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.