Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born
in France in 1864 and went on to become one of the most influential
illustrators and printers of his time.
His most well-known and successful work centers on the decadent life of
urban Paris. Lautrec was especially
drawn to the theater district of Monmartre where the most famous cabaret
performers played, and artists, writers, and philosophers came to live. During the time when his work was most
prolific, in the late 1890s, Lautrec was living in a post-impressionist Europe,
swamped by an overwhelming atmosphere of indulgence in alcohol and sordid entertainment. Richard Thomson calls it a “means to
represent a complex, fluctuating scene, chic and seedy, corrupt and commercial,
subtle and gross”(508). His ability to capture this feeling is his most successful
quality as an artist.
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| Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret 1892 |
Lautrec manages to display the
eccentricity of personality with sparing, energetic lines that show the
influence of master drawers like Degas, and utilizes traits of Japanese prints
like large, flat color areas, and oblique points of view in his advertising
posters for celebrities like Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant. His talent for
abstraction offers a seductive, yet innocent glimpse into Parisian nightlife
that played on popular fad and intrigue of the urban lifestyle. Other successful strategies in Lautrec’s work
are his process of sketching performers in their own surroundings, building a
bond of familiarity for their unique characters, employing free-form lettering
for clear direction of information, and using a tone of decorative unity that suits
his medium of two dimensional color lithography. I think Lautrec’s least successful work is
his paintings, because although they retain his linear style of working, his
line quality is at its most expressive and powerful in his prints due to its
economy and harmony with the flat use of color and compositional abstraction.
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| Jane Avril 1893 |
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