The Art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Professor Retraces Artist's Steps and Work
By DONNA LADD
hen most of us think of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, we envision bawdy Parisian nights filled with gleeful can-can dancing.
When Gale Murray turns her attention to the artist - as she regularly does - she most likely is considering the social and political significance of his work.
"We usually associate Toulouse-Lautrec with nightlife," the Colorado College art professor says from her office in Packard Hall. She points out that the artist - who painted in Paris in the late 1800s - frequently depicted scenes from rowdy dancehalls, cabarets and brothels. As a result, he captured much of the low-brow action that accompanied many Parisian social ills of the era.
Murray's interest in the artist goes back to her undergraduate days at Barnard College, but really came into focus when she was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. The New York native's dissertation, "Problems in the Chronology and Evolution of Style and Subject Matter in the Art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec," started a long chain of articles and books about the artist, his work and its significance.
She has published two books on the subject: Toulouse-Lautrec: The Formative Years, 1878-1891 (Oxford University Press, 1991) and Toulouse-Lautrec: A Retrospective (Macmillan Press, 1992).
Interestingly, although Toulouse-Lautrec's lively, colorful images are well known to most of us, little of substance had been published about the artist and his work before Murray got involved. Her Oxford book, a huge monograph, covers the first half of his career. Now, she's working on a monograph on his mature and late works.
Murray readily admits that she's had to piece together much of Toulouse-Lautrec's chronology. She has spent enormous amounts of time in museums featuring the artist's work, particularly Paris and Albi, the artist's hometown in the South of France. The last four summers, she has traveled to the City of Lights and attempted to retrace Toulouse-Lautrec's steps and work. She also frequents American museums that feature his work, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan and Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Much of Toulouse-Lautrec's work was bought up by Americans, since impressionist and post impressionist work wasn't very popular with the French of the time. Fortunately, however, many American-owned pieces have been donated to museums, allowing a determined researcher like Murray access to them.
In addition to actual study of the artist's work, Murray spends a great deal of time pouring over popular illustrated journals of the late 1800s. She says it's easy to see how closely Toulouse-Lautrec's work reflects the tabloid-esque illustrations of the day.
"It was a high-art version of the materials in the popular press," she says.
In some ways, Toulouse-Lautrec was a rich kid who decided to go slumming. Born to aristocratic parents who were also first cousins, Toulouse-Lautrec had a debilitating and growth-stunting soft-bone condition, pycnodysostosis. As he grew up, he shunned the high society he was born into - one where horses and hunting were revered rather than artistic experimentation. Instead, he preferred to study art and frequent dance halls and brothels. "He hung with other outcasts," Murray says. As a result, his work captured that segment of society probably more accurately than any other artist of his time.
"I've tried to focus on the work and its content," Murray says, "rather than focus on the artist's life, as most previous writers have. For instance, I've looked into the meaning of the can-can. It really began as a proletariat expression of defiance at the bourgeoisie. They were deliberately vulgar, flaunting their sexuality."
"The dancers often wore no underwear," she adds with a smile.
As so often happens in urban districts that start out as haunts of the disenfranchised, the middle class then caught on to the action at the Moulin Rouge, in the artsy Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre. The racy crowd started drawing spectators and participants from more upstanding addresses, particularly gentlemen who dropped in to pick up prostitutes.
However, the landscape Toulouse-Lautrec painted involved more than good times. It captured a time when free thought was beginning to take hold with the lower class really getting fed up with the bourgeoisie. For instance, his famous subject Aristide Bruant was a cabaret owner, songwriter and one of Toulouse-Lautrec's earliest influences. Although the artist had studied with more traditional academic teachers, he became friendly with Bruant, whose songs and cabaret poked fun at the bourgeoisie, in turn, elevating the working class. Bruant penned songs about pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals to "epater la bourgeoisie" (shock the upper class). Ironically, it was chic for the monied crowd to go to Bruant's cabaret to hear themselves be made fun of.
"You'd walk in there and suddenly you'd become the subject of his ridicule," Murray says.
Murray says Toulouse-Lautrec's friendship with Bruant marked his turn away from traditional imagery to more radical subjects. Other avant-garde artists of the time were also starting to turn against traditional values, she says, bucking what was thought of as appropriate artistic subjects.
"It was the beginning of modernism," Murray says.
One of Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, "The Inspection," even shows prostitutes waiting in line to be examined for venereal disease. These paintings weren't exactly what high Parisian society was used to seeing in its galleries.
"It was shocking," Murray says. "Now, it's ho-hum."
But the paintings' effect on today's hardened audience doesn't interest Murray nearly so much as what Toulouse-Lautrec's art meant in his own time.
In Murray's work, little-known aspects of Toulouse-Lautrec's career regularly surface. For example, she's studied his illustrations of Jewish subjects, made at the time of the Dreyfus affair when a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of betraying French government secrets. Lautrec illustrated a number of novels and travelogues about Eastern European Jews that have decidedly anti-semitic overtones.
Toulouse-Lautrec was influenced by other artists of the day, Murray says, including Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh. Interestingly, Degas also captured low-class life of the time - unbeknownst to many. Most of those elegant bathers we love so much were actually prostitutes of the day.
Other artists, however, didn't go as far as Toulouse-Lautrec dared with his depiction of Paris' underbelly. "Nightlife was his territory," Murray says.
Conventional society may not have cared too much for Toulouse-Lautrec's work but his art was respected by avant-garde critics and artists. He even made some money - although he didn't need it.
His wealthy family, who didn't exactly love his work, didn't reject Toulouse-Lautrec."They supported him with grave reservations," Murray says.
Toulouse-Lautrec did not have an easy nor a long life. Not surprisingly, considering his haunts and chums, Toulouse-Lautrec became an alcoholic and, it is believed, contracted syphilis. "He became part of the whole nightlife that he painted," Murray says.
He also started having delusional episodes and spent much of 1899 in an asylum. There, he painted a series of circus drawings, which Murray says are evidence of mental disturbance. He died at age 37.
Murray says she's never been lucky enough to actually obtain an original Toulouse-Lautrec piece - no surprise with masterpiece pricetags attached. She did come close. Once, while studying in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in the early 1970s, she had the opportunity to purchase a Toulouse-Lautrec print for under $4,000. Alas, it wasn't to be. "I was struggling to make ends meet," she says.
The art professor is content to examine original pieces by the artist as often as possible. She's also very pleased to live in Colorado Springs - as long as she can get away to New York and Paris regularly. Her mother still lives in Riverdale so she gets back to New York at least once a year.
"The Springs is a really nice place to get work done and raise children," she says. Back East or in Europe, "I collect research materials, then come home to analyze and write. I always enjoy coming back. It's a nice pace of life here."
Her husband, Sandy Kinnee, is a successful artist who works from the Springs and exhibits in galleries all over the world. He and their 16-year-old daughter, Lauren, are lucky enough to accompany her to Paris. Lauren's gone the last four summers and knows her way around the French capital.
They've been fortunate to rent the same apartment on the Ile de la Cite, near Notre Dame and overlooking the Seine, for several years. "It's very beautiful," she says.
Murray enjoys visiting many parts of Paris, including the Left Bank and St. Germain. As expected, she's familiar with the Moulin Rouge, although it's not quite the same as it was in Toulouse Lautrec's "Dance at the Moulin Rouge" (now hanging in the Philadelphia Art Museum).
Back at Colorado College, Murray enjoys teaching a wide variety of art history courses, including those that focus on 19th and 20th-century art, as well as classes on women artists. She also supervises independent studies.
This is Murray's 21st year at Colorado College. "I really like this institution," she says. For the moment, though, Murray is focusing on getting as much research done as possible while she is on sabbatical and has a break from classes.
And, of course, she'll always have Paris.
Donna Ladd is a free-lace writer who lives in Colorado Springs.