The visionary pop artist who beat Warhol by a century
Pin-ups: Toulouselautrec & The Art of Celebrity Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Move over, Andy Warhol. The painter who first celebrated “iconic” fame in bright, shiny, mass-produced images wasn’t a Sixties pop artist, but a Post-impressionist who barely lived to see the 20th century, let alone the culture of mass fame he helped create. Or, at least, that’s the implication of this revealing exhibition of the posters and graphic work of Henri de Toulouse-lautrec.
Always the odd one out among the Impressionists and Postimpressionists – an aristocrat with louche sexual tastes, who has become almost as famous for his stunted growth as his art – Toulouse-lautrec had little interest in landscape. He preferred the seedy dance halls of Montmartre and the company of cabaret performers and prostitutes to the middle-class rural idylls painted by Monet, Cézanne and co.
Toulouse-lautrec, moreover, embraced the emergent advertising industry and new print media such as lithography. His posters for music hall stars such as Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant are among the most famous advertising images ever created, and synonymous with the edgy glamour of the belle époque.
This show takes the bold step of viewing these works not just as beguiling historical artefacts, but as harbingers of modern celebrity culture. Its title projects us forward in time, evoking resonances from Nissen huts and teenage bedrooms to the pop-art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, with their knowingly cheesy glamour girls, and, not least, to that one-man lexicon of cultural poses, David Bowie, whose 1974 covers album Pin Ups will be many people’s most immediate association with the term these days. That’s heady company for one small Post-impressionist to keep.
Yet, having put these ideas in our minds, the show doesn’t labour its contemporary implications, focusing instead on taking us to “Gay Paree”, the great fin-de-siècle capital of pleasure with its massive sex industry and love of technical innovation, embodied in the posters of Toulouse-lautrec and his contemporaries, many of whom are represented here. If there’s a slight sinking feeling in realising that much here isn’t by Toulouse-lautrec, the works of Alphonse Mucha, Théophile Steinlen, Jules Chéret and other key figures do help set the mood of slightly queasy gaiety, while also showing up the startling modernity of Toulouselautrec’s own images.
Where Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir, with its sinister, smirking cat, and Mucha’s La Tosca, with its flower-bearing Sarah Bernhardt, are both classic examples of the art nouveau poster, they have a mannered, slightly fussy quality that ties them to their era. Toulouselautrec’s Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, on the other hand, still looks fantastically fresh. And if you know it from the domestically scaled “Athena” prints popular in the Eighties, you’ll be amazed by the size of the version here, which is a good 7ft high.
The silhouette of the preposterously tall male dancer Valentin le Désossé dominates the foreground, with the rambunctious cancan dancer La Goulue – the glutton – brightly lit in the centre; the crowd beyond an undifferentiated mass of shadows. If the simplified treatment of line and colour comes directly from Japanese woodblock prints, which were hugely popular at the time, the image packs a graphic punch beyond anything achieved by the likes of Hokusai or Hiroshige.
There’s a seductive art nouveau feel to the sinuous lines of Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris, in which the famous dancer performs the risqué highkicking cancan, with the head of a massive double bass framing the image in the foreground. Yet in Lautrec’s hands, art nouveau never seems mere mannerism and that composition still feels daring.
It’s hardly surprising these images should have enjoyed their huge resurgence of popularity in the Sixties. They have the electrifying directness of the best pop art. Looking at them, you can feel the 20th-century world of brash, hyper-celebrity opening ahead of you. And where Andy Warhol had his factory of misfits and poseurs to call upon, Lautrec immortalised the larger-than-life denizens of the Moulin Rouge, the Divan Japonais and other dicey cabarets. Figures such as the charismatic chansonnier Aristide Bruant, whose belligerent black-clad bulk dominates Eldorado, Aristide Bruant, or the comically sour-faced comedienne Yvette Guilbert, who Lautrec celebrated in whole folios of lithographs exhibited here.
The romantic myth is that the privileged and wealthy, but physically grotesque – or so he saw himself – Toulouse-lautrec identified with this dissipated demi-monde because he was himself a tragic outsider. If that view feels plausible in his paintings, with their melancholy images of weary prostitutes and zonked-out bohemians – represented here by a beautifully observed oil study of a woman combing her hair – the Toulouselautrec revealed by the posters feels very different: much more up-beat, with an instinct for how his radical designs can hit the man-in-the-street between the eyes.
If many of the posters here are torn at the edges, as though ripped from hoardings, then they probably were. Lautrec’s posters became so popular they were often taken down by collectors within minutes of being pasted up. Toulouse-lautrec may have killed himself with syphilis and absinthe by the age of 36, but he didn’t die in alienated obscurity like his friend Van Gogh. His posters had made him a household name.
If the crowning delights of this exhibition are the posters, there are many incidental pleasures, too: some Toulouse-lautrec-influenced posters by another great Post-impressionist, Pierre Bonnard; the first colour print I’ve seen by that obsessive master of black and white Aubrey Beardsley, and a sumptuous painting of fashionably dressed women on the Terrace of the Café d’harcourt by the Scottish colourist JD Fergusson, which might feel a gratuitous inclusion, but works beautifully beside Lautrec’s poster of the English singer May Milton.
The last of Toulouse-lautrec’s posters shown here, La Troupe de Madame Eglantine, 1896, is perhaps the most telling. Showing a diagonal line of high-stepping cancan dancers set against a flat yellow background, it was created just as the craze for the dance was tailing off. If the show already appeared old-hat by the time it hit British theatres on the group’s tour, Toulouse-lautrec’s exuberant lines still feel as immediate as the day they were created. And for all its prettiness, this poster has an edge, an underlying knowledge of life’s tougher side, which is essential to what makes these images genuinely great.
‘He may have killed himself with syphilis and absinthe by the age of 36, but he didn’t die in alienated obscurity. His posters made him a household name’