged by alcohol and racing toward the abyss in a wildly danced chahut.”3° Lautrec, the seer, also served as the summation of this declining civilization in the trag‑ edy of his life: “The fame of his family began in the Provence [during the Middle Ages] and ended between the locales of Aristide Bruant and the Moulin Rouge; between these temporal limits is inscribed the entire organic evolution of a great people’s a r t and culture.”31 It iswithin this contex t that weshould consider At the

Moulin Rouge and its transformation. It was given the title Une Yahle auMoulinRouge (A Table at the Moulin Rouge) when it was illustrated, physically cropped, in 124

LeFigaro Illustré, and it was discussed under this title as well a few years later by the German critic Hermann Esswein. Using Lautrec’s a r t as his focus, Esswein en‑ gaged in an extended discussion of decadence, and the issue of decadence in ar t , and concluded that it was the milieu, n o t the art , that deserved the epithet. In his argu‑ ment , the fragmented At the Moulin Rouge played a pivotal role:

[Lautrec] often ate in the company of these t w o women and three men about t o w n and at this table they distributed themselves thus, five isolated figures surrounding its t o r ‑ t u r ous barrenness, its void surface. But all five of them fail to notice the t w o female figures behind them to the right, whom only Lautrec sees. Two women, one fixing her hair with amasterful, lifelike gesture asthe other, with hands on hips, stares into the room through rigidly glazed, wide open eyes. In these t w o secondary figures, aswell asin the t w o character types who saunter past the seated group toward the locale’s exit, the entire genius of the painter has been brought into focus. This is n o t just some ingratiating slice of life arbitrarily selected. In this painting weare convinced that the scene fully characterizes the milieu.32

In addition to summarizing the argument against Lautrec’s decadence, this account makes clear how dif‑ ferent the effect of the painting fragment was from that of the entire composition. Closely focused on the table group, with the edges of the painting cropped and re ‑ duced even further asthey were folded back around the stretcher for tacking, the abridged composition placed the viewer (or the painter, asEsswein suggested) imme‑ diately behind Jane Avril, somewhat above her and ap‑ parently on aplatform behind the railing seen at left. At eye level were the four background figures, who thus assumed the significant role attributed to them by Ess‑ wein. With edges c u t close to the figures and with the light green background visually pressing forward, the space in the paintingwas compressed and collapsed, and the viewer’s eye bounced in a claustrophobic circle among the brightly colored faces, hair, and skin of the women over the incommunicative shadows of the men. Viewed in this manner, the fragment is apowerful image in and of itself, and certainly capable of independent presentation, whether seen in formal or psychological terms. It would n o t bedifficult to imagine Lautrec pre‑ senting it in this fashion asavariation on similar scenes by Degas, whom he admired, aswell ason his o w n At the Moulin de la Galette of 1889. Although the severed composition would have been

effective, and therefore testifies to the artist’s sensitivity to composition, it lacks the internal visual logic found in other Lautrec images, whether paintings or prints. Following, in particular, the example of Degas in crea‑

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ting works containing unorthodox viewpoints and fre‑ quently cutting figures with the frame as if it were a physical limit imposed on the field of vision, Lautrec placed great emphasis on establishing the position from which ascene takes on its perspectival coherence. This is mo s t noticeable in his lithographs, whose compositions tend to bebolder than those of his paintings. His con‑ cern for naturalistic vantage point and perspective seems to affirm allusions to volume and space, which his flat application of color seems to negate; it is in their tension that Lautrec achieved pictorial unity. Asalready pointed ou t , in the fragmented painting the viewer/painter would have to beimmediately behind and slightly above Jane Avril. If one assumes this vantage point, one should also belooking downward o n t o her companions. How‑ ever, this is n o t the case at all. Instead, the viewer is at about the same height as the profile face of Maurice Guibert, able to see the undersides of the hat brims of La Goulue, Dujardin, and Sescau. The viewer m u s t also move his eyes upward to gaze at the four background figures. It becomes apparent to the viewer, in trying to define where heis in relationship to the table group, that he is, in fact, somewhere to the right of the group, o u t of the rectangular space of A Ykhle ut the Moulin Rouge and directly at eye level with May Milton. The entire scene is plotted soasto appear asif the viewer had just encountered her yellow‐green apparition and only then sees to the left the table group and the others in the Moulin Rouge, with its green walls, windows, and ex‑ panses of mirrors. May Milton is more, then, than a necessary component of the composition; she is the very fulcrum around which the entire composition was con‑ ceived. She could n o t have been added in alater rework‑ ing of the painting; without her, the painting of Lautrec and his friends in the Moulin Rouge lacks any focus. It should also be apparent that, with May Milton as an integral part of the original painting, it could n o t have been created prior to 1894 or 1895, when the artist m e t her. While it is n o t possible to document that it was n o t

Toulouse‐Lautrec who c u t down the painting, it is cer‑ tainly unlikely. Had hedone so, surely hewould have granted the fragment greater unity and logic. The 1902 photograph, when compared to the painting asit is t o ‑ day, does show some alteration, but all of it is concen‑ trated on erasing the presence of May Milton, n o t on reshaping the composition sothat it gains independence without her. Her right sleeve, which would have re‑ mained in the rectangle’s lower right corner, m u s t have been overpainted with the ocher of the floor and with lines suggesting floorboards. Part of Guibert’s coat may also have been touched up in aneffort to blend the new paint of the alterations with the old, something that may

Rediscovering Lautrec

have caused the changes in jane Avril’s bentwood chair that are apparent in the photograph, although the latter may be touch‐ups on the photograph for the sake of clarification. Since traces of these changes are n o t discernible in the

painting today, they m u s t have been made in amanner that would have allowed them to beundone later on. It is possible that an easily soluble medium was used, or that the pigments used to cover what remained of May Miltonwere applied over acoa t of varnish. These would be the techniques less of an artist altering his own work than of a res to re r who had been instructed to make ad‑ justments in such a way that the painting could be re ‑ stored to its original state. Thus, Joyant, rather than Lautrec, comes to mind asinstigator of the alterations. Had the removal of MayMilton taken place by Lautrec’s hand, it would have been for unknownpersonal reasons, asformer lovers might edit o u t the figure of a rejected, or rejecting, love from aphotograph. ByMay 1898, such exorcising of May Milton from his oeuvre had n o t yet taken place, since Lautrec included her portrait in Goupil’s exhibition of his work in London. Shortly thereafter, in January 1899, he was confined for detox‑ ification. During the t w o years remaining to him, he developed a painting style quite unlike that of At the MoulinRouge. There is no evidence of this later mode in the corrections visible in the 1902photograph. Again, all this suggests aposthumous change in, and entitling of, Toulouse‐Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge. As long asit remained in the artist’s possession, MayMiltonwas very much a part of the painting. Wecan safely conclude, therefore, that At the Moulin

Rouge was c u t apart after the painter’s death on Sep‑ tember 9, 1901, and certainly prior to publication of A Ykhle at the Moulin Rouge in the April 1902 issue of Le Figure Illustré. Similarly, the cutting and restretching mus t have taken place before the opening of the Salon des Indépendants on March 29, 1902. The alteration of the painting can bemore closely dated to the weeks just after Joyant received the painting in the group of works deeded to him by the artist’s father. He himself provided evidence suggesting this. In his book, Joyant described the painting asbeing signed by the artist with his mono‑ gram at the lower left of the canvas.” There is no such signature today, however; instead, what we see is the small red cachet of the artist’s encircled monogram which Joyant himself applied as executor of the estate in 1902. Apparently never intending to exhibit i t , Lautrec had no reason to sign the painting, and it was left to Joyant to do after it came into his purview. Had the canvas already been divided at that time, the cachet would have been placed o n t o the rectangular fragment containing the seated figures at table. Instead, on the

125

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lower left corner of the L~shaped segment that is May Milton’s realm, the cachet was stenciled prior to the c u t ‑ ting down of the canvas. It is one more factor affirming that At the M oulirz Rouge was slit into separate sections under Joyant’s immediate direction. Why would the man who prided himselfonbeing one

of Lautrec’s staunchest defenders, closest friends, first dealer, and the major authority on his a r t and life have done this to awork of ar t he was assigned to preserve? His very emotional involvement with the a r t and creator maywell be the reason. MayMiltonwas, after all, some‑ one whose brief stay in Paris seems to have left behind it a trail of animosity among those of Lautrec’s acquain‑ tances who chose to write about her. The desire to eradi‑ cate her presence in the work of Lautrec m u s t have been strong. Popular and influential, the poster in which she figured could hardly be destroyed, n o r could the por‑ trait in a private collection or on display at the rival gallery of Durand‐Ruel be refuted. But the ma t t e r was different in apaintingnever seen before and in which her image seemed peripheral and easily removable from the main body of the picture. Even after hehad restored the figure of May Milton to the canvas, Joyant continued denying her presence by identifyingher as“Mlle. Nelly C.” The effect of denying May Milton her identity was conceptually similar to , although certainly less drastic than, removing her figure from the painting. To the complex of personalmotivations m u s t beadded

the commercial ones of anart‐gallery director. The re‑ duction of the canvas did n o t deprive it of commercial value and, in fact, may even have enhanced it. In the climate of repeated charges against Lautrec of insanity, depravity, alcoholism, and general signs of degeneration, the garishly green, yellow, andwhite face of May Milton was hardly a ready argument for sanity of vision mea‑ sured in naturalistic terms. During this period, it was precisely the green faces or blue trees made by other artists that were constantly cited assymptomatic of their mental aberration.34 Even if May Milton’s bizarre com ‑ plexion derived from a naturalistic rendering of the effects of stagelighting, her discolored, masklike face could certainly have been detrimental to the image of a healthy Lautrec fostered by Manzi‐Joyant, and would have been aliability in their inventory. Skillful cu ts and minimal reconstructive painting were ready and viable solutions of the gallery for removing the undesirable aspects of one of its major holdings. If it can be established that At the Moulin Rouge was

taken apart during the early months of 1902, after it had entered the inventory of the Galerie Manzi-Joyant, it is less certain precisely when Joyant and Manzi chose to resur rec t the original composition. Esswein’s description of the smaller painting was published in 1909, sur ‑ 126

prisingly without an illustration in an otherwise well‑ illustrated book that made ready use of Manzi-Joyant holdings. Perhaps, by that time, the t w o parts of the painting were being reunited o n t o the lining canvas that now supports them. The restorationof the original com‑ positionwas certainly completed by the ]une 1914 re t r o ‑ spective exhibition sponsored by Manzi-Joyant. At the Moulin Rouge, then owned by Manzi, appeared in the catalogue listing accompanied by the description, “Por‑ traits of M. Henri deToulouse-Lautrec, of Dr. Tapié de Céleyran, Sescau, Maurice Guibert, La Macarona, La Goulue, etc.” The “etc.” may indicate that May Milton had been reunited with her friends. But again, unfor‑ tunately, the painting was n o t illustrated. A photograph of At the Moulin Rouge in its restored state, looking like it does today, did appear t w o months later, however, asa full‐page plate accompanying a lengthy laudatory review of the exhibition in the August 1914 issue of the prestigious, aesthetically conservative art-historical pe‑ riodical, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.35Written by Gus‑ tave Geffroy, the article announced the ready assimila‑ tion of May Milton’s gaudy face into an a r t establishment whose sensibilities were beingaccosted by yet more offensive visages portrayed by Fauvists, Cubists, and Futurists asmodern artists increasingly re‑ jected the essentially mimetic values that Lautrec’s a r t continued to maintain. The restored painting nonetheless fails to reconstruct

fully the composition that Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec painted during the 1890s. David Kolch’s analysis of the canvas also revealed that several portions of the canvas onwhich the image was created are missing, havingbeen removed in the course of the changes of 1902. Originally, At the Moulin Rouge may have been larger in one or both directions. At least the upper edge of the painting shows possible signs of havingbeen trimmed, sothat the precise dimensions of Lautrec’s original painting can no longer be determined. It is likely, however, that little more than the inch required for atacking margin would have been c u t from the edges. However, within the cur‑ r en t field of the painting, portions of canvas are absent as well: roughly an inch where the lower arm of the L‑ shaped segment and the bottom of the rectangular frag‑ me n t are joined; and asmaller, erratically sized amoun t where the t w o pieces meet vertically (see fig. 11). The gaps, again, are the results of the painting’s dismember‑ ing when a tacking margin was created around the rec‑ tangular portion seen in the 1902 photograph asit was attached to a stretcher. The process of folding and a t ‑ taching naturally would have damaged much of the pe‑ rimeter of this segment, and the areas that suffered the mo s t loss m u s t have been cu t away when the t w o frag‑ ments were rejoined. Parts of the right‐hand, vertical

R L

, M M ' , , , ; , . T , . T M M - - .

T M M ' . A "E V 6" M M , , . T ' A N , A M R , , . T . A M M ' . I , A N - - , L ' . A , - - , , J A ' .

T A M R L , M M , . T , , . T - . T . ,

L ' 1890 . L , - . D 1880 , - , 1890 1894, .36 T - 6, , L - , - .37 L ' - - , - , I - , . P , . L , - , . L - A M R , , . V - , .

A A M R . A - , ( , , 1894 ), , . T L - , . T .

T M M , . H , L- A I 1935.38 T

M M ' . T - ' , ,

127

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tacking margin, which would have included elements of May Milton’s hair and dress, were retained, the holes patched with plaster, and the repair hidden with paint; but the horizontal tacking margin was simply removed, thereby leaving a space between the t w o segments when they were aligned. To fill in this gap, the t w o canvas parts were deliberately misaligned in the rejoining by shifting the entire rectangular portiondownward aninch in relation to the other section. The resultingdisjuncture ism o s t readily visible immediately above and behind the head of May Milton as the border of the ocher wall paneling and the green-hued doors suddenly lifts with‑ o u t any justification for it in the architectural details of the room. That this has never before been noticed was probably

due to the manipulations the form of May Milton’s odd hat has undergone. As seen in the cover illustration for “Eros Vanné” and in the portrait ofMayMilton, this hat was composed of a tulle bow from which sprouted t w o feathers, or rather the denuded rachis of t w o feathers with all but the tips of their vanes removed soasto result in a form reminiscent of the club antennae common to many beetles. The hat’s Art Nouveau insectile reference is clear in the lithograph and the portrait, but in the reconstructed At the Moulin Rouge it has been lost, as the t w o antennae were incorrectly restored and joined by other, more bulbous or flowerlike forms. These were added by the restorer to disguise the disjuncture of the rejoinedcanvas segments and to cover parts of the repair process. Also altered to suit the incorrect alignment was the profile of May Milton’s hair and the pattern of her collar. In their original form andposition, their swirling lines directly joined with the similarly shaped silhouettes of the seated and standing figures so that anArt Nou‑ veau-like linear pattern moved gracefully through the entire composition, much as in Lautrec’s lithographs. And, similarly disrupted were the lines of the floor‑ boards that originally formed relatively accurate per‑ spective patterns, asdid the balustrade on the left, which now has asudden bulge near the area ofJane Avril’s chair to cover up the misalignment. The removal of portions of canvas and the misaligned

joining of the parts of At the Moulin Rouge disturbed the relaxed and undulating linear unity Lautrec had given his composition, sothat MayMilton now intrudes more harshly than before, her form angularly juxtaposed to the remainder of the work. This is also due, in part, to the contrast of the garish coloration of her face to the moremuted tones dominant elsewhere. This is probably the result of attempts to restore andpreserve the co n t r o ‑ versial portion of the painting. The painting today has at least one layer of glazing and probably more. While this serves to unify and protect the paint surface, the glazing

Rediscovering Lautrec

or varnishing of paintings was contrary to Lautrec’s practice during the 18905. Likemany other artists of the time, heexperimented with various techniques and ma‑ terials in his painting and also with the resulting surface effects. During the late 18803, hebegan to show aprefer‑ ence for painting with oils thinned with turpentine and sometimes mixed with gouache or crayon on cardboard and, from 1890 to 1894, apparently ceased to use canvas almost totally.36 The choice of a nondurable and non ‑ noble cardboard material on which to represent scenes of café, theater, and brothel life surely appealed to Lautrec at a time when many of his friends and support‑ ers openly espoused political anarchism, with its abso‑ lute rejection of the existing social order and values.” Whether or n o t Lautrec’s cardboard paintings were ma~ terial manifestations of asocio‐anarchist advocacy, with their turpentine-dispersed pigments, they presented a surface quality quite unlike the oily and viscous surfaces of traditional oil paintings or those of the Impres‑ sionists, especially after varnishing. Paint and turpentine on cardboard creates amore m a t surface, in vogue at the time. Lautrec developed a technique in which sheets of thin, subtly nuanced color arranged in veil-like, flatly rendered planes defined his figures. Like the linear pat‑ te rns of the original At the Moulin Rouge, the flat, planar color layers have aneffect closely resembling that of his lithographs. Varnish on such asurface would de‑ stroy the intendedeffect, and in the process at least some of the colors would also be altered. All this has happened to At the Moulin Rouge. Al‑

though painted on canvas, n o t cardboard (which is, we should note here, material evidence that the paintingwas created in 1894 or later), the canvas was primed with gesso tinted to take on the color of cardboard, and this brownish tone serves asthe color base of much of the painting. The paint applied to this ground ismostly the thinned oil paint Lautrec had used on his cardboard paintings and was likewise intended to melt into its sup‑ por t so as to create a soft, m a t surface. The rich yet subtle variations of dark violets and browns that form the coats and dresses of the figures in the painting have also been lost beneath sheets of yellowing glazing. The face of May Milton appears less affected by this

darkening and dulling process than does the remainder of the painting, perhaps because when the rectangular fragment was varnished she escaped that fate. However, the L‐shaped section was certainly varnished when it was reattachedandwhen the paintingwas restoredat the Art Institute in 1935.38 The muted colors of the table group were originally more closely related to the now strong contrast of May Milton’s facial colors. The red‑ dish tones of hair and the whites of the women’s skin, the tablecloths, and the reflected lights acted asconstant

127

FIGURE 11 H A M R ( . 1).

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R L

, , , , , - , . I , M M , . , - . J ' - L , .

I -

L , .39 - , , , - , . M , L . H " ." I , - - G . - , ' . F L , M - . I A M R , - - , - - , . R , - .

L A M R . J ' 1892, , , , , M M L ' 1894 1895. 1894

1896, R M ( . 12)

M L D B "C " ( . 13). P , , A N - A M R . 1894, 1896, L . I A M R 1894 , , 1895.

L ' . B A M R M R 1892, J ' L ' . M M , - - . P 1895, , - , L . I 1892 M R , 1895 . L G . L G - , L .40 P , - L G L , L G ' "M D " M R J A , M G , P , C , L - - A M R - . , A M R L - .

I , - L - ; , . A M R - . J A L D J 1892-93, , 1893 1894. M M , 1895 L , 1894 . L M

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accents within the tonal harmonies of greens, ochers, violets, and browns offered by clothing, floor, bal‑ ustrade, and walls. In that admixture of colors and hues, the limelit face of May Milton alone attracted them all, uniting in its form what is otherwise dispersed through the composition. Thus, she was ascrucial to the colora‑ tion of the painting asto its composition. Joyant’s inter‑ ference with the painting negated the look Lautrec sought to impart to his paintings, alook whose source is the compositional and coloristic practices he developed in his lithographs. In recent studies and exhibitions devoted to Toulouse‑

Lautrec, the preeminence of his lithographs over his paintings has been repeatedly asserted.39 The litho‑ graphs, it is argued, often derive from one or more painted compositional studies, or even finished paint‑ ings, so that the artist m u s t have viewed these aspurely preliminary to the prints and clearly subordinate to them. More likely, Lautrec rejected any such hierarchy ofmedia. His interest in lithography reflectedadesire to extend the meaning and application of a r t outside the traditional limits of the “fine arts.” In being executed on cardboard, the paintings came to participate in the essen‑ tial temporary and disposable n a t u r e of posters or adver‑ tising brochures such ashedesigned for Yvette Guilbert. The technique constituted adenial to painting of its t r a ‑ ditionally noble and elevated position and function by rejecting the physical components assigned to it, so that even the paint itself was thinned to liquid consistency to take on the quality of lithographer’s ink. For Lautrec, paintings and prints devoted to the low life of Montmartre functioned asavisual accusation against the society in which hewas relegated by virtue of his hand‑ icap to the role of eternal child. In At the MoulinRouge, he expanded his repertory of ink and painted cardboard by applying consistently lessons learned in lithog‑ rap y ‐ a manner of drawing and the use of large, flat color a r e a s ‐ t o the medium o f oil paint n o w o n its tradi‑ tional canvas support, butwith a gesso ground tinted the color of cardboard. Rather than being a painting from which lithographs were derived, it is apainting derived from lithographs‐a painting almost disguised as a lithograph. These considerations are useful aswe r e t u r n to the

question of when Lautrec paintedAt the Moulin Rouge. Joyant’s attribution of the painting to 1892, which has been consistently followed until now, no longer can be defended on stylistic grounds, on the use of materials, or iconographically, since May Milton was n o t part of Lautrec’s milieu until 1894 and 1895. Technique also ties the work closely to the manner of other paintings on canvas known to have been created between 1894 and 1896, such asThe Salon in the Rue des Moulins (fig. 12)

Rediscovering Lautrec

or Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in “Chilperic” (fig. 13). Painted on canvas prepared with tinted gesso, these t o o display aconcern for broadplanes of color and thinned veils of pigment, but n o t the flowing Art Nou‑ veau lines of At the Moulin Rouge. The painting was definitely n o t executed before 1894, nor after 1896,when Lautrec assumed astyle of greater sketchiness and loose brushwork. It is mos t likely that At the Moulin Rouge was painted late in 1894 or, more probably, in 1895. This reviseddating gives the image adifferent position

in Lautrec’s life than previously assumed. By grouping At the Moulin Rougewith other MoulinRougepaintings of 1892, Joyant distorted the painting’s position in Lautrec’s career. The effort to extract May Milton may underlie this move, but the commercial virtue of apaint‑ ing capping an already successful suite of paintings pre‑ viously sold to collectors surely m u s t also have been a consideration. Placed back into the milieu of 1895, the painting takes on different, and possibly more signifi‑ cant, connotations for Lautrec and the development of his work. If 1892 represented the renewal of the Moulin Rouge as nOted dancers and singers were hired away from other music halls, by 1895 this energy was fading. La Goulue and others who had brought fame to the locale were leaving or had already gone. La Goulue set o u t to present her belly dances and can-cans at local fairs, and invited Lautrec to provide the exterior of her booth with paintings.40 Possibly, this commercial pro‑ duction of publicity images on canvas for La Goulue reawakened in Lautrec an interest in painting on canvas, while the scenes he executed depicting La Goulue’s “Moorish Dance” and her performance at the Moulin Rouge that was admired byJane Avril, Maurice Guibert, Paul Sescau, Tapié deCéleyran, and Lautrec‐all repre‑ sented in At the Moulin Rouge‐served asinspiration for creating his own private image of a milieu whose dissolutionwas imminent. Thus, At the MoulinRouge is amemorial image that is acomposite of past activity and of prior depictions by Lautrec of the persons participat‑ ing in the scene. Indeed, the practice of utilizing previous composi‑

tions and portions of compositions is one Lautrec fa‑ vored in his lithographs; aswe have said, his painted images and printed derivatives could be separated by years. At the Moulin Rouge demonstrates the same prac‑ tice. The figure of Jane Avril seen from the back relates to the poster of LeDivanjaponais from 1892‐93, aswell asto the t w o oil sketches that more precisely duplicate the pose, both probably from 1893 or 1894. The face of May Milton is an adaptation of her painted portrait, possibly also done in 1895 while Lautrec worked on her poster, but is stylistically related to works of 1894 as well. The face of La Macarona in t u r n derives from

129

FIG E 12 H - L .

M , 1895. O , 111.8 132.8 . A , F , M -L .

FIG E 13 H -

L . M L D B "C ," 1895/96. O ; 145.4 150.2 .

N , M . J H . P : J D.

, N .

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FIGURE 12 Henri de Toulouse‑ Lautrec. The Salon in the Rue des Moulins, 1895. Oi l on canvas, 111.8 X 132.8 cm. Albi, France, Musée Toulouse‐Lautrec.

FIGURE 13 Henri de Toulouse‑ Lautrec. Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in “Cbilperic,” 1895/96. Oi l on canvas; 145.4 x 150.2 cm. New York, collection of Mrs. John

Hay Whitney. Photo: john D. Schiff, New York.

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L

FIG E 14 H -

L . L M J , 1894. -

; 51.8 38.7 . A I C (1954.22).

L ' , F 1894 L F I ( . 14); , . D ' D J . G , , , -L C M ( . 15) .

I 1890, L D 6 M ; A M : D ( . 16), I M , C - . 1890 , 6- . , - , , , - , . ; . I , M M ' , , .

I , M M - L , ( . 16). L , L . - ,

, " " M , I - , D - J F ( - A A , ). L M , A B ' L M , C F I - 1886-89, - I 1890. -

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FIGURE 14 Henri deToulouse‑ Lautrec. La Macarona asajockey,

1894. Oi l and gouache on card‑ board; 51.8 X 38.7 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago (1954.22).

Lautrec’s portrait of her as a jockey, published in the February 1894 issue of Le Figaro Illastré (fig. 14); the cos tume was changed, but the white face covered with rice powder and with heavily colored features remains the same. Dujardin’s characteristic profile reverses that seen in the Divan japonais poster. Sescau and Guibert appear either separately or together in several paintings, any of which might have presented amodelportrait, but photographs t o o might have been used, just asone of Toulouse-Lautrec in the company of his cousin Tapié de Céleyran at the Moulin Rouge (fig. 15) surely was the source of their grouping in the background. In 1890, Lautrec represented many of the members of

his milieu in the painting showing the dancer Valentin le Desossé teaching the quadrille nataraliste to a new dancer at the Moulin Rouge;At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance (fig. 16), exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and then publicly displayed in the foyer of the Moulin Rouge itself, is in many ways the antithesis of the Chi‑ cago picture. The 1890paintingwas apublic one in every sense, depicting the entertainment at the cafe‐concert and dance hall along with the audience that participated vicariously in the energetic spectacle of the dancers. The raucous gaity and movement, the anonymous intermin‑ gling of people seen in that painting cont ras t sharply with the private world of the later work where women and men sit, stand, or saunter silently, without com ‑ munication or focus, in isolation one from the other. They are gathered togetherm a scene of personal and sexual tension in an atmosphere of anxious ennui; both dancers have ceased performing and their male admirers have lost interest. In fact, the powerful motion and focal attraction of May Milton’s figure and face, pushing o u t of the framed limits of the painting, threatens to pull the entire composition off the canvas itself. In this way, May Milton functions in a manner con ‑

trary to figures situated at the periphery of other Lautrec paintings, where they are seen walking into an interior or acting asenframing and stabilizing elements (see fig. 16). Likewise, similar yet different from the group in other Lautrecpaintings are the men and women seated at the table and staring blankly past each other. Uncom‑ municative figures seated and drinking in acafé, with or

Rediscovering Lautrec

without dancers or singers providing entertainment above and behind them, had become avirtual trademark of the “painters of modern life” from Manet, the Im‑ pressionists, and Degas to less adventurous but suc‑ cessful artists such asJean Francois Raffaélli (also cham‑ pioned by Arséne Alexandre, incidentally). Lautrec adopted such scenes ashebegan to explore the world of Montmartre entertainment, first in illustrations for periodicals such asAristide Bruant’s Le Mirliton, or the more popular Courrier Frangais and Paris Illustrée dur‑ ing 1886‐89, and then in paintings exhibited at the Sa‑ lons des Indépendants beginning in 1890. They func‑ tioned essentially asimages that presented ayoung artist with apersona established in an association of style and subject ma t t e r that countered the world of artistic and social propriety with anadopted argot and aposture of

131

. A L " - " M ' , , , H , I , H , . " " " - A ."41 A - , , M G E 6 M . M 1889, , - ,

FIG E 16 H -

L . A M : D , 1890. ; 116.8 152.4 . M

A .

- M - . -L ' M ' - , , - - . I , , - . , - , , - .

A M , . H , , . L M

N ' L B . M , , - - - . , , . B -1890 , M L . A

FIG E 15 -L C M , . 1894. : M.G. D , -L (N , 1971), . 1, . 98.

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perpetual antagonism and cynicism. As Lautrec “de‑ scended” into Montmartre’s music and dance halls, it had become the site of artistic, literary, and musical bohemias advertising themselves under the names of Hydropathes, Incoherents, Hirsutes, and Zutistes. They occupied the Parisian “mountain” asif it were a“venge‑ ful and clamorous citadel from which projectiles [rained] heavily o n t o the pontifs of the boulevards and o n t o the mummies of the Academy.”1Along with poets and a r t ‑ ists came professional entertainers, dancers, and singers to replace the unpaid amateurs or semiprofessionals of the Moulin de la Galette or the Elysée Montmartre. When the Moulin Rouge opened in 1889, many of the m o s t popular performers, previously amateurs or part‑ time dancers, were hired and efforts made to entice the

FIGURE 16 Henri de Toulouse‑ Lautrec. At the Moulin Rouge: The

Dance, 1890. Oi l on canvas; 116.8 X 152.4 cm. Philadelphia Museum

of Art.

bourgeois and upper-class patrons who had mixed with the more plebian inhabitants of Montmartre at the other cafés-concerts. Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting of the dance at the Moulin Rouge and his other images of the dance hall’s entertainment and entertainers publicizedand cele‑ brated n o t so much a vulgar, proletarian world asone that was becoming socially acceptable, a place where bourgeois and aristocrat could experience anti‐bourgeois and anti‐aristocratic plebian entertainment. It was a demimonde straddling professionalism and amateurism, respectability and vulgarity, the upper-middle and lower classes. This was a perfect setting for an aristocratic painter who could share in the world of the entertainers without being part of it, could indulge in alcoholic ex‑ cess without suffering its financial consequences, could paint without needing to sell his ar t , and could adopt the role of commercial lithographer despite his financial in‑ dependence in an existence balanced between reality and amusement .

At the Moulin Rouge represents a private world, n o t a public one. Here, the entertainers and the entertained fuse their existences, at a m o m e n t when they are about to be forced apart. Lautrec would frequent the Moulin Rouge less and less and instead would become part of the more sedate realm of literati and artists associated with Thadée Natanson’s periodical La Revue Blanche. The Montmartre dance halls, t o o , continued their move ‑ m e n t toward respectability and professionalism asinnu‑ merable imitating institutions appeared in Paris and else‑ where to draw away m o r e and more of the audience and performers. The entertainers w e n t on t o u r, collected governmental awards, and signed cont rac ts with the newly fashionable Olympia music hall. By the mid‐18905, the Montmartre Lautrec had celebrated and whose image he had propagated was dying. At the

FIGURE 15 Photograph of Toulouse-Lautrec and Tapié de Céleyran at the Moulin Rouge, 0. 1894. Photo: M.G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York, 1971), vol. 1, p. 98.

M i R ge ee ha e bee ai ed b hi e ia i e hi d, hich had e b aced hi . He c ci e e ed hi "i fe " i ejec i f hi a i c a ic bac g d a d a e , b hi e a ade ib e b hi cia a a d hi c i - i g e ia ce i . E e gi g f he i a e ea f La ec' e ie , A he M i R ge i a de i a i age ha i a i ed hi i ie j a i cea ed e i . J a ' a i a i f La ec' i age de i ed i f i f c i a a d c e f hi a i g a a . The M i R ge a ge f La ec a ace f j , aba d , a d ea ea e i hich La G e da ced he ca i e chah hi e ci c i g e de eg , he i hi ed, he face a a f e e a i . Thi a ificia , e ci i g d f a e a d e e , e

a d a c h ca e a di bi g ha i he ai i g A he M i R ge a d a e aced b a i e e i a d e a a i , b f f bidde a ach e a d bi - e e a a i . The ai i g i he e a ch c e - i he ai ed chah i he , a ic ia e i a e he g f he M i R ge:

O he f Ma I g i d d d ea a d ha . I g i d d g d a d e e, Rede i a d ha e I g i d d a be e f e.42

I i a i age he h f He i de T e-La ec a d c e cia c ce gh de .

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Moulin Rouge seems to have been painted by him to memorialize this world, which had embraced him. He consciously entered this “inferno” in rejection of his aristocratic background and values, but his entry was made possible only by his social status and his continu‑ ing reliance on it. Emerging from the private realm of Lautrec’s memories,At the MoulinRouge is adevotional image that immortalized this milieu just asit ceased to exist. Joyant’s manipulation of Lautrec’s image deprived it of its function asadocument of this passing away. The Moulin Rouge was no longer for Lautrec a place of joy, abandon, and easy pleasure in which La Goulue danced herprovocative chahut while circling on slender legs, her skirts hiked, her face a mask of o ve r t sensuality. This artificial, exciting world of makeup and movemen t , sex

and alcohol came to adisturbing halt in the paintingAt the Moulin Rougeandwas replacedby asilent ennui and separation, by rumors of forbidden attachments and bit‑ t e r separations. The painting is the melancholy coun te r ‑ point to the painted chahuts in other works, apictorial equivalent to the song of the Moulin Rouge:

On the mount of Martyrs I grind down dreams and harmony. I grind down gold and remorse, Redemption and shame I grind down a19etterfuture.“2

It is an image the myth of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and commercial concerns sought to destroy.

133

E

1. F A , .G. D , - ( , 1971), . 2, . 258, . 427. H , D ' : ( .) .

2. J , H - , 1864-1901 ( , 1926-27), . 2, . 133.

3. D ( 1), . 2, . 258, , J ( 2), . 1, . 275. , ' 1902.

4. , 29- 5, 1902. I - , : 1025, ; 1026, E ' ; 1027, ; 1028, - ; 1029, ; 1030, F ; 1031, A - ; 1032, F ; 1033, J A ; 1034, . J ( 2), . 2, . 255, " H. - . . A 50 60 - ." H , , , , . , . 122, .

5. D ( 1), . 2, . 258; J ( 2), . 1, . 275. 1914 G -J 201 ; , E ' H - (1864-1901) ( , 1914), A A , A . 32.

6. D ( 1), F B 1917, . 2038, .

7. D ( 1) J ( 2) - A 1914 ( 5). H , - B ( , 1955), D , . G , J. A 6 - ( B : C - B , 1981 , . 272, . 7). . C , , , ( ) B , A , , , F 1892. I A

, C , I - , B B J 10, 1894. - ,

. A B , - , . A , . , , - , , ' . A , , A , . , , 1894 . B 1894 ' , A .

8. J ( 2), . 1, . 274-75.

9. J G ' 1893 : J A E (D 1 , 417); G (D 1 , 422); G E (D 1 , 423); A : C (D 1 , .428).

10. J ( 2), . 1, . 137-39.

11. I ., . 138. J ' 1914 . E - ... ( 5), . 32.

12. J G C . - , , , . , , " - " ' , . A C , ( , 1913) , ( , 1921). .

13. J ( 2), . 1, . 139.

14. " . C." C , - : , . ., A I C (1979), . 187, 247.

15. J ( 2), . 1, . 288; D ( 1), . 3, . 348, .572.

16. J ( 2), . 1, . 198.

17. C , ... ( 12), . 154-55.

18. " , 6 / 6; / /E E 6!" D , "E " ( , 1894), . .

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NO T E S 1. For the exhibition history of At the Moulin Rouge, see M.G. Dortu, Toulouse‐Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York, 1971), vol. 2, p. 258, entry for painting no. 427. Hereafter, all paintings by Lautrec will be identified according to Dortu’s numbering: (P.) and the number. 2. Maurice joyant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864‐1901 (Paris, 1926-27), vol. 2, p. 133. 3. Dortu (note 1), vol. 2, p. 258, identified Manzi asthe first owner, asdid Joyant (note 2), vol. 1,p. 275. Neither indicated the date of acquisition, but evidence to be discussed later in this article identifies the painting aspart of Lautrec’s estate in 1902. 4. Paris, March 29‐May 5, 1902. It was n o t listed in the cata‑ logue, which includes the following works by Lautrec: 1025, Scene detheatre; 1026, Etude d’acrohate; 1027, Nu; 1028, Por‑ trait; 1029, Portrait; 1030, Femme enpeignoir; 1031, Les Am‑ hassadeurs; 1032, Fernme en clown; 1033, jeanne [sic] Avril; 1034, Lithographies. Joyant (note 2), vol. 2, p. 255, noted that at the Salon was a “retrospective of H. deToulouse-Lautrec. The catalogue does n o t contain titles. About 50 to 60 num ‑ bers.” However, asseen here, the catalogue did contain titles, but of far fewer than fifty to sixty works, and it is likely that this inventory of paintings was expanded to include newly available paintings. See text , p. 122, for discussion of this. 5. Dortu (note 1), vol. 2, p. 258;]oyant (note2), vol. 1,p. 275. The 1914 exhibition at the Galerie Manzi‐Joyant consisted of 201 works; the catalogue, Exposition retrospective de l’oeuvre deHenri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864‐1901) (Paris, 1914), with an introduction by Arséne Alexandre, listed At the Moulin Rouge asno . 32. 6. Dortu (note 1), mentioned an exhibition of French a r t in Barcelona in 1917, with the painting cited asno. 2038, but it has n o t been possible to confirm this exhibition. 7. Neither Dortu (note 1)n o rJoyant (note 2) identifiedexhibi‑ tions of At the MoulinRouge prior to that of 1914 (see no t e 5). However, in Toulouse-Lautrec en Belgique (Paris, 1955), Dortu, M. Grillard, andJ. Adhémar suggested that the paint‑ ing was included at the ninth Les Vingt exhibition under the title Nocturne (see LesXX Bruxelles: Catalogue des dix exposi‑ tions annuelles [Brussels, 1981], p. 272, no. 7). No evidence for this bizarre identification is provided. Currently, we do n o t knowwhat painting, drawing, or lithograph(the catalogue fails to distinguish among them) may have been entitled Nocturne in Brussels, but it was certainly n o t At the Moulin Rouge, since, asthis article will demonstrate, the painting did n o t yet exist in February 1892. In matchingAt the Moulin Rouge with the titles of Lautrec

paintings in exhibitions during his lifetime, the sole possible identification is with Un Coin du Moulin Rouge, exhibited at the seventh exhibition of Peintres Impressionistes et Sym‑ bolistes, which opened at Le Barc de Boutteville in Paris on July 10, 1894. The exhibition has previously n o t been consid‑ ered in the literature on Lautrec, sono effort to identify this

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painting has beenmade. As with the Brussels Nocturne, how‑ ever, a precise identification is currently n o t possible. One cannot deny unequivocably that At the Moulin Rouge was this painting,but it is highly unlikely.Stylistic, technical,and icon‑ ographic reasons for this will be considered in the course of this article, but here it should benoted that the title is n o t one that fits the painting well, whereas other paintings of the time could more readily fit the title’s description. Also, all other paintings exhibited by Lautrec at this time bear his signature, while At the Moulin Rouge does not , displaying only the stamp of his estate. The proof is circumstantial, n o t absolute, but argues strongly that the paintingwas n o t exhibited either in 1894 or earlier. Between 1894 and Lautrec’s death, no exhibited work can be identified with At the Moulin Rouge. 8. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, pp. 274‐75. 9. The suite of four Moulin Rouge paintings exhibited by Joyant at Goupil’s in 1893 can be identified asfollows: jane Avril Entering the Moulin Rouge (Dortu [note 1], R417); La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (Dortu [note 1], R422); La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge (Dortu [note 1], R423);At the Moulin Rouge: The Waltzing Couple (Dortu [note 1], P428). 10. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, pp. 137‐39. 11. Ibid., p. 138. Joyant had already similarly described the painting’s subjects in his 1914 exhibition catalogue. See Exposi‑ tion retrospective . . . (note 5), no . 32. 12. Muchof what weknow concerning the dancers and singers of Montmartre is due to joyant and other acquaintances of Lautrec such asGustave Cocquiot. One of the major prob‑ lems, however, with ou r knowledgeof Lautrec andhismilieu is ou r dependence on such reminiscences, which tend to be highly subjective with anemphasis on colorful anecdote rather than consistent biography. Too frequently, aswell, these “rem‑ iniscences” failed to be published until a half century after Lautrec’s death, so that their reliability can be questioned. Among the first to write such astudy of Lautrec and his work was Cocquiot, in Lautrec (Paris, 1913) and its revised version, Lautrec ou quinze ans demoeurs parisiennes (Paris, 1921). The context in which this type of approach to Lautrec developed is discussed later in this article. 13. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, p. 139. 14. The identification of “Mlle. Nelly C.” asMay Milton was first made by Charles Stuckey and Naomi Maurer, Toulouse‑ Lautrec: Paintings, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago (1979), pp. 187, 247. 15. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, p. 288; Dortu (note 1), vol. 3, p. 348, R572. 16. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, p. 198. 17. Cocquiot, Lautrecouquinze ans. . . (note 12), pp. 154‐55. 18. “Tres vieux, malgré mes vingt ans/Usé blasé; car je suis né/Sur un lit de roses fanées/Et je suis un Eros vanné!” Maurice Donnay, “Eros Vanne ” (Paris, 1894), n.pag. See also

- : C ( , 1985), . 1, . 31. 19. 1.

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the discussion of this poembyWolfgangWittrock in Toulouse‑ Lautrec: The Complete Prints (London, 1985), vol. 1, p. 31. 19. See no te 1 . 20. Douglas Cooper, Henri deToulouse-Lautrec (New York, 1956), p. 96. 21. Gale B. Murray, review of M.G. Dortu’s Toulouse‐Lautrec etson oeuvre (note 1), in TheArt Bulletin 58, 1(Mar. 1978), pp. 179‐82. 22. Stuckey and Maurer (note 14), p. 187. 23. David Kolch’s memo to Reinhold Heller, Jan. 23, 1986, summarizes the findings. 24. See no te 3 . 25. As cited by Joyant (note 2), vol. 2, pp. 129‐30. 26. The first of several French editions of Nordau’s book was published in Paris in 1894 asDégenerescence. 27. Arsene Alexandre, “Une Guérison,” Le Figaro (Mar. 30, 1899), ascited by Joyant (note 2), vol. 2, p. 124. 28. Julius Elias, “Henri deToulouse‐Lautrec,” DieNation 19, 51 (Sept. 21, 1901), pp. 809‐901. Also compare Arséne Alex‑ andre, “Toulouse‐Lautrec,” Le Figaro Illustré 20, 145 (April 1902), p. 2: “ I t is possible, in Paris, to beat once acélehre and unknown. Henri deToulouse-Lautrec has become one of the mo s t striking examples of this misconception between public opinion and the actual person.” 29. Gustave Geffroy, “Henri deToulouse-Lautrec (1894‐1901),” Gazette des Beaux~Arts, ser. 4, 12(Aug. 1914), p. 89. 30. Erich Klossowski, Die Maler von Montmartre, vol. 15of Die Kunst, ed. R. Muther (Berlin, 1903), p. 52. 31. Elias (note 28), p. 901. 32. Hermann Esswein and AW. Heymel, Toulouse‐Lautrec, vol. 3 of Moderne Illustratoren (Munich, 1909), p. 36. 33. Joyant (note 2), vol. 2, p. 250. 34. Compare EdvardMunch’s complaint of 1891: “[People] do n o t believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or aface isblue or green, they are sure that is insanity.”

Rediscovering Lautrec

Cited in Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work (Chi‑ cago, 1984), p. 65. 35. Geffroy (note 29), between pp. 100 and 101. 36. Joyant (note2), vol. 2, p. 66, was surely mistaken in dating Lautrec’s interest in the technique to anexhibition of paintings by Raffaélli in 1890, since his use of the turpentine‐thinned oil paint on cardboard appears at least asearly ashis studies for the illustrations of the essay “L’Eté aParis” by EmileMichelet, published in Paris Illustrée, July 7, 1888, pp. 426‐27. The following paintings oncanvas, traditionally dated to the

years of 1893 and 1894, should beattributed to different years, either earlier or later, when the stylistic characteristics and techniques they display appear in other works by Lautrec: MonsieurBoileau (Dortu [note 1], P465); The Logeat Mas‑ caron Doré (Dortu [note 1], R470); Man,Woman andDog (Dortu [note 1}, R494); Doctor Tapié deCéleyran in a The‑ aterAisle (Dortu [note 1], R521); In the SalonoftheRuedes Moulins (Dortu [note 1], 17.559); In the Salon oftheRue des Moulins (Dortu [note 1], P560).

The fact that they correspond to lithographic compositions or biographic events of the years 1893‐94 does n o t preclude their having been painted earlier or later. In fact, given Lautrec’s habits, it is likely that the dates of paintings do n o t correspond to such external factors at all. 37. Among critics praising Lautrec’s work and also advocating the principles of anarchism were Arséne Alexandre and Gus‑ tave Geffroy. See John Rewald, Post‐Impressionism: From van Gogh to Gauguin, 3d ed. (New York, 1978), p. 141. 38. Portions of the painting had lost paint and were blistering, particularly the face of Sescau, which was heavily retouched. (As noted in the files of the Department of Conservation, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1935.) 39. See particularly Wittrock (note 18). 40. Joyant (note 2), vol. 1, pp. 84‐86. 41. Michel Herbert, La Chanson a Montmartre (Paris, 1967), p. 65. 42. Maurice Boukay, “Le Moulin Rouge,” ascited by Klos‑ sowski (note 30), p. 49: “Sur la montagne des Martyrs/Je mouds le réve et l’harmonie/Je mouds l’or et les repentirs/Le rachat et l’ignominie/Je mouds un avenir meilleur.”

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