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.