Art: Gaslight and Fallen Souls

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"Heads pass by in the crowd," wrote a Belgian painter describing the Moulin Rouge in 1893. "Oh, heads green, red, yellow, orange, violet. Vice up for auction. One could put on the door front: People, abandon all modesty here." This, as Stuckey points out, is almost a verbal postcard of Lautrec's painting; but anyone who read into its brilliant, sickly jolts of complementary color and its ravaged cast of characters the evidence of moral disapproval would not know his Lautrec. The sheer ingenuity of vision is still astonishing; for instance, how the unstable colors within the group at the table, laced with patches and lines of burning red — the plaid lines of La Macarona's bodice, the serpentine fur trim of Jane Avril's coat — are stabilized by the four hatted heads of men receding to the upper left, all in profile, including Lautrec himself, like medallions. Nor is there any more shocking apparition in early modernist painting than the low-lit green-and-yellow mask of May Milton, clashing with Jane Avril's writhing brioche of red hair, that rears into the right side of the scene.

With this image, the stage is set for Fauvism and the early Matisse. The achievement of this show, in short, is to give us a Lautrec very different from the slumming boulevardier of fiction. It argues, success fully, that he was one of the creators of modernism itself.

Robert Hughes