The naughty nineties in the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec

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Toulouse-Lautrec transformed the humble poster into an art form. Some outstanding examples are now on show in New York, as Stephen Bury explores

Toulouse-Lautrec was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1931, 30 years after his death. The press release stated: ‘The realism of Lautrec will be supplemented by the symbolism of Redon…two aspects of late 19th Century French painting’. This was to ignore the role of Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints in the project of modernism – his use of incomplete, abbreviated, foreshortened figures; unusual/non-three-dimensional perspectives; the absence of modelling; and the preoccupation with ‘stars’ such as the dancer Jane Avril, singer May Belfort, cabaret singer Aristide Bruant, dancer Loïe Fuller, singer Yvette Guilbert, male impersonator Mary Hamilton, dancer Edmée Lescot, May Milton, Louise Weber (‘La Goulue’ – the Glutton), etc., individualized by their gestures, haircuts, gloves and hats.

Although the 1931 exhibition included 17 prints, it was not until the gifts in 1940 and 1946 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller – she saw a connection between modernism and the ‘democratic’ medium of printmaking – that the Museum of Modern Art’s Toulouse-Lautrec print holdings really took off. This exhibition displays around 100 prints supplemented by contemporary printed ephemera in the second floor Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries. It is curated by Sarah Suzuki.

While African and Oceanic art was an important influence on Parisian artists at the end of the 19th century, Japanese art – exhibited at the World Fairs of 1867, 1878 and 1900, as well as in Siegfried Bing’s Paris shop from 1875 – was equally influential. Sarah Suzuki’s lucid catalogue text explains that Toulouse-Lautrec’s engagement with Japanese art began with a visit to Louis Gonse’s ‘Exposition retrospective de l’art japonais’ in 1883 when, in the company of artists Tristan Bernard and Louis Anquetin, he saw work by Hokusai,  Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige.

Toulouse-Lautrec dressed up in Japanese costume, mimicking the gestures of Sharaku’s portraits of actors. He collected Japanese prints, including Ukiyo-e (Floating World) from the Yoshiwara district. From 1892, he also began to use a ‘remarque’ in the Japanese style to sign his prints, conflating his initials into a single character in a circle. Working with the printers Père Cotelle and, later, Henri Stern, Toulouse-Lautrec made 191 lithographs in editions normally ranging from 10 to 100. He reportedly worked in the print shop in the morning, painted in the afternoon, dined with his mother in the evening before taking part in the Parisian nightlife of café-concert, theatre and bar.

Divan japonais (1893) is a lithographic poster for the café-concert recently renovated in the Japanese style. The dancer Jane Avril relaxes at the bar whilst singer Yvette Guilbert, with her trademark elbow-length black gloves, performs. Edouard Dujardin, critic and co-editor of the Revue Wagnériennewith a former lover of Avril, Téodor Wyzewa, approaches from the right –  whether as flaneur, dandy or voyeur – the yellow of his walking stick seemingly an extension of Avril’s chair back. The orchestra also fuses with the bar in the grey shallowness of the picture plane. The male figure recalls the blue-outlined, seemingly elder figure in L’Anglais au Moulin Rouge of 1892, chatting up two women, perhaps performers at the Moulin Rouge, which had opened in 1889. Here Toulouse-Lautrec used as model the then 31-year-old British painter, William Tom Warrener (1861–1934), who showed paintings at the Salon 1886–99 but gave up painting in 1906 to return to the family coal business in Lincoln.

La Clownesse au Moulin Rouge (1897) also reflects the obsession with things Japanese. Cha-U-Kao’s name (a version of the high-stepping dance, chahut-chaos) and costume, with a geisha-inspired topknot, reflected Japanese sources. She also appears in La danse au Moulin Rouge (1897), arm-in-arm with her lover Gabrielle la Danseuse, and, legs akimbo, in Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao, La Clownesse assise in the portfolio series Elles (1896), which reflects Toulouse-Lautrec’s non-titillating approach to the quotidian backstage lives of the Parisian actresses and artistes. In La Clownesse au Moulin Rouge, Cha-U-Kao, in her low-cut ruffed yellow blouse, faces the viewer semi-frontally, whilst the other participants, including Toulouse-Lautrec’s painter friend and admirer of things Japanese, Tristan Bernard, are, frieze-like, in silhouette, moving left or right – even including Gabrielle who is hand in hand with Cha-U-Kao – against the blue-coloured, mirrored walls of the Moulin Rouge.

It has often been argued that Toulouse-Lautrec rarely advertised commercial products. One example provided in the exhibition is Confetti (1894) for J. E. Bella, an English paper manufacturer keen to use paper confetti to replace the dangerous alternatives of bonbons or coloured plaster.  The model’s eyes are closed in delight (not for self-preservation) as three hands throw not only confetti but also its very text at her, Toulouse-Lautrec using his crachis or splatter technique to imitate the confetti. But Toulouse-Lautrec also completed a poster to advertise motorcar tyres, La Chaîne Simpson (1896) – in a large edition of 1000, and made a poster advertising the photographic services of Paul Sescau (1896). And what were all the posters for the café-concerts and programmes, etc. but advertising. ‘L’affiche y a qu’ira’ (There’s only the poster), declared Toulouse-Lautrec.

The catalogue,The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters from the Museum of Modern Art  by Sarah Suzuki is published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014. 160 pp., fully illustrated in colour, $45.00, £30.00 ISBN 978 0 87070 913 5