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.
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