Toulouse-Lautrec: BLINK

 

LAUTREC GIFS: Now it's getting REALLY strange!

When I decided to look up Lautrec gifs (and somehow, I think the Little Lothario might have liked this strange, primitive form of animation), most of them were pretty terrible, and I didn't feel like trying to make any of my own. But I managed to winnow out a few, including this high-kicking one which is actually pretty well-animated, especially for a gif.

The painting-come-to-life thing is kind of cornball, but it gives a vivid impression of the way  Lautrec captured motion, mid-kick  or even mid-sentence, if not mid-breath. Some of his portraits actually do seem to be speaking to you. His photographic mind could convey far more dynamic energy than any still photography could. The fact no one knows how he did this is, I suppose, his little secret. 

This one is pretty snazzy and jazzy. Though I think it's from the Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge, which I detested, it still gets across the excitement of the times, the neon flashes long before neon even existed. 

And oh my goodness, I LOVE this one, a tiny excerpt from  the GOOD Moulin Rouge, the one I rhapsodized about in a former post. The more I look at Jose Ferrer in this role, the more I see our beloved Toulouse. Here one of his fancy ladies is trying to get his attention, but he's too absorbed in sketching those other ladies as they fling their  legs up in the air. This image of a little man in the corner drawing furiously on a napkin is thought to be too cornball to be believable, but he actually did this. Not that he took tablecloths home with him (but think how much one of those tablecloths would be worth now!), but the quick deft sketches froze the image in his mind, so that he could  go back to his studio and bring those wispy lines to life. 

And such life. 

NOW I know what's on his head!

 

But I have even less idea what it means! This is one of the many costumes Lautrec liked to don for photographs. He never smiles, which is sort of disappointing, but he may have been self-conscious about his teeth. Like so many of the great artistes of his time, he had syphilis (and that includes Beethoven and Van Gogh, among others), which of course was untreatable. But one of the things the disease does is rot your teeth. I'm sorry to be such a bearer of bad news, but it's true. The Julia Frey bio I'm slogging through (and yes, it IS a hard slog in places, being almost more detailed than you would ever want) presents him as whole as she can, the bright and the dark, including his sexual escapades with prostitutes and the resulting incurable disease. 

He's in some sort of "Oriental" getup, perhaps supposed to be Japanese (which was all the rage with the artistes of the time, including Van Gogh), but why is he holding that creepy-looking doll? The fan seems to indicate orientalisme, if that's what it's called. But I still don't know what that thing on his head is supposed to signify. It  looks phallic (and no other artist ever crammed so many phallic symbols into his work), and oddly like someone sticking their tongue out, or perhaps raising a middle finger. I'm not sure if that particular hand-gesture existed back then. 

In other famous Lautrec poses, he looks cross-eyed, and in some he is plainly in drag. Then there is the most notorious photo of all (or should I say, series of photos, which may have been meant to be put together Muybridge-style to make a primitive animation), where he is taking  a dump on the beach. No, I won't subject you to THAT one!

 But, I have discovered a new trove of Lautrec images on Microsoft Bing. No one uses Microsoft Bing, and I barely knew it existed until I wanted to look up Monmon Cats and found a trove of them there. Really, it's a much better setup than the Google images which have completely overtaken anything else. 

I could get even MORE lost in Lautrec at this rate. Whether it's good for me or not remains to be seen. These obsessions were what Lautrec liked to call furias, passions that took on the intensity of rage - "all the rage", as the saying goes. 

I have furias too, but they never make me world-famous, or cause anyone to even look at my work.  I was amused to hear that the Lautrec family were Anglophiles, meaning - for some weird reason - they loved all things English. It's partly why Lautrec dressed that way. Why? I still haven't figured it out. The dry dullness of the British, preferred to the poetic, exotic French?

 But between his broken English and my fractured French, we might have been able to carry on some kind of conversation.

Afterthought: I came across this rather sad photo of Henri while in his cups, or passed out. 

Toulouse! Toulouse! Even More Lost in Lautrec

 

Or maybe I'm just lost. My only consolation, these days, is how I can still lose myself in the creative process, whether anyone else sees it or not - which they likely won't. 

 But I LOVE this poster! It's an illustration  for that series Waldemar did (I won't even try to spell his last name), which I had mixed feelings about. He seemed to be giving Henri the once-over, and surely he deserved better than that. Besides, he hated Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge, making me wonder if he ever actually watched it.

One of my many favorite photo portraits of Henri. He always wears such an enigmatic expression  and never smiles, though this clashes with everything I'm reading about his hysterical nocturnal revels and the way he loved to roll around with all those women he so accurately portrayed. Here he looks serious, as if striking a pose, and no doubt this is one of his many costumes (what's that thing on his head??). But there is also something tragic in his eyes. Or is it the alcohol? No one knows better than I what it can do to a soul, the corrosive effects of what is supposed to be a pleasure.

This painting has the strange title of Poudre de Riz (Rice Powder), so named after the chalky mask this woman is forced to wear to attract customers. Though the woman is obviously young, not much more than  a girl, there is nothing young about her facial expression, the tough, jaded look that has so much vulnerability and sorrow behind it. No one starts off in life planning to be a prostitute. nor did  Henri decide to be a dwarf and an alcoholic. One must make the best of it, mon cheri.

I laughed out loud when I realized that this is a portrait of Oscar Wilde! Yes, he has captured the man, though in the most cartoonish way possible. The dissipated look with the drooping eyes, the bee-stung lips, the massive body in powder-blue velvet. . . yes, that's Oscar, all right. The two knew each other, and no doubt Henri realized that Wilde was yet another stigmatized soul who would pay dearly just for being himself.

I  LOVE finding more candid shots of Henri! This one is a treasure. Think of  being the anonymous, scruffy-looking character sitting on the park bench next to one of the greatest geniuses of the art world. Wonder what they're saying to each other? Is it happy hour yet? Is it wine o'clock? At any rate, it was always happy hour chez Lautrec. Though I refuse to believe the man was ever happy.

I love how this captures the hard work, sweat and exhaustion behind the most delicate ballet performances. She has plopped down for a second, huffing anf puffing, probably craving a cigarette or a drink, or both. But all the audience ever sees is the delicate illusion. Lautrec was never satisfied with that. As usual, the image seems to have been captured in mid-breath, so you can practically hear her speaking. You are there - always, but it's not always comfortable.

I don't even know who  this  is, but it's an example of why some people loathed his art. They were afraid they'd show up in it somewhere. The woman in the background seems to be someone I knew once, or saw in a dream, or a nightmare - or did I just hear her voice? Lautrec was one of the first artists to paint artificial light, the glaring electric lamps and spotlights in the cabarets making every color look garish, with a gloom in the background in  which things seem to be crouched and coiled.

I love the brothel paintings, the way he portrays tenderness and affection between women who must be tough and hard-boiled to survive their lives. It has been said that these are the only works in which Lautrec shows human beings displaying any tenderness to each other. But it also reveals that there is a world of women which is absolutely NOT dependent on the favors of men. Did Lautrec feel shut out of this world, or did his art provide him with a magic key?

I don't know who this is either, but she is electrifying! The face, the eyes - I  don't know, I can't get out of this thing I've fallen into, this tub of love, this gay Purr-ee that I now know was anything but gay, except maybe in the sexual sense. How can mere paint bring someone alive like this? And why can't I do it? Stick to what you know. Keep writing, even if it kills you. Even if NO ONE is listening and no one even knows you are there. Which is probably true. Everyone noticed Henri, and rightly so, even though he flamed out well before the age of 40. But can you imagine Lautrec old? Or anything else other than what he was - a total original?

Toulouse-Lautrec: zoom in

 

Zoom in, zoom out. Of course nothing like this could be accomplished in the era in which this was painted. But perhaps with our painterly eye (borrowed, of course, because we really don't have one), we can see it, the way we're sucked in, drawn in by the vacuum of her eyes (as Dylan would put it), so that we perceive what is truly at the heart of this painting.

The first thing I noticed were those fierce, angry eyes, dark-ringed, with arched, almost Satanic eyebrows and a curving mouth that seems almost an inversion of the brows. This was a tough, harsh lady of the night (and it might even be La Goulue, the Glutton, though I haven't researched it enough to know for sure). 

Then as you zoom in, you see more. In the head-and-shoulders shot, she suddenly looks different, more elegant, even graceful. The white skin contrasted with the black ruff is startling. The tendrils of her hair, the delicate feathers surrounding her neck, somehow bring out another quality altogether. She is not so armor-plated now, and the fierce, angry eyes seem just a bit sadder. She is tired, perhaps hung over, but needs to get it together for one more night of business.

Then when her face fills the frame, we see the vulnerability. She is weary under the hard mask, that mask which Toulouse has stripped away, ruthlessly, yet somehow compassionately. Softened, she looks almost embarrassed, as if she really would rather be somewhere else - or just maybe, someone else. You can also see a younger version of herself, a softer face, a little girl who went the wrong  way and now is lost.

And then in the final shot, you can see the despair, the grief, the trapped feeling. Though the upward pencil-strokes of her brows and lower lids are more masklike than before, the ruse has become transparent through Lautrec's magic x-ray. She is jaded, exhausted, but also - afraid? Yes, it's there somehow, impossible, a multilayered effect which only a genius could accomplish. Her right eye stares at us, a glazed bullseye, but the left eye  looks as if she is ready to cry. The hard line of her brow is parallel to the drawn-on half-circle which almost looks like a black eye.

We were never meant to see it like this, but if you flip it over, the eyes look terrified, like someone who is about to scream in horror. It's ghoulish, but brilliant, like a clown burning in hell. Is this somehow there even though it's not there, unseeable except through an artificial trick, a zooming in which just reveals more and more with every shot?

 Quelle horreure!

AFTERNOTE. This isn't La Goulue, not specifically anyway, though he may have had her pose for it. It's called Woman in Black Boa, and in the first shot her long, thick feather boa gives her a shaggy, animalistic look, as if she has fur. The pointed, straight-down black strokes give the whole painting a downward pull, and look kind of like furious rain on a dark night. There is a curious circular stroke around her right arm, as if she has just brought her hand sharply down, or perhaps whirled around to face us, and not very happily: "What do you want?"  Lautrec captured that element of surprise like nobody else. 

Lautrec, Lautrec - I know you too well

  

One of my favorite images of Lautrec. Labelled as a "trick photo", I actually think he was magical enough to split himself in two and portray himself. the Two Henris. both spectator and subject. 

I love the intent way he studies himself, pencil poised, and the slightly aw-shucks fake modesty of his subject. probably imitating every falsely coy nude model he ever paid to pose. As usual, his face is full of elegance and sly wit, but  still, essentially, unreadable.

What's coming across in the Julia Frey bio is his humor, which has been downplayed in favor of the tortured artist in just about every book, movie or bio I've ever seen. Of course he suffered - Frey does say his close friends felt they were helplessly watching as he drank himself to death. unable to do anything to stop him. 

He was in constant physical pain from the bone disease that caused his legs to crumble, and the host of other internal ailments brought on by generations of inbreeding (the noble Toulouse-Lautrec family tree twisted inward rather than branching out, kind of like the Hapsburgs), and the only way he ever found to cope with the pain was to drink. And that's not even to mention the psychic pain of knowing that he was a constant disappointment to his snobbish family, who didn't have to hustle artwork (and such artwork!) to make a living. 

So he WAS two Lautrecs, at least - the wealthy aristocrat, who never needed to work and who only visited those dives as a form of slightly contemptuous recreation, and the almost skinless artist melding into those heartbreaking brothel scenes, becoming one with the cabaret acts (the little man in the corner scribbling on a napkin, which is actualy what he did, not just something in the movie), stripping off the masks, holding up what seems like an actual camera lens to capture the swish of skirts and the bloodthirsty screams of the dancers as they fell violently into a row of splits.

I'm not trying to make this "good", in fact I can barely write it at all, and though I have posted the last few entries on Facebook, I  really don't know why. No one reads this blog any more and I know it, so why do I even do it? And I am even more certain that nobody bothers with my Facebook entries, except for the odd one that is utterly trivial. It says more about them than me, and I know it, but it still hurts. Has this all been in vain?

I  suppose I do this as a distraction. The writing game has revealed itself to be even more mercenary and heartless than I thought. Everybody's hustling. Everything is for sale. If it's no sale, you don't exist any more, as it is almost entirely a popularity contest, even worse than the living hell I went through in high school.

And I've had enough of that.  

I don't know what the future will bring, and maybe it's nothing  -  I am contemplating, literally, not existing any more. Oh, I want to be optimistic, but I'm not. Like Henri, I know my time is  short and  growing shorter (and oh, those awful puns  - but I still think, with his sardonic wit, he'd appreciate it). And oh yes, with each day we live, all of us, our  tally of days grows shorter and shorter (and why should I become more patient as I  grow older? Wouldn't the opposite make more sense?) 

But who wants to know? As the song says, the game of life is hard to play -  I'm going to lose it anyway. So if writing is communication, I'm not sure I'm communicating at all any more. Henri never needed to worry about selling his work - his magnificent posters were the  kind of advertising no other painter had ever known before, and people tore them off doorways and walls, perhaps knowing they had something of real value. 

But here he is, Lautrec painting Lautrec, as if nobody else notices him, so he must portray himself. 

It could be argued that every  painter paints themselves - just look  at our old buddy Vincent, and the more modern Frida Kahlo - but few were actually able to photograph themselves doing it. Oh, you want a self-portrait? Well, here I am painting myself! Will I get the details right?  No doubt someone will say he does not. The more some people talk, the less they say. But did he give a shit? Yes and no. The bon vivant surface (usually drunk) hid a desperately broken heart which peeps through in some of his photos.

In my Facebook post, I  compared Lautrec to Chaplin's Little Tramp. Though no doubt someone will say it's an absurd comparison and that Chaplin knew nothing about Lautrec, I still think it's a worthy insight. (And I'm glad somebody does, because let's face it, nobody else will care enough to find out.)

They were both portraying little men, marginalized, slightly shabby and down-at-heels, but still somehow elegant, with the bowler hat, the cane, the natty suitcoat which had seen better days. Even the waddly, awkward, ducklike walk. Chaplin was feisty and unquenchable, and though Toulouse could not manage the physical feats, his wit and playfulness and practical jokes were incredibly courageous, as he was finding a way to  defend himself, to take a stand, even to have adventures among the avant-garde who adopted him as a sort of mascot. 

It was hard for him, not so much to love as to be loved, and as I lay there on the pullout bed in more pain than I thought I would  ever experience, I truly believed in my soul that no one had ever cared about me at all. In all my days, I had never once been truly loved, though I had lavished love on everyone around me for decades.

 Worse, no one even noticed. 

That wounded, devastated child who never should have been born, the late-in-life embarrassment (for they truly did NOT want another baby, and my mother even told me straight-out that she wanted an abortion but her doctor talked her out of it), the disappointment, the one who did not add anything to the family's prestige, who didn't even have a university degree and wrote novels that nobody read - . Oh yes. At the core, we are one.

Lost in Lautrec: why Jose Ferrer was the best Toulouse

I watched the movie long before I knew very much about the man. But as with that other painter-of-the-people, Van Gogh, Lautrec's artworks are - what? Just around, everywhere. It's fashionable to hate the Hollywood versions of great artists (Lust for Life, which I really love, is universally loathed among art snobs), but to tell you the truth, I think Ferrer comes closer to  becoming Lautrec than any other actor could, or should even try to.

I wonder what that's like. I did a lot of acting in years past, community theatre, nothing nearly as intense as this, but I do know something about the process of becoming someone else. When you look at his face, it's startling, even shocking how much he resembles the real Henri. It isn't just the black eyebrows and heavy beard, or the familiar hat and cane. His features are close enough that he carried it off in a way which, now that I look at it again, seems uncanny. 

I didn't know much about Ferrer when I first saw the movie (and I was likely about ten years old then). In the many subsequent viewings at various ages, of course, the guy kept changing, and at some point I realized Ferrer has the sexiest, most voluptuously masculine voice in history. When Elizabeth Taylor first met Richard Burton, she told a friend, "His voice gives me orgasms." I feel the same way about Jose.

Yes, he was very good-looking, but somewhat heavy-featured, with a large nose and prominent lips. A Puerto Rican, he was no doubt considered "exotic" and did not play too many romantic leads. Though it could be argued Lautrec was the most romantic role of all.

I love this poster! It's yet another example of something you're supposed to hate. But hey, what about Henri himself? He could be called the very first multi-media  artist, producing not just brilliant drawings and oil pantings, but pastels, lithographs, book covers, calendars, and other forms of mass-production which appalled the purists, and quickly made him insanely famous. Quite literally, his posters were plastered all over Paris, and became so desirable that people literally tagged along as the new posters were put up so they could peel them off the walls before the glue was set.  As one of his biographers stated, "Everything was for sale,"  a poignant statement that reveals all the ways in which he sold his own soul.

So how can anyone say he didn't capture the real Henri, the broken-hearted bon vivant? It's  tempting to put these photos side-by-side with photos of the real Henri, but I don't think I even need to. The wounded look is there, the tristesse. 

In  this one, the resemblance is even more startling, because Ferrer somehow or other captures the most elusive thing about his photos: that sense that his public face is essentially unreadable. He must have studied pictures of him to get that distanced look, with all the fathomless hurt lurking behind it.

And at work. My God, the more I look at these, having spent most of the day looking at actual photos of Lautrec, the more amazed I am. So never mind that they used trick photography to make him look

like a dwarf, or had him walking along with his shoes on his knees.

Kirk Douglas claimed that playing Van Gogh cost him dearly, and it took a very long time to shake off the torture and torment of the man (if he ever did). I don't know if Ferrer immersed himself in the same way. So now I guess I have to find some biographical material to see if I can find out. Stay tuned, there will be more. . . 

Toulouse, Toulouse! Why do I feel that I know you?

OK  then, this is NOT going to be an essay.

This is NOT going to be a biography (there are plenty of those).

This won't be a rehash of the Jose Ferrer movie (much as I love it).

So what will it be?

When you begin to creep and sneak into the darkly bright,  incandescent, alley-smelling world of Lautrec, you come away changed, if in fact you come away at all.

Unknowable, yet, in a sense, too known. Known for his sneaking and creeping nocturnal habits, as much for his famous header down the stairs when he was a child (note: it didn't happen) and his aristocratic inbreeding as for his astonishing genius, the way masterpieces flew out of his tiny warped body, his fiery mind. 

I won't write about all the details of his life, as it was pretty short anyway (oops, Freudian slip! But it's one I think he would enjoy.) He made a kind of spectacle of himself, created a public persona, the inevitable cane, bowler hat and natty suit coat sitting so neatly above the stumpy atrocity of his legs.

I say atrocity, only because of what it did to him to be so disabled, and as a result, no doubt in constant pain. Is it any wonder he frequented those steamy night spots, drowning his diminutive self in gall and bitter wormwood?

(Absinthe-minded, he was, and it finished him off, but oh what glory came before!)

The tumble down the stairs didn't happen, except in the movie, but inbreeding did. It was the embarrassing family secret, first cousins marrying  first cousins in a long line of bleeding aristocrats, coming to a screeching dead end with Henri, his legs crumbling away under him, his facial features almost as distorted as King Charles II of Spain, the inbreeding train wreck of all time.

Long before I became so fascinated, when all I really knew about him was watching Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge (and by the  way, I think he captured Lautrec as well as, or better than, any actor could or should), I had this exact poster on my wall in Alberta. It didn't survive the move, for some reason, though I easily could have rolled it up and stashed it somewhere.

But I was fascinated by the way the background is  flipped over into the foreground.  The  subject of the poster, a garish, rather crude dancer named La Goulou ("the Glutton"), is somewhere in the middle, and in the background we see only black silhouettes of a lot of men and women in hats.

No  doubt, these are the delicate classes, slumming, hungry for entertainment that  would break every taboo  they had ever known. 

By placing the weirdly twisted, tree-looking brown man in the very front, it is as if we are in the audience, having  to try to look  past this ungainly  figure to get a good look at La Goulue and the way she kicked so high, you could see that she wasn't wearing any underpants.

This brown man appears in the movie, of course, and everyone complains his prosthetic nose and chin look fake. . . but maybe not.

And ah! In THIS one, not only is the dancer relgated to a smallish figure in the middle, the well-to-do hoity-toities in ther top hats and frilly, furry gowns aren't even looking at her, but justwalking by, promenading, apparently bored. They have come not  to see, but to be seen. 

Ah, Toulouse, Toulouse. Such a little man. He did  cultivate this dapper persona, this  half-man  who was actually taller sitting down than standing up. I always thought Lautrec was adorable, a sort of doll-man or  a puppet, though no  doubt he was forced to wear his disability like a badge. Though this seems not to have cramped his style socially or sexually (or, goodness knows, artistically), nevertheless, behind his back, his so-called friends muttered to each other about his shocking appearance.

Not just his body, but his face, which was universally described as coarse and even ugly.

And, of ourse, I am developing  a theory about this even as I sit here winging it. Yes, he had a rather large nose and very full lips, which he may have  tried to downplay with the shaggy moustache. But the nasty remarks about his huge nose and blubbery  lips came directly out of the snobbishness that decreed an "aristocrat" had to look like an aristocrat. What DOES that term mean, facially speaking? A thin, rather aquiline nose, cupid's bow lips, snooty fake-as-fuck eyes that were often half-closed from boredom. Aristocratic, eh what? And Lautrec was none of the above.

I  also believe, just  as I am sitting here figuring it out, that a large part of it was in fact a kind of racism. His ungainly nose and fat lips, in connection with his black-haired shagginess, made the snooty ones  think of Africa, and that was just not the thing, not at all, not at all. In fact, they'd see it as horrifying.

Jose Ferrer compares himself to a  monkey in the movie, explaining that beautiful women sometimes kept apes as pets, as they somehow enhanced their own beauty through contrast. No, he didn't  look like an ape, an African, or anyone else (well, maybe a bit  like King Charles II of Spain! But he couldn't help it if his family rolled around with their cousins.)

His facial features, along with the stunted bandy legs, made him look sort of exotic. And those eyes, which even his detractors had to admit were beautiful, exposed his soul: gentle, compassionate, even tender. It rarely showed in most of his photos, in which his face is oddly unreadable. But he was photographed a lot, and actually liked being photographed, though often in outlandish  costumes which meant, in modern parlance, "leaning in" to  his strange appearance, making it his "shtick". 

He'd make fun of himself, cut ahead of the line, and get the jabs in before anyone else could take a stab. 

He could capture the hoity-toitiness of the  self-appointed upper crust,  but he also exposed the relative emptiness of the well-to-do who flocked to the midnight cabarets for a nice evening of drunken slumming. Their finery  did not detract from the hardness of their faces. They could strut around and promenade, and try to outrun being found out - but they could not hide from that little man in the corner, furiously scribbling an image onto a napkin.

And gentlemen, yes, gentlemen, most of them already afflicted with syphilis, looking for a pickup. Why not this one? We can't see her face, but she is pulling back from him noticeably, perhaps appalled by his attentions. And who or what on earth is that apparition between them? A mask, a caricature, or some sort of  demon summoned from the depths of the gutter?

This is Jane Avril, played in the movie by Zsa Zsa Gabor, an unlikely choice, though she is the one who sings that divine song. Avril was a real professional and could kick so high her boots touched the  ceiling. But she too was all artifice, her own creation, a public persona, and here we see her leaving the threatre, in an unguarded moment looking very alone, and not particularly glamourous.

And yes, Toulouse spent a lot of time in brothels, not just partaking (and one of his nicknames among the girls was Little Coffee Pot), but sketching, and somehow honoring the most stigmatized members of society. Lautrec's working women often looked weary, and he caught  them without their come-hither masks on. But he also saw real tenderness between them. The erotic closeness between sex workers gave the women the only real love they would likely  ever know. 

And this is the real underside, the women lining up for the obligatory medical examination. Not  that it did  much of anything to halt the spread of venereal disease, but in order to keep their licenses, the madams had to put  their staff through this humiliation. And you can see how they feel about it in their faces. 

How is it that Lautrec can paint movement like no other painter who ever lived? For you not only hear the swish-swish of the dancer's livid pink petticoats - you  feel the breeze, even among the smoke and the fug  of the cabaret. 

These were the superstars of the fin de siecle - Aristide Bruant with his darkly comic, rather obscene songs written in a kind of crude Parisian patois, Jane Avril getting her kicks (and what could  be more phallic than the neck of that huge bull fiddle in the foreground? The musician looks like a maniac or a devil, or perhaps a gargoyle.)

Lautrec liked the crudeness of it, he cultivated it, he sang and praised it, and most of all, he painted it. All of it. His gaze was fierce, and candid, and even compassionate. He saw everything, and got it all down. He sported drag and clown suits and every other disguise that would protect his excruciatingly sensitive interior. It didn't quite work, but disguises never do.

This is the saddest clown I've ever seen. Or is he drunk? For, most of the time, he was, and it killed him, along with the ravages of untreatable syphilis and the raging genetic disaster inflicted by his ancestors, who thought  they were such hot  shit.

Ah, but here. He's taking in the lavish beauty of this luscious nude model,  appreciating it, just thinking  about how he is going to capture her body on the canvas, or on one of those great, gaudy, flaming posters that still have the power to jump  off the wall and nearly assault you. 

Like this one! MOULIN ROUGE! MOULIN  ROUGE! MOULIN ROUGE FOREVER! 

It is as if Lautrec is the cheering section for a  whole era, this so-called Belle Epoque which, as he realized only too well, wasn't too damned belle at all.

There are so many Lautrecs, and that is just the troble. When we think we know what he is trying to do, he pulls this one on us. This woman, heartbreakingly young, her white blouse falling open, having just serviced another customer or contemplating another hard, humiliating  day, looks soft and girlish, frighteningly vulnerable. He has, as always caught her in an unguarded moment.

But since life is a cabaret, old chum, the show must  go on, and it did, until it didn't. The circus poster featuring the bare horse's ass is somehow, against the odds, beautiful. We sense hoofbeats on sawdust, smell the scatty circus odor of the animals, even get a whiff of the bareback rider's garish perfume. While the man with the whip contemplates, just perhaps, bedding  her down at the end of the show.

(Please note. I didn't edit this, and I realize now that some of the paintings and posters appear more than once. It's like that Waldemar guy (who  hated the movie, for some reason) asking us to take another look. Or I wasn't in the mood to take the duplicates out, whatever. Toulouse often formally displayed various forms of his masterpieces, even showing preliminary sketches and the same images done in various different mediums. I'm just  glad I was able to write this, on a day when I was in more physical pain than I can ever remember. Bonjour, Toulouse, and goodbye.)