Exhibition and Catalogue Review:
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre
At the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
March 20 - June 12, 2005
Once every so
often an exhibition comes along that seems worth traveling to, even if that means enduring
a long, uncomfortable bus ride or eating dinner out of a paper bag. Such exhibitions are
rare, or maybe what is rarer is the desire to make an effort to seek them out. I made such
an effort recently to see Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre at the National Gallery
in Washington, DC, a show that will soon travel to the Art Institute of Chicago where it
will spend the rest of the summer and fall (July 16 - October 10). The ultimate question
after making such a trip is, of course, was it worth it?
Before answering that question, however, one must consider the importance and
impact of the graphic art of Toulouse-Lautrec and his fellow Montmartre artists onto history. Modern
movie posters, which are responsible for the sale of billions of dollars worth of theater tickets
(and eventual DVDs) each year worldwide, are the direct descendants of the advertising poster, an art
form which was born in Paris during the 1870s. Times Square would hardly be the grand spectacle that
it is without its gigantic posters and moving advertisements, equally and directly related to the
spectacle that was Montmartre, more than 130 years ago. Although photography, digital graphics and
film have replaced the hand-colored lithography of the nineteenth-century images, the ultimate goals
remain the same: to sell a product; to make a face familiar and famous; to create an entertainer´s
career.
It was actually Jules Chéret (1836-1932), and not Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(1864-1901), who was the father of poster art, and many of his famous images are present at the National
Gallery´s exhibition. Chéret´s posters of Loïe Fuller, modern dancer extraordinare,
made her career in the same way that Toulouse-Lautrec´s posters of Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant
would make theirs some years later. Although inspired by the bold areas of color and strict linear design
of Japanese prints, Chéret´s posters also employed a flowing, uninhibited line that would
inspire Art Nouveau artists such as the young Toulouse-Lautrec and their contemporary Georges Seurat.
Chéret created a type of beautiful female whose beauty and performances could be witnessed for
a price; the coquettish girls in his works were often called chérettes, named after their
creator.
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923), the Swiss-born graphic artist and
painter, is the unspoken star of the National Gallery exhibition. I was lucky enough to have been living
in Fribourg when an exhibition of Steinlen´s works was held in the spring of 2004 at the Musée
and Abbatiale de Payerne, in the town of Payerne near Fribourg. I remember being mesmerized by his
Apotheosis of Cats (1905, Musée du Petit-Palais, Geneva), and it is even better in
Washington, where it hangs opposite its original "companion" piece at the Chat Noir
cabaret: Adolphe Léon Willette´s Parce Domine (1884, Musée Carnavalet,
Paris). The cat, an animal that teeters on the border between good and evil, became Steinlen´s
signature motif. Certainly since Edouard Manet´s Olympia, and probably before, the
cat in French art has symbolized indignation, promiscuousness and faithlessness; for Steinlen, as
seen especially in his infamous poster for the Chat Noir entitled La Tournée du Chat
Noir (The Chat Noir on Tour, 1896, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, State University of New
Jersey), the feline, complete with halo, is raised to the level of sainthood directly because of
these traits.
Although some recent critics have chided the curators for including a number of
cases of ephemera in the exhibition, I think that these were excellent additions to the show. Without
the tickets to masked balls, menus, photographs, and published books by the featured artists, a
visitor would lose an important element of the context of the period and miss the sense of how this
art and its artists operated in the public sphere. Designing these items also helped to provide
graphic artists and painters with an alternate source of income, as tomb sculpture helped to provide
sculptors with the same during the period. In Toulouse-Lautrec´s day, these items were as
artistic and beautiful as the posters that originally beckoned the audience to the spectacle;
today a modern movie or theater ticket is a computer-generated piece of junk, an object that
becomes a piece of garbage almost immediately after it is produced.
Also educational and pleasant to watch were the edition of two short film pieces,
one a 13-minute documentary on Toulouse-Lautrec, and a very short film showing the mystical and
energetic dance performances of Loïe Fuller. This exhibition is full of media to be consumed
by the visitor: films, wall texts, an exhibition brochure, and audio guides. This is very typical
of modern museum exhibitions, but taken too far and these items can make the experience for the visitor
too overwhelming, like a woman wearing too much cheap perfume, and can take their attention away
from the works of art on the walls. The National Gallery exhibition has just the right amount of
external media to complement the art on view, if one skips the audio guide.
In my two decades in this business, I have yet to see the perfect exhibition,
and this presentation had some minor faults. Most noticeably, the wall text was very uneven. Text
on the wall provided either no information other than identification of a work, or too much
information about a specific café or institution. Repetitiveness on some of these texts
was so rampant that it bordered on being insulting: how many times did the audience need to be
reminded that the chahut was a provocative version of the cancan, and that Valentin
le Désossé´s name meant Valentin the Boneless (that is, like Plasticman)?
The curators felt we need the first definition three times and the second four times, because
we could not possibly be smart enough to remember it from the wall text in the previous room.
Unless a visitor is in the habit of skipping many of the texts, they will find the curator´s
decision to repeat definitions somewhat ridiculous.
I usually do not advocate a visitor wasting their hard-earned cash on the
audio guide, because I think it takes away from one´s personal experience with the
works on view, and here I make no exception. (Sometimes, however, I do obtain an audio guide
if I am reviewing a show.) There are often too many distractions in a crowded exhibition, and
the audio guide usually makes matters worse. Unless the curators decide to change the dialogue
for the Chicago presentation (they won´t, I am sure), keep your five dollars. More
repetitiveness ensues, and when that doesn´t happen the speaker (usually curator Richard
Thomson) states the obvious to the point where I was insulted again. (For the full-length
portrait of the composer Erik Satie in a top hat, Thomson states in a complete sentence that
"here we have a full-length portrait of Erik Satie in a top hat," as if he were
addressing a blind visitor.)
If that five dollars is burning a hole in your pocket, add thirty-five
more to it and invest in the catalogue. Entitled Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre
(National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 2005, softcover ISBN 0-89468-320-9)
contains essays by Tomson, Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Weaver Chapin and includes 400 images,
most in color. It fairs well against other texts on the period, including the Spirit of
Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 (1996), which was edited
by Cate and Mary Shaw and based on an exhibition of the same title. The National Gallery
catalogue includes wonderfully reproduced color plates and essays that can be comfortably
read in a single sitting.
Finally, the last two rooms of the exhibition, which contain
Toulouse-Lautrec´s images of prostitutes in the Maison Closes (or brothels)
and his images of the circus that he made while in an asylum, seem hastily put together
and are the only disjointed aspect of the show. They are given too little attention and
are not contextualized as are the posters and other works depicting the world of
entertainment. And yet they are necessary here: the women of the brothels worked as hard
(if not harder) and put their lives at risk to feed the voracious sexual appetite of
Montmartre. They are at once sad and heroic. Something should be said about the fact that
Toulouse-Lautrec reserved the poster, a lower form of art production at the time, for
high-status celebrities, and paintings and pastels, a higher form of art, for the
traditionally low class women of the brothels and the street. Prostitutes, like cats,
achieve an apotheosis in this body of work.
So, was the trip to the exhibition worth it? In my opinion, Toulouse-Lautrec
is always worth it. Steinlen is always worth it. Chéret is always worth it. I would
endure Port Authority at night, the most uncomfortable bus ride, the greasiest dinner from
a paper bag, the most tiring trek from the hotel to the National Gallery and beyond. Because
once you arrive, surrounded by the brilliant colors, the decadent acts, the swirls of the
dance, you can almost smell the alcohol, hear the bawdy songs, sense the sex that seems to
breathe down your neck; surrounded by these works, art becomes life and all the world really
does become a stage.
A web component to the exhibition can be found at
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/lautrecinfo.htm]
Caterina Y. Pierre
Brooklyn, New York
23 May 2005
Copyright 2005 © Caterina Y. Pierre; all rights reserved
No portion of this text may be used without the written permission of the author
Contact the author at
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