Every epoch views art in its own way, so it should not be surprising that a period dominated by popular culture would emphasize the same characteristics in art of the past.
“Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre,” the exhibition that just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a spectacular example. Given that the Lautrec retrospectives of 1979 and 1992 focused attention on the art and artist, the present show moves away from analysis and biography to use a little more than 10 years of Lautrec as so many lenses for viewing the place that concentrated much of the popular entertainment of his day.
This is done handsomely owing to more than 250 pieces by Lautrec, his predecessors and colleagues, as well as an unusual array of documentary materials, so opportunities for formal analysis and biographical discovery still are present. Yet they are not the reasons for the show, as they were last year in the Institute’s “Seurat and the Making of ‘La Grande Jatte.’ ” Where that effort told an audience it would have to work, tracing the development of a complex masterpiece, this one promises a vacation of touristic, voyeuristic fun.
And that it delivers from the very first artworks, by Lautrec and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a giant from an earlier generation. Both were residents of the district of Montmartre in the north of Paris, but Puvis had accepted the dictum that the highest form of painting treated subjects from myth and history. Thus his “The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses” is of an idealized world beyond time and appetite. Lautrec saw the painting and with friends immediately created a parody that showed them wandering through the grove in a crowd controlled by a policeman. Here, with the humor of caricature, Lautrec declared the only subjects for his art would be derived from modern life. Its truth is borne out by the rest of the show, often as lightly.
Georges Michel, an early 19th Century admirer of Rembrandt and Dutch painters, was the first serious artist to paint Montmartre. Then it was a village of windmills and quarries, where Romantic poet Gerard de Nerval saw “proud, surefooted little girls” playing and watching over goats. Such innocence was nearly gone by Lautrec’s time, when advertising posters showed it as a tourist trap in the making. The poor who lived there would increasingly see visitors from many walks of life in search of heightened sensation — at cafes, dance halls, cabarets and brothels.
A remnant of the old innocence was the Moulin de Galette, a working-class dance hall identified by two windmills, one of which was said to date from the end of the 13th Century. Pierre Auguste Renoir had captured some of its sunlit happiness in the 1870s, but during the next 20 years artists from Lautrec’s generation saw it differently. When Santiago Rusinol — one of many artists from other countries who gravitated to Montmartre — painted the Moulin de Galette by day, it was an empty, lonely place. From there on in the exhibition, life goes indoors, and the sense of afternoon having yielded to night is conveyed as much through the artworks as the dark colors most of the galleries are painted.
Lautrec’s early art was indebted to Constantin Guys, Honore Daumier, Jean-Louis Forain and Edgar Degas. The last two are represented in the exhibition. To different degrees they all were concerned with depicting modern life, and a section of the show is devoted to the types some of them treated. Here Lautrec posed friends and neighbors to look like creatures of the night. They were meant to be working-class girls and bourgeois males who met in cabarets and dance halls.
A lasting impression
The dance hall most important to Lautrec was the Moulin Rouge. When it opened in 1889, Jules Cheret, the father of the modern poster, did the advertising. Lautrec revered him enough to appear in a photograph standing before Cheret’s Moulin Rouge poster with hat in hand as a sign of deference. But as sometimes happens with artistic forbears, the “sons” transcend their “fathers.” And with his poster for the Moulin Rouge — his first poster of any kind –Lautrec went beyond Cheret, so far beyond, in fact, that it made the dance hall’s reputation, which, in turn, made him.
This moment in the show is significant. Lautrec’s poster is surrounded by several Cherets to illustrate how Cheret turned figures into a generic type whereas Lautrec focused on specific personalities. But then, where earlier Lautrec exhibitions might have demonstrated how the look of his poster was influenced by Japanese prints, this show introduces a clip from John Huston’s 1952 film, “Moulin Rouge,” to indicate how Lautrec’s distillation of French entertainment was the basis of a full-blown re-creation in American entertainment from a half century later.
It’s a nice point and the first time the institute has put complementary video material on equal footing with art objects. It makes a later clip of American dancer Loie Fuller, set across from an entire wall of Lautrec’s great Fuller lithographs, look inevitable. Both films extend the range of documentary material that long has given French museum exhibitions texture and interest but generally has been cut out of American showings. Yet as much as I like the decision to include such documents, the more unusual ones served to underline for me how most everything here — paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs — is presented for documentary instead of artistic value.
In the rooms devoted to particular Montmartre places, such as the Chat Noir cabaret, that is natural, as the paintings are by highly interesting but minor artists, so are more curious than surpassing in quality. And in the spaces consecrated to specific “stars” of the dance hall, cafe concert or cabaret — nearly all the entertainers Lautrec admired are treated in depth — it is instructive to see that several artists presented different aspects of the figures whereas Lautrec repeatedly appeared to get at their essence. But how he did that — through what esthetic sources, borrowings, devices and procedures — is the process that turned his documents into art, and both the exhibition and catalog essays are silent about it, perhaps assuming that since it was central to the earlier retrospectives, viewers already will know it.
Great works
Later rooms, with works on brothels and the circus, do something of a turnabout. The show indicates that in his brothel pictures Lautrec clearly was more sensitive than Forain or Emile Bernard or the young Pablo Picasso; they are not documents of brothel life and, besides, it long has been known that Lautrec avoided Montmartre’s cheap pleasure houses, preferring more elegant establishments near the Opera. His brothel subjects are simply some of his greatest works in any medium, and if none is presented as such, it is still why they’re shown.
A lighter touch
The circus pieces, on the other hand, are in the penultimate room to lighten the atmosphere after the psychological depth of the brothels. In several earlier works Lautrec did seem to document a Montmartre circus. But the later ones in greater number were done from memory to secure his release from confinement for severe alcoholism, and they are as much ominous as cheery. Here, through the exhibition’s focus on biography, we comprehend that the Belle Epoque was also the Decadence and to celebrate the one did not make you immune to the other.
The final gallery presents only four works: two Lautrecs and two Picassos. The earlier Lautrec, a study for his poster of English dancer May Milton, is shown to have become an object of reverence for Picasso, who also tries his hand with dancers. But the last Lautrec painting again intrudes upon the upbeat climate of the exhibition. Probably created from memory, it is one of the most unhealthy pictures of life in what used to be called halcyon years. This penetrating vision, as much as all the show’s stress on entertainment and celebrity, continues to make Lautrec relevant to our own frenetic, prosperous-sad times.
“Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” continues at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Oct. 10. 312-443-3600.
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aartner@tribune.com
