424
INTRODUCTION  With Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as
with his contemporary Seurat, the issue of popular art and
modernism once again comes to the fore, as it did a generation
earlier with Courbet, and will again with Van Gogh.
We have seen that for a few short years Courbet produced
history paintings for the common people: workers,
peasants, and the petit bourgeoisie. He did so by combining
the scale, ambition, and even subject matter of Salon
art with some of the forms and rhetoric of popular art. The
Burial at Ornans (1849, p. 274), after all, represented one of
the sacraments of the church, but its flatness and tonal simplicity
recalled popular woodcuts from Épinal. This radical
initiative could not, however, survive the years of repression
and political reaction following the coup of 1851. For more
than two decades thereafter, Courbet struggled to find or to
create another equally compelling means of artistic address.
The art of Toulouse-Lautrec constitutes an alternative
kind of popular art, one pitched at an urban audience
already trained to enjoy the mass culture on offer at cabarets,
dance halls, circuses, and even (for men) brothels. In
that way, Lautrec was similar to Seurat, but with the following
difference: Seurat, the Neoimpressionist painter, sought
to understand and then to distill the delights on offer at
the new, Parisian places of recreation in order to establish
the basis for a universal language of harmony—one that
might be useful in building an anarchist society, a kind of
utopia. Toulouse-Lautrec, on the other hand, explored and
recreated some of the visual delights of mass culture for the
purpose of generating an equivalent optical pleasure
for himself and his viewers. This was one of several, late
nineteenth-century manifestations of modernism in the
visual arts, along with Symbolism and Art Nouveau.
The period of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life coincided with the
greatest phase of Parisian urban growth in the nineteenth
century. It was also the time when France experienced
an industrial revolution, and, beginning in the 1870s, a
series of economic crises. The consequence of all this
was increased popular solidarity (through the growth of
worker orga­nizations and unions), and widespread conviction
on the part of political and industrial leaders that this
emboldened public must be addressed in ways productive
for capital. That is what Toulouse-Lautrec and some others—especially
the great advertising poster artists Jules
Chéret, Théophile Steinlen, and Alphonse Mucha, among
others—helped to do. Along the way, some extraordinary
works were produced. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted a working-class
woman’s anguish and exploitation in Poudre de
Riz (1887), and feminine, sexual mutuality in a series of
almost unprecedented pictures of same-sex desire and
women in bed. Courbet had depicted lesbians in 1866 (The
Sleepers, p. 281), but in a far more sensational, and even
exploitative manner.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, Toulouse-Lautrec linked
his art to fetishism. The term fetish is found in the discourses
of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Marxist economics. It
has a somewhat different meaning in each domain, but in
general indicates a purposeful misrecognition: a totem for
a god, a secondary sexual characteristic (or miscellaneous
object) for a primary one, and a commodity for a powerful
or hypnotic being. Toulouse-Lautrec recognized the authority
of the fetish and brandished it in his art, especially his
posters and other prints. It is represented by the hat and
cape of Aristide Bruant, the slender leg of Jane Avril, and
the long gloves of Yvette Guilbert. In this way, ToulouseLautrec
managed at once to celebrate unbridled desire, and
at the same time make it available for capitalist exploitation.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s friend Vincent van Gogh, as we will see
in the next chapter, explored still another kind of populism.
The Appeal of Modern Art:
Toulouse-Lautrec
c. 1880–1900
Chapter 18
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425Chapter 18  The Appeal of Modern Art: Toulouse-Lautrec
modernization and capitalization in the countryside
reduced or in some cases nearly ended small-scale ownership
of rural lands, as well as nearly eliminated open
lands available for common use. The cities were where
industry and factories were located, and that is where
the people had to move.
Within factories, working conditions were appalling,
but circumstances were often not much better in the surrounding
streets themselves. Metropolitan engineering
rarely kept pace with population growth. As a consequence,
there were teeming slums in all major European
cities, and frequent outbreaks of disease. In France, a
series of spectacular bank failures in 1882 exacerbated
depressed economic conditions, and un-employment levels
rose greatly. Masses of people in the French capital thus
daily scraped, scrambled, begged, and stole to survive.
Working-class women were subject to especially gross
forms of exploitation, and were judged by bourgeois men
to be indistinguishable from prostitutes. Indeed, even
if they were regularly employed as flower-sellers, shop
girls, artist’s models, laundresses, or barmaids—the last
two depicted in Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry
(1875, p. 382) and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (c. 1882,
p. 386)—the working women of Paris were often forced to
sell themselves in order to live. Estimates of the number
of full-time prostitutes range from 30,000 to 120,000,
though the number of part-time or occasional prostitutes
must have been even greater. Nineteenth-century Paris
may thus have constituted one of the most oppressive
environments for women in modern human history, and it
is necessary to keep this in mind when looking at the art
of Toulouse-Lautrec. It is not so much that he regularly
15.15
15.21
NOVELTY AND DESIRE
“His passion and his profession is to marry the crowd.”
Charles Baudelaire’s famous phrase from 1859 was
intended to describe the illustrator Constantin Guys.
But it is more apt for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec thirty
years later, and for two principal reasons: first, because
the crowd (the word foule also means mob, multitude,
and mass) came more fully into being at the later date;
and second, because Toulouse-Lautrec exploited print
techniques and a medium (the poster) that, compared
to the drawings of Guys, were more precisely tailored to
mass spectatorship. But even Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings
had a popular character. Many were large, raucous
affairs, intended for exhibition at cabarets, restaurants,
circuses, and other venues frequented by working-class
and lower-middle-class crowds.
The popular appeal of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artworks is not
just a matter of their novel technique, medium, and exhibition
circumstances: it consists equally in their peculiar,
erotic urgency. In his paintings and especially his posters,
the nouveauté of urban life—shoes, gloves, make-up, hair,
hats, and the grinning faces of popular entertainers—are
given over to the celebration of sexual desire. And not just
any desire, but the fetishistic desire that was cataloged
by sexologists of the time, practiced by clients and sex
workers at the new maisons de specialité, and embraced
by an emergent lesbian and gay subculture. Herein lies
the source both of the great appeal of Toulouse-Lautrec’s
art and of its modernity. For more than a hundred years,
capitalist commerce has used sex to sell commodities and
thereby intervene in the domain of erotic and imaginative
life. By crafting images that stimulate desires—and then
proposing that these may be gratified by the purchase of
designated commodities—industry and advertising have
rationalized and regulated both sex and consumption.
Parisian visual culture from the fin de siècle is an important
early example of the practice. Toulouse-Lautrec’s
paintings and posters, however, may be said to have used
commodities to sell sex, not the other way around. They
highlight sexual pleasure as a refuge from working-class
labor, and fetishism as a form of emancipation. His model
of metropolitan desire is thus as unruly and unregulated
as the insoumises (unlicensed prostitutes) who walked
the streets of Paris and posed—dressed, half-clothed, or
naked—for the artist.
THE CROWD
The growth of European cities and the emergence of
crowds were epochal developments in nineteenth-century
history. Between 1800 and 1900, Berlin grew from
200,000 to 3 million, London from 1 to 6 million, and
Paris from 500,000 to nearly 3 million. The reason
these cities grew at so unprecedented a rate was that
18.1  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
Poudre de Riz, 1887. 
Oil on cardboard,
22 × 18⅛" (56 × 46)
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426 Part 4  Modern Art and Life
declined. Though women, workers, and the petite bourgeoisie
generally could not afford to buy pictures, they
could be induced to pay small entrance fees to exhibitions
and panoramas. (Panoramas, like the cinemas
that took their place, were cheap and spectacular. For
just 1⁄2 franc on Sunday, for example, audiences in the
1880s could see the Storming of the Bastille by Poilpot
and Jacob.) Men had more opportunities than women
to be consumers of mass culture. They could go where
they wanted at night, and were seduced to pay for admission
and watered-down drinks at cafés and nightclubs;
these latter included the Grand Bouillon, restaurant du
Chalet at 43 avenue de Clichy, and the cabarets Chat
Noir, Mirliton, and Moulin Rouge—where paintings and
other works of art were exhibited. At such places, social
class itself was as much part of the show as the artworks,
drunkenness, and ribald songs. To think of artworks by
Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Anquetin, Bernard, and
Guillaumin in these prosaic settings—and they in fact
exhibited in November and December 1887 at the vast
Grand Bouillon (établissements de Bouillon were large,
salubrious, inexpensive restaurants found across Paris,
in which all items, even napkins, were separately reckoned)—is
to begin to transform our understanding of
the popularity of modern art. Here Van Gogh showed
his Portrait of Père Tanguy (p. 442), and Toulouse-Lautrec
some paintings of prostitutes. Van Gogh also exhibited
that year at the café Le Tambourin on the Boulevard de
Clichy, and in the lobby of the avant-garde Théâtre Libre
of André Antoine.
Laborers, shop assistants, clerks, servants, and prostitutes
might in addition see works by these and other
artists at the newspaper offices of La Vie Moderne and
Le Gaulois, and in the pages of cheap illustrated papers,
such as Le Courrier français, Le Mirliton (the product of
the eponymous cabaret), and L’Escaramouche. Outdoor
circuses and amusement parks had painted sets, and artworks
were now also visible in the streets: the posters of
Chéret, Steinlen, Grasset, Mucha, Bonnard, ToulouseLautrec,
and many others decorated the walls and kiosks of
the Parisian metropolis. These posters, Roger-Marx wrote
with excess sobriety in 1897, have “no less meaning, and
no less prestige than the art of the fresco.”
The new spaces for public art generated enormous interest
among painters and sculptors, and not simply because
they offered opportunities for employment. Such artists
as Toulouse-Lautrec, who disdained the jury system still
employed at the Salon des Artistes Français, were especially
glad about the new circumstances for exhibition.
At these new venues, they could directly communicate
with large numbers of spectators, and thereby achieve
something of that public renown that had long been the
goal of ambitious French artists. In addition, those artists
who counted themselves on the anarchist or socialist
19.10
chose prostitutes as his models and companions, as that
the categories “prostitute” and “working-class woman”
were in ideology, and often, in tragic fact, nearly indistinguishable.
Toulouse-Lautrec depicted this disturbing
ambiguity with extraordinary purposefulness, but without
moralism or sentimentality.
Of course, wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.
The forced assembly of so many people in brothels,
factories, on the streets, and in the slums—their subjection
to law, industrial discipline, and time management—meant
that they gained knowledge of each other, of their work,
their common poverty, and their common culture. While
the English countryside was the place where capital was
first organized, the metropolis was the place where labor
was first organized, and where feminism made its first
inroads. An International Working Men’s Association,
formed in London by Karl Marx and others in 1864, grew
rapidly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
and established important headquarters in all the major
European capitals. The Association for the Rights of
Women was founded in France in 1870, as was a newspaper,
Le Droit de Femmes. International Congresses on
the Rights of Women were held in Paris in 1878, 1889,
1892, and 1896, at which feminists demanded that wives
and prostitutes be freed from the domination of men. The
subservient condition of wives necessitated changes in
the Civil Code; the desperate circumstances of prostitutes
required additional measures—extraction of child-support
from fly-by-night fathers, the abolition of the repressive
police des mœurs, and closure of the notor­ious St. Lazare
Prison where insoumises were routinely incarcerated.
The impact of urban, working-class, and feminist organizations
on the development of art and culture in France
and elsewhere, it is now generally understood, was enormous.
For one thing, the surviving artistic bureaucracies
of the old regime—in France the Salon and Académie
des Beaux-Arts—came increasingly to be seen as fossils;
their standards and programs were simply irrelevant to
the concerns and experiences of emancipated women and
lower-class spectators. For another, the increased confidence
and sophistication of working people meant that
they would demand the recreation in the metropolis of
the rich and affective art and culture that had been theirs
in the countryside—or at least they would expect a fairly
good substitute. The creation of a replacement popular
culture and art was the aim and achievement of the burgeoning
entertainment, or culture, industry.
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AND URBAN ART
The explosive growth in the numbers of workers and
popular, mass organizations at the end of the nineteenth
century meant a new audience for art at a time when
traditional patronage from state and church had greatly
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427Chapter 18  The Appeal of Modern Art: Toulouse-Lautrec
(1887, p. 425), Au Cirque Fernando: Equestrienne (1887–88),
and Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1889, p. 381) represent
working-class people in the places they frequented, and
the paintings were exhibited in those very same places—
Poudre de Riz at Aristide Bruant’s Cabaret Mirliton, and
the second at the Moulin Rouge. Van Gogh saw Poudre de
Riz as representing an archetypically Montmartrois character;
he wrote Theo van Gogh in August 1888 that he
wished to see it hung beside his own Provençal Patience
Escalier (1888, p. 14). Bal du Moulin de la Galette was, in
a sense, brought even closer to its subjects: it was reproduced
on the pages of the cheap and popular newspaper
Le Courrier français.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s most ambitious efforts to combine
popular subjects and audacious, modernist means are his
large paintings of cabaret and circus scenes, such as Au
Cirque Fernando: Equestrienne. The picture anticipates
by two years Seurat’s The Circus (p. 422), and is certainly
more spontaneous and more gross. It is also the artist’s first
large-scale engagement with a fetishistic theme current
in the decadent literature of the day. Au Cirque Fernando:
Equestrienne is broadly and thinly painted with pinkish
white relieved by stripes of red and patches of green,
gray, and violet. The artist has taken particular delight in
painting the horse’s massive croup (we can easily see it is
a stallion), which is then implicitly compared to that of
18.2
15.14
0.3
17.14
left—Toulouse-Lautrec flirted with them—could now
believe it was possible both to follow their individual
artistic inclinations, and remain in close contact with
the proletarian mass, those “newcomers of tomorrow,”
as Mallarmé once called them, who promised to become
the ruling force in the next century.
MODERN FORM, POPULAR CONTENT
Toulouse-Lautrec, in fact, took great advantage of these
new patronage circumstances, and devised novel solutions
to the integration of modern art and popular culture.
Like Degas, for whom he had unbounded admiration,
he was highly experimental in his approach to form. He
employed unorthodox perspectives, garish stage lighting,
strong contour, startling color choices, and peinture
a l’essence—oil paint thinned with turpentine and freely
brushed, lending works a sketchy and spontaneous aspect.
From the standpoint of any Salon juror, Toulouse-Lautrec’s
works would have been deemed unfinished and laid, or
“ugly”—the epithet routinely used to describe both modern
paintings and those with working-class subject matter.
But that was precisely the point of the works. ToulouseLautrec
literally brought the metropolitan crowd within his
orbit of address: they are both the subject and the object
of many of his best works. Such paintings as Poudre de Riz18.1
18.2  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
Au Cirque Fernando:
Equestrienne,
1887–88.  Oil on
canvas, 38¾ × 63½"
(98.4 × 161.3)
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428 Part 4  Modern Art and Life
artist to his mother—indicates it was intended for exhibition
at the Cirque Fernando itself. In any event the
smaller canvas was exhibited above the bar at the cabaret
Moulin Rouge beside Dressage des nouvelles (1889–90) and
Adolphe Willette’s Danseuse (c. 1890). There, working-class
spectators could easily glimpse its vulgar humor, while
bourgeois men could revel in its degeneracy.
Even when Toulouse-Lautrec was not painting for the
metropolitan public, his works often exhibited a similar
embrace of popular themes and exotic sexual perspectives.
There is no evidence that Two Friends (1895), for
example, was exhibited at a brothel; on the contrary, it
appears to have been made for the private delectation of
a male friend of the artist. But it addresses one particular
aspect of contemporary prostitution with considerable
directness—that is, lesbianism. Though Toulouse-Lautrec’s
several paintings of sexual intimacy between women
recall poetry and painting devoted to the theme—consider
Baudelaire’s condemned “Lesbos” from The Flowers
of Evil and Courbet’s The Sleepers (1866, p. 281)—they are
also derived from contemporary literary and sexological
sources. Mendes was enamored of lesbian themes, though
his Satanism and misogyny are generally absent from
Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings. More apposite is Richard
18.3
11.23
the ringmaster, bareback rider, and even clown at the left.
The red-haired équestrienne has heavily rouged cheeks and
painted eyes and mouth, recalling the dissipated rider in
Catulle Mendes’s “L’Amant de sa femme,” from Monstres
parisiens (1882). In that story, a man is irresistibly compelled
to return to his wife whom he had thrown out of
his house years before for her adulteries. Now she is a
circus performer, “starring at the Hippodrome, under a
pseudonym, in the pageant of Riquet à la Houpe.” Indeed
it is the very degeneracy of Mendes’s bareback rider—
evidenced by her sagging flesh, livid face paint, and ripe
odor—that arouses the lust and devotion of her cuckolded
husband.
Whereas Seurat’s bareback rider is a weightless sprite—
note the upward direction of the skirt, arms, and hair—
Toulouse-Lautrec’s figure is awkward and angular, and
her body is as hard and flat as her paste make-up. This
very crudeness, this very visible corruption, like that
associated with Mendes’s wife turned circus equestrienne,
is the source of the picture’s erotic charge, and the
intended basis of its popular appeal. Toulouse-Lautrec
in fact painted an over-lifesized version of the composition.
Known today as the “missing Ecuyère,” the picture
is lost, but its scale—and a confirming letter from the
18.3  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
Two Friends, 1895. 
Oil on cardboard, with
strip added on the left,
17⅞ × 26⅝" (45.5 × 67.5)
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429Chapter 18  The Appeal of Modern Art: Toulouse-Lautrec
von Krafft-Ebing, whose scholarly monograph Psychopathia
Sexualis (1886) was read by Toulouse-Lautrec and cited by
him with some regularity, according to the painter’s friend
Thadée Natanson. In this celebrated book, Krafft-Ebing
specifically described lesbian love (“congenital sexual
inversion among women”) as the frequent solace of prostitutes.
He writes:
Prostitutes of gross sensuality who, disgusted with
their intercourse with perverse and impotent men
by whom they are used for the performance of the
most revolting sexual acts, seek compensation in
the sympathetic embrace of persons of their own
sex. These cases are of very frequent occurrence.
Two Friends, like In Bed (c. 1892) and several others, clearly
represents the solace provided by lesbian sex and intimacy—the
proximity of the figures to the picture plane,
the warmth of the colors, and the great emphasis upon
pillows, blankets, and varied patterns and textures, all
combine to create a palpable physicality and closeness.
Indeed, it may be that male spectators, used to seeing
male/female pairings in such Academic paintings as
Carolus-Duran’s The Kiss (1868), were encouraged to
experience a measure of transgender identification with
18.5
18.4
18.5  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
In Bed, c. 1892.  Oil on
cardboard, 21¼ × 27¾"
(54 × 70.5)
18.4  above Charles-
Emile-Auguste
Carolus-Duran 
The Kiss, 1868.  Oil on
canvas, 36¼ × 35⅞"
(92 × 91)
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430 Part 4  Modern Art and Life
remarkable as well for essentially disregarding the most
commonly used erotic motifs in the advertisements of
the day. There is nothing in Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster
oeuvre comparable, for example, to Chéret’s Le Bal du
Moulin Rouge (1897, p. 421) in which décolletage and bared
thighs tell the whole story. Instead, the artist combines
an elaborate vocabulary of metropolitan styles, attitudes,
and expressions into a complex and fetishistic elixir.
Jane Avril (1893) was created on the occasion of an
appearance by the celebrated dancer at the café-concert
Jardin de Paris. The five-color lithographed poster reveals
the full range of the artist’s technique and style, including
ink spatters, colors that overflow contours, and an
expressive framing line, which meanders from foreground
to back, unifying pictorial surface and fictive depth. The
dancer herself accordingly occupies an ambiguous zone;
her plumed bonnet caresses the background framing line
at upper left, while her raised leg taunts the phallic bass
viol neck in the extreme foreground. Thus, the dancer’s
legs seem to rise and fall, open and close, move forward
and back in rhythm with the viewer’s alternating perception
of the picture as surface or depth. Jane Avril is like an
erotic automaton who is operated both by the spectacled
musician with the giant instrument and, imaginatively, by
the spectator who stands before any public kiosk bearing
her image. But like the lesbians in Toulouse-Lautrec’s
brothel pictures, Avril is not a mere passive object of
sight. Her haughty expression suggests that she delights
in controlling her audiences, in placing them in her thrall.
Indeed, Jane Avril understood fetishistic desire and the
casting of spells. She had been a patient of Jean-Martin
Charcot at the asylum of Salpêtrière in the early 1880s
when the doctor published his landmark study of fetishism,
“Inversions du sens genital” in the Archives de la
neurologie (1882).
In the poster Ambassadeurs, Aristide Bruant (1892), a
slightly different erotic game is played, but once more
the working-class and bourgeois viewer is dominated by
a celebrated entertainer. Known for his lusty gestures,
crude double-entendres, and for abusing his audiences,
Bruant was a star from the 1880s until after the turn of
the century. The sign outside his Montmartre cabaret read
“Le Mirliton, for Audiences that Enjoy Being Insulted.” In
1892, Bruant moved from Le Mirliton to the tonier Café
des Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Elysées. Still favored
by the masses, but now, too, according to Edmond de
Goncourt, by unblushed society women eager to hear his
“purulent slang,” Aristide Bruant commissioned his friend,
the artist, to represent him in his unique and instantly
recognizable attire: wide-brimmed hat, Inverness cape, and
long, red scarf. Bruant fills the poster, squeezed between
its four borders, and between the spectator and the seductively
posed sailor who gazes out from the upper right.
The silhouetted sailor may have been a sly reference to
17.13
18.6
18.7
one or another of the women. If this was the case, then
the familiar circuit of seeing and being seen—of men as
disembodied possessors of sight, and women as passive
and embodied objects of vision—was challenged, at least
in painted fiction. Toulouse-Lautrec’s pictures of lesbians
may thus have confronted their spectators with something
of the same vitality and disembodied confidence
we observed in Cassatt’s In the Loge (1878, p. 396). Like
the large decorative panels and oval portraits made by the
artist for the brothel on the rue d’Amboise, their pictorial
address is to sex workers as much as to their clients.
POSTER ART
At about the same time that he was working on lesbian and
brothel pictures, Toulouse-Lautrec turned his attention
to poster art. The posters are extremely audacious—flat
colors, hard, clear outlines, exaggerated foreshortening,
and bold repetition of shapes and words. They are
16.13
18.6  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
Jane Avril, 1893. 
Color lithograph,
48⅞ × 36" (124 × 91.5)
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431Chapter 18  The Appeal of Modern Art: Toulouse-Lautrec
Gustave Geffroy in La Justice in 1893, “have taken possession
of the streets with an irresistible authority.” This
very evident erotic authority is the basis of the unsettling
power and popularity of Toulouse-Lautrec’s art.
For Toulouse-Lautrec was a fetishist, and fetishism is a
form of unreason or madness: the displacement of easel
paintings from the walls of the Salon to the walls of the
cabaret; the desire of a wealthy bourgeois man for a dissipated
bareback rider; the imaginative identification of
a straight man with a lesbian prostitute; the castigating
glance of Jane Avril; the willing insertion of the heterosexual
male spectator into a circuit of homosexuality.
In each instance, the fetishistic object of desire is evidently
of lesser social or economic value than the thing
it replaces, and yet the exchange is made in any case. In
Guy de Maupassant’s classic story “La Chevelure” (1884),
a rope made of hair is more alluring to the story’s protagonist
than any mistress. Surely it is cold company on the
streets of Paris, in a theater box, or a boudoir, yet for this
the corvette, a term used in the French Navy both for
a small, fast battleship and for someone who is courbé,
or “bent,” that is to say, queer. (He thus anticipates the
sailor named Querelle from Jean Genet’s novel of 1947
and R. M. Fassbinder’s film adaptation of 1982.) Aristide
Bruant actually revived and popularized this slang, and
other non-nautical synonyms, including jésus, mignon,
pédé, rivet, sonnette, etc. (Most of these are found in
Bruant’s Dictionnaire Français Argot from 1901.) The viewer
of Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster, and Bruant’s performances,
was thus required to submit both to verbal abuse and to
a homosexual come-on! Toulouse-Lautrec, like Bruant,
observed the gay subcultures of France and England. In
England in 1895, he painted a portrait of Oscar Wilde while
the esthete was in the midst of his disastrous lawsuit. In
addition, he undoubtedly witnessed the parade of gay
men who sought their petit jésus in the relatively secure
precincts of Montmartre brothels.
At the request of Bruant, the poster was displayed on
both sides of the stage of the café-concert Ambassadeurs,
as well as on hundreds of walls and kiosks throughout
Paris, transforming the city into one man’s image. “Who
will rid us of this picture of Aristide Bruant?” wrote a
columnist in La Vie Parisienne. “You cannot move a step
without being confronted by it. Bruant is supposed to be
an artist; why then, does he put himself up on the walls
beside the gas-lamps and other advertisements? Doesn’t
he object to neighbors like these?” Here was the new
art intended for the metropolitan crowd: it was cheap,
public, and democratic; it spoke in the argot of working
men and women; it chastised the bourgeoisie while giving
them an erotic charge; it derived its authority from the
brothel, the vaudeville stage, and the alienist’s laboratory.
THE METROPOLITAN FETISH
The posters and paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, we may
conclude, were at once deeply manipulative and highly
incendiary. Whereas nineteenth-century urbanization and
industrialization, in Eugen Weber’s phrase, had “turned
peasants into Frenchmen,” advertising and mass culture
during the fin de siècle turned Frenchmen into consumers.
The working-class and petit bourgeois crowd was
encouraged to believe that its most fervent desires could
be gratified by visits to the new grand magasin and by
the purchase of commodities. It was led, too, to believe
that passive spectatorship at circuses and cabarets was
somehow the same thing as sharing and participating in
a common culture. And, finally, they were persuaded that
they could receive sexual gratification from individual acts
of consumption and spectatorship. Toulouse-Lautrec and
his friends—Jane Avril, Aristide Bruant, and the others—
were especially good at making this latter case. “Bruant,
La Goulue, and most recently the Divan Japonais,” wrote
18.7  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec 
Ambassadeurs,
Aristide Bruant,
1892.  Color lithograph,
51 × 39⅜" (150 × 100)
18A  Max Klinger  A Glove
Eisenman, S. F. (2020). Nineteenth-century art : A critical history. Thames & Hudson, Limited.
Created from bham on 2024-02-26 09:11:04.
Copyright©2020.Thames&Hudson,Limited.Allrightsreserved.
432 Part 4  Modern Art and Life
fetish had especial authority. It seemed to uphold or celebrate
individualism in the midst of anonymity, imagination
in a world of routine, personal autonomy in a political
culture that prized obedience, and intrinsic worth in an
economy based upon exchange value. This, in any case,
was Toulouse-Lautrec’s proposition—his particular artistic
gambit. For a time, in fact, he—along with Seurat
and Vincent van Gogh—seemed to be remaking popular
culture along modernist lines, and his posters stand at
the beginning of an advertising tradition that extends to
this day. But after 1887 the paths of these artists diverged.
Van Gogh, as we shall shortly discover, could not abide
the speed, anonymity, and extremism of metropolitan
life and its new mass culture.
fetishist, the blond tresses induced transports of “superhuman
delight.” Such fetishes as hair, hands, gloves, feet, and
shoes, Krafft-Ebing wrote, provoke such powerful “optical
and emotional impressions” that they have the power to
arouse “visual memory” and “sexual excitement, even
orgasm.” The gloves of Yvette Guilbert highlighted in Le
Divan Japonais and in an important album of lithographs
of 1894 are images of fetishistic madness, foreshadowed
in 1881 by Max Klinger’s haunting suite of etchings titled
The Glove—in which the desired glove is the protagonist
and assumes a life more vivid than its human pursuers.
In Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris—a modern city, a city of
immigrants, workers, paupers, and prostitutes; a city governed
by the reason of cold cash—in that metropolis, the
18.8
18.8  Max Klinger 
“Abduction” from
The Glove, 1881.
Etching and
aquatint, 4⅝ × 10⅝"
(11.75 × 26.99)
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.	 Toulouse-Lautrec’s work arose from an emergent
mass society. What were some of the political
and social hallmarks of that society? What was
one of its artistic innovations, championed by
Chéret, Steinlen, Grasset, Mucha, Bonnard, and
Toulouse-Lautrec?
2.	 What does it mean to say that Toulouse-Lautrec’s
art was “popular” in its own time? Was it the result
of his peculiar subjects, style, or media? All three?
3.	 The term “fetish” was used in this chapter to
describe Toulouse-Lautrec’s strategy and one basis
for his art’s appeal. Briefly define the word. What
works by the artist seem to you “fetishistic”?
Eisenman, S. F. (2020). Nineteenth-century art : A critical history. Thames & Hudson, Limited.
Created from bham on 2024-02-26 09:11:04.
Copyright©2020.Thames&Hudson,Limited.Allrightsreserved.