Art: Gaslight and Fallen Souls

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One enters expecting the familiar recorder of a vanished culture, the cafe and boulevard life of the Belle Epoque, the lowlife of the cabarets, the well-known cast of characters—May Milton, La Goulue, Paul Sescau, Jane Avril. One leaves with an impression of precocious modernity, partly because Lautrec's caustic and tender view of the world speaks directly to our culture of narcissism. Lautrec's art was about watching; as Stuckey observes, each figure spins in its own solitude in the midst of the schedules of lust and sociability: "In Lautrec's paintings glances are only seldom acknowledged or returned. Instead, he diagrams the routines of curiosity and anticipation he observed at public places." If the stream of life is subdivided into an infinity of fleeting moments, as it is by a culture based on photography, each looks like an actor's gesture, a pose—or a snapshot. This disarticulation was what Lautrec attempted, and one still marvels at the speed and accuracy of his notation, whether it was real (in his sketch pads) or feigned (in the finished theatrical lithographs). The impression that his drawing of Jane Avril's kick or Yvette Guilbert's bow took as little time as the movement itself does not hold for long: one's admiration for Lautrec's craft, for the eggshell delicacy of spattered lithographic ink or the exact placement of a complementary color, overrides it. But it lasts just long enough to give a sense of wholly different organization—that the painting or the drawing is based on a precarious, swift sense of the real, exact but friable, quite unlike the formal traditions of European art since the Renaissance. There was nothing expressionistic about Lautrec. He did not revel in the miseries of the soul, and even his most pathetic images come to us across a measured distance and through a focused sense of human absurdity. The painting that summed up Lautrec's sense of what Baudelaire, another wounded argonaut of the boulevards, called "the heroism of modern life" was At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-95. It is a gathering of Lautrec's tribe, his best male friends and the cabaret women who were the main characters of his art. It also seems to be Lautrec's most complete answer to the Parnassian pretensions of French artists' circles in the '90s—the kind of high-mindedness he had mocked as a student, ten years before, with an acrid parody of Puvis de Chavannes's Sacred Grove, into whose pallid scattering of muses he introduced a line of stray moderns from a Paris street, including his stunted self, back turned, urinating on the turf of Parnassus. Lautrec thought the timeless and the eternal a boring joke, and in At the Moulin Rouge he offered the alternative: let the aesthetes dedicate themselves to Higher Thought, but he would stick with gaslight, friends and the fallen soul.