Toulouse! Toulouse! My Lautrec Fantasy

 

So my Lautrec Trek continues. Sometimes I think I'm over it (my God, this is like a bad breakup!), and at other times I think it has just begun.

One thing that has kept it going is a novel I'm reading by Pierre LaMure, called, strangely enough, Moulin Rouge. It purports to be the novel on which the 1952 movie is based, but so far it bears little or no relation to that much-loved (by me, not by art critics, who loathe it) film, one of those old-friend movies you like to spend some time with, even if you know how it ends. 

 The novel is interesting for the way it DOESN'T truly represent Lautrec, the silly boy behind the gloomy tortured artist, the young wag who dressed up as a clown, an Arab sheik, and a fancy lady in a feather boa, just because he liked having his picture taken. The Julia Frey bio, as bogged down as it is by unnecessary detail, does seem to capture lightning in a bottle, the mercurial, multi-faceted genius who really could go out on the town and have a good time. While at the same time, not whitewashing the fact that he died of a combination of alcoholism and tertiary syphilis.

Though the  novel tries to paint him as so chronically lonely as to be almost friendless, the truth is he had a host of loyal and even loving friends, who tried to protect him from  the nastiness of social stigma. I think they really did see the value of what they had in Henri, a little man with a huge heart, and an incandescence of vision that would all too quickly flame out.

The Pierre LaMure novel, though I was not able to get much information on it (it seems to be out  of print and only available in used copies), is plainly a transation from the French. Though it has touches of brilliance (such as describing a grand piano  as "like a coffin for a harp") there's a clunky quality to it, a labored, almost wheezy sense of trudging through detail. French is essentially untranslatable, and the English language, though it 's good for technical things, is lousy for  expressing  nuance. Only the most brilliant poets can make it jump  through hoops of fire and do pyrotechnic tricks. Whoever translated LaMure's novel, and I still can't find out who, lacked that kind of genius and just went word-for-word, making it a bit of a trudge.

SO: we're left with the paintings, and the drawings, the lithographs, the posters, the immediacy, the startling sense of catching his subjects in mid-breath, as if they are about to turn and speak to you. He not only captured these vulnerable nanoseconds, he captured what they weren't even expressing on their faces or body postures. He got inside them. The little man, no doubt stigmatized for looking so odd, always with thick pince-nez clamped on to his face because he could barely see, saw things in ordinary human beings that no  one has ever perceived before or since.

Can I tell you my Lautrec fantasy? Will you be suprised it has nothing at all to do with night life, absinthe, sex in general? I know a little bit of French, what we Canadians call "cereal box French" (meaning, a degree of familiarity due to the bilingual packaging of products), and Lautrec knew a little bit of English and liked to try to speak it. He dressed like a dapper Englishman, albeit one with sawed-off legs, and his mother even called him Henry. 

My fantasy is that we're trying to have a conversation, and it's not going well, in spite of the fact that it's totally hilarious and I'm having to sing most of my responses ("Sur le pont, d'Avignon, on y danse, on y danse"). This slightly hysterical exchange is no doubt oiled by Lautrec's famous cocktail, called the Earthquake, consisting of  one part absinthe and one part oblivion. As a retired drinker, I don't think I'd really need it to feel the effect.

I want to talk to a man who did the impossible every day of his life. He didn't just paint movement, he painted intent, and even things people had not dared to think in their conscious minds. His paintings are bristling with aggressive and even ugly phallic symbols, demonstrating the fact that men didn't impress him  very much, but the women - . His  tender studies of courtesans embracing, kssing and cuddling in bed are full of a compassion no one else ever thought of, much less expressed. Compassion, for these harlots? And Lesbians, to boot! 

So he knew about contempt, and how easily and casually you could become the target of it if you did not quite fit the social prisons of the day. He saw and saw and saw, mainly how people somehow found love and expressed love in the midst of an ugly, harsh, unyielding environment where everything was for sale. Much as he was famous in his lifetime, he may even have craved anonymity, turning back the clock to simpler times when not so  much was expected of him. 

This is his most famous poster, the one that started it all, and as usual it's topsy-turvy, forcing us to look over the shoulder of this great hulking monster in the foreground to get a glimpse of  the wild cancan dancer La Goulue, the real subject of the work. As a backdrop we see black silhouettes of high hats both male and female, and on the left is a wildly distorted electric light.

And that's another thing. Lautrec was the first artist to paint electricity - that garish new phenomenon that revealed things  we never expected to see. Suddenly the soft gaslight was wiped out,  the newfangled illumination exploding like lightning in a way that must have seemed like a violation.  It's why the grotesque carved-from-chocolate man in the foreground is in shadow, and only the dancer in the middle is lit up, scandalously displaying her crotch to all and sundry. Her lower half lights up the room, electric lamps making her lacy plus-fours flare and glare.  Did any artist of his day dare to display a massive phallic hand just inches away from a nearly-bared female crotch?

The fact that it's beautiful is another mystery, another impossibility, like that wacky Franglish conversation I want to have with Henri. He was gone too soon, but while he was here - while he was here - 

"A little thing, you know, like a puppet" - how his friends saw him

 

All through the sometimes harrowing biography of Lautrec by Julia Frey, there are indescribably cruel and even monstrous descriptions of his physical appearance which just don't tally with what we see in the photos. Or at least, I don't think so. This Guilbert chick didn't mince words, she thought he was ugly, his lips were too thick, he looked disgusting as he ate. But he had such beautiful eyes! It's true, there is so much in those eyes, candid, compassionate, and full of ironic humor. They are kind eyes. So why make such a fuss over his table manners or his unaristocratically full lips? No wonder he drowned himself in absinthe. With friends like these. . . And yet, Henri not only forgave Yvette Guilbert, he was such a great fan that he featured her in many of his artworks. 

As for the puppet remark, I keep running into the fact that Henri was just under five feet tall, about like Danny DeVito who is never described as a dwarf, just a short man. Many women are a similar height, so there is no way everyone towered over him. The fact his legs were so out of proportion, causing his awkward hobble, may have compounded the puppet insult. But was he such a tiny little thing? The fact that he seemed to be two different bodies cobbled together may have emphasized this miniaturized quality.

Why can't I stop writing about Lautrec? Because when I am writing about Lautrec, I forget about how I feel, about all the health woes, the pain, the endless specialists and tests and the sense that even after all this, I am still doomed. Lautrec has been a life-saver, in that I become totally absorbed in what I am doing, in finding just the right words. I can't seem to get back into my YouTube channel after all that has happened, and not just with my health. It does hearten me a little to see that my creativity has once more flowed in a different direction. It has not dried up. Hardly! 

At any rate, I'm grateful to be able to lose myself in what is increasingly becoming a Lautrec fan blog. As for the little thing like a puppet, well, we already know that there were certain portions of his anatomy that were far from miniature. Perhaps Yvette had to find that out for herself.

How many phallic symbols can you cram into one painting??

 

I just don't want to let go of my little friend, just yet. Maybe it's just a distraction from the myriad ongoing health "issues"  that may yet do  me in. The shadow of mortality is never far away, and I honestly wonder how much time I have left. And reading about the man's untimely demise wasn't exactly uplifting. BUT! I still uncover surprises, like this famous poster of Jane Avril sitting ringside in a cabaret with a withered-up old geezer beside her.

Freud could have used this to prove his most notorious theory. There are the obvious ones - the heads of the cellos and bass fiddles in the background;  the arms of the orchestra conductor; his "erect" stick;  the odd little thing like a whale on the left (one of  those inexplicable little figures he always draws in the corners); the old man's cane; the back of Jane's chair; whatever she is holding in her hand - a fan, perhaps? The black gloves of the lady in the background; the riotous "thing" on top of Jane's hat, like a phallus exploding. . . and there are probably more.  Lautrec had a devilish sense of humor, and was not averse to drawing penises all over the place, especially in the sexually-charged atmosphere of the Belle Epoque (also known as the fin de siecle, a darker, more shadowy title revealing the not-so-Belle Epoque's underside). 

I'm still finding more. What is that thing in the bottom right corner? The old man's leg or something? And what's going on with his beard? It seems to blend into some sort of foamy-looking thing. a cravat of some kind. The man's hand on the cane might qualify, though here we risk seeing the entire painting (actually it was a poster, one of his more famous ones) as one big weenie-fest. 

In fact, Jane Avril herself, all decked out in black, her sinuous figure curving upward in a familiar pattern - maybe she's the ultimate phallic symbol. There was lots of sex going on in those days, but I  doubt if there was very much intimacy. It's implied in the  biographies that the sex workers he hired were treating him like social work, an act of mercy for a man who likely would have had a problem attracting a civilian mate. And it was virtually a certainty that he would never marry, a terrible crisis in an aristocratic family like the Lautrecs, where marriages were ways of consolidating wealth and spewing out the next generation of grossly-inbred male heirs. Disabilities were seen very differently then, and his truncated stature and strange, Habsburg-looking facial features might have made fine ladies not want to be seen with him.

But those eyes. Those eyes. I don't even need to say it.

The truth is, they lost out. Imagine knowing a genius like Lautrec! What a mind, and beyond his incandescent talent, something almost supernatural in the energy, the supercharged sexuality, but at the same time, the curious detachment of the world he created and reflected. As his biographer Julia Frey put it: "Everything was for sale." Not just  the women, but the paintings, the posters, the lithographs, all the brilliant work he did in 36 years - all of it had a price on it. HE was for sale, and he knew it, which is partly why he posed for all those droll photographs, purposely making himself look  silly and even trite. He seemed to be saying: I don't take this life seriously, no, not at all! Come to the Cabaret, old chum. Step right up. Step inside, breathe the air, the smoke, the opium, the absinthe, the greasepaint and sweat and cheap  perfume, and even darker things. He painted the air and the anxiety and the drenching, self-annihilating pleasures that were all too brief in their analgesic effect.  

All of it cost him. All of it was for sale.

POSTSCRIPT! I don' t know if I dare post this to Facebook, as it's a family show, after all, and those terrible weenie references may corrupt the youth of this country, if not the world. But I had to include a cute little detail that is also relevant:

Toulouse-Lautrec was nicknamed "The Coffee Pot" by his friends, particularly the women of Montmartre, due to his short stature and the disproportionately small size of his legs compared to the rest of his body. He himself reportedly referred to himself as "a small coffee pot with a big spout," embracing the nickname with his characteristic irony and humor. The nickname also reflected his lively personality and popularity as a lover. 

Strangely enough, as detailed as the Julia Frey bio was (sometimes excruciatingly so), no mention was ever made of his famous/infamous nickname. Could it be that those ladies of the night did not feel sorry for him at all, but really DID celebrate him, not as an oddity or a random genius, but as a well-endowed lover? He could be surprisingly earthy, preferring red-haired women because he claimed their natural scent attracted him. And I don't mean Chanel No. 5, folks.

This is a little sad, but I had to post it anyway. . .

 

So while digging around in Lautrec Land, I found this, a rather sad diagram (in Spanish) listing all the disabilities Lautrec had. It's called Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, which may not exist, and as far as I can see his problems were genetic, the result of generations of aristocratic inbreeding. It's an ugly topic, as it verges on incest in too many ways, and the most horrendous example is what happened to the Habsburgs, who inbred their way to a screeching halt with the freakish Charles II of Spain.

But Toulouse had a more charming persona - well, yes, he WAS charming, the too-long overcoat, the dapper hat and walking stick and the legs that were half the length one would expect. He looks kind of like a doll, a puppet, a child-man. This was a sort of semi-fictional character he deliberately cultivated, so that he became a kind of mascot for the avant-garde. 

So what went on inside hm? A lot of it is in the paintings. But even more of it is evidenced in the way he lived. Not too unusual for a bohemian of his time, but all the absinthe and the cognac and all the rest of it finally and inevitably did him in. No  doubt this came at a much younger age due to all his disabilities, visible or internal. Not to mention that other creepy affliction: syphilis, which was totally untreatable then and which anyone who went to prostitutes could not help but end up with. 

It was a short life, a hard life, but what a life! The Julia Frey biography emphasizes that his life was NOT one big misery - he was a Goodtime Charlie (or Charlot) who really did know how to enjoy himself. He had a host of friends, good and loyal friends who truly loved and took care of him (though they were unable to stop or even regulate the drinking which eventually killed him). 

It wasn't all hell and suffering and wretchedness. He actually made a good living selling his work in many forms. He was never even remotely a starving artist, for even if the paintings and lithographs  weren't selling, his mother provided him  with a comfortable allowance to live on (not unlike Van Gogh with his brother Theo). The sad thing is that he never really had an intimate relationship with a woman that wasn't casual or short-lived (usually a business transaction). In the movie Moulin Rouge, a woman does try to love him, but he is too encased in his bitterness to allow her to penetrate his hard shell.

Did this happen? We don't know. We know he suffered, but he also rejoiced, posed for wacky pictures, played pranks, sang drinking songs, went to bed with tarts, and generally whooped it up.