Art: MUTUAL PORTRAITS

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ALTHOUGH the baffling, dedicated, often tormented painters of the late 19th century have inspired one Hollywood opus after another, the celluloid vision has proved no more revealing than the dated contemporary photographs. This month at Chicago's Art Institute, a traveling exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec will offer a fresh look at that tempestuous age, peopled by the foppish, witty, dwarf-legged chronicler of Montmartre and his painter friends Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. There, done with quick, sure strokes, is the record not only of what Toulouse-Lautrec saw as he grappled with the living instant, but how he saw it, set down with a warmth and power that no camera eye can match. Nowhere is this more evident than in his pastel portrait of Van Gogh, sketched at a café table in 1887.

Fresh May Wine. During the two years (1886-88) the three painters saw each other, they were unknown outside their own small circle of artists. Their favorite Paris haunts were the bars of Montmartre, the paint shop of Père Tanguy, and the mezzanine of Goupil's Gallery, which modest Dutch Art Dealer Theo van Gogh had turned into a boisterous rendezvous for the despised impressionists. There congregated the unbought painters, including Toulouse-Lautrec, then 23, and swashbuckling Paul Gauguin, 39, the onetime stockbroker who was now a full-fiedged painter just back from Panama and Martinique, roaring with contempt as he shook his carved cane like a fencing master before the academic Beaux Arts paintings hanging on the walls about them. Among them the clodhopperish. red-bearded Dutchman Vincent van Gogh, 34. Art Dealer van Gogh's younger brother, recently arrived in Paris, was usually a silent onlooker. He was content to drink in the new, exciting talk of pure, shadowless colors like a peasant swigging new May wine, then rush off to the Montmartre rooms that he shared with his brother to try out the new theories in dazzling flower paintings of his own.

Toulouse-Lautrec, a count's son gone bohemian, could confess to the dance-hall Chanteuse Yvette Guilbert: "Everywhere and always ugliness has its beautiful aspects; it is thrilling to discover them where nobody else has noticed them." But from his own ugliness. Toulouse-Lautrec turned away, preferring to caricature it outlandishly to make his friends laugh harder. He could not resist telling Vincent van Gogh, who struck most men on sight as physically unattractive, where to get his rotting teeth fixed. But his pastel portrait of Van Gogh shows a warmer, more searching glance. In reply, Van Gogh humbly offered his gratitude and praise.

A Bandit's Head. The figure on which the friendless Van Gogh fastened with an intensity that had near fatal consequences for them both was Gauguin, who boasted that he was part Spanish Borgia, part savage. When Van Gogh saw Aries on a trip to Southern France in 1888, he told Gauguin that he had found a glaring brilliance and overpowering color to match the tropics Gauguin longed for. Van Gogh dreamed that if Gauguin would only come to Aries, it would be the impressionist center for all painters.