Toulouse-Lautrec

‘You know, if one were a Frenchman, or dead, or a pervert – best of all, a dead French pervert – it might be possible to enjoy life!’

Degas and Lautrec are the two great poets of the brothel.

If Lautrec’s depictions of actresses and singers could be harsh, caricatural and even misogynist, his treatment of working-class women and prostitutes was often extraordinarily tender and sympathetic. In this, he differs greatly from his hero and mentor, Edgar Degas.

Although Yvette Guilbert liked Lautrec and admired his art, she was unsurprisingly ambivalent about the images he made of her. On one of them she inscribed the message ‘Little monster! You have made a monstrosity of me!’.

It was partly Lautrec’s physical infirmities that made him seem – along with the tubercular Aubrey Beardsley – so representative of fin-de-siècle decadence.

Perhaps as a result of inbreeding (his parents were first cousins and his grandmothers were sisters), Lautrec’s young bones failed to heal properly and his legs ceased to grow, leaving him stunted, deformed and quite literally déclassé.

Lautrec’s fin-de-siècle hedonism is more refined and contains an element of self-conscious decadence and perversity.

Although the notion of the artist as a self-destructive outsider reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century with Lautrec, Gauguin and van Gogh, its origin can be traced back to the late eighteenth century when political, cultural and economic revolutions transformed the way artists saw themselves and their relations with the world around them.