Paris's Party Animal

Toulouse-Lautrec Delighted in the Demimonde

Toulouse-Lautrec placed himself (center, second from back) at the heart of Paris nightlife in "At the Moulin Rouge," part of the National Gallery show opening today. (Art Institute Of Chicago)

There's not much yellow sunshine in "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre" at the National Gallery of Art. Its glow is greenish. That's partly the gaslight, partly the absinthe, and don't forget the queasiness of the morning-after dawn. This is a show about the club scene. It takes you out all night.

There are many oils, posters, prints and party invitations (one suggests you check your fig leaf at the door), 10 connected rooms and 250 pictures of dance halls, nightclubs, bars, circuses and brothels, and the people who hang out in them: artists, drinkers, gawking tourists, whores. The show sweeps you back in time up the steep streets of Montmartre, to the hottest spots in Paris, where women are available and getting stoned is easy and dancing girls kick high.

The atmosphere is charged with showbiz glamor, lust, bohemian license, art, scruffiness and slumming. You are not far from the thug life. You meet a lot of painters. Bearded Vincent van Gogh is drinking in the corner; he has four works in the show. Young Pablo Picasso, who has five, is up from Barcelona. There's Finland's Eero Järnefelt. Erik Satie is on piano. You get to go behind the scenes -- Santiago Rusiñol takes you to the kitchen of the Moulin de la Gallette -- and every now and then you run into old masters, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, men who understood Montmartre before it got hot.

Their pictures aren't alike. It's not style that connects these men -- there are 50 in the show -- but a preference for Montmartre and for living on the edge. The place is rife with painters. They drive each other on. One of the most gifted -- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), is your sharp-eyed constant guide.

Everybody knows him. He's pretty unmistakable. Lautrec is under five feet tall. His torso is a normal size, but his brittle, often-broken legs are as spindly as a boy's. His gait may be unsteady (his walking stick is hollow, he keeps it filled with booze), but his manners are delightful and his banter is exquisite. The man is an aristocrat, but his lips are red and bulbous, and he drools.

Unlike his cousins he couldn't ride to hounds. That sort of life was closed to him. But Montmartre's was wide open. Had he not been so odd, he might have been dismissed as yet another well-bred youth going down, but here, among bohemians, where hierarchies of class and taste were overturned with glee, his deformities promoted him. He wore them like a badge.

As he hobbled up the cobbles to the Moulin Rouge or the Moulin de la Galette, the Chat Noir or the Mirliton, Lautrec blazed a trail. When Bob Dylan left his home town of Hibbing, Minn., to go to Greenwich Village, or Packards from Park Avenue purred up to the Cotton Club, they were treading the same path.

Lautrec was very good. He was fabulous at faces, and at body language, too. His eerie skill for capturing a likeness, swiftly, empathetically, still seems a sort of miracle. His drawing and his painting aren't separate, they're one. And he was heroically productive. Lots of wild people get over the club scene, but he didn't, and it killed him. By the age of 33, when he went to the asylum, he was pretty much a ruin, a paranoid, forgetful, syphilitic drunk, drawing creepy circus scenes for the doctors. Yet he'd managed to produce more than 700 canvases, 360 prints and thousands of sharp drawings. He has 140 pictures on display in this show.

Their candor is terrific. "I do not spare the warts," he wrote, "and I enjoy adding the hairs that sprout from them."

His painting style is not exceptionally original. The borrowed strands from which he wove it -- naturalist, impressionist, cartoony, Japanese -- are pretty clear to see. Lautrec is hardly shallow, but his oils, seen together, aren't as endless or as deep as those of Manet or Paul Cezanne. Purely as a painter he isn't quite there at the top with the grandest of French masters. What makes him so important, and also so prophetic, is something else about his art.

Lautrec put it all together. To read his pictures rightly is to be as hip as he was. Beauty in his pictures is almost incidental. That's not what they're about. What they offer is a joining of rough new music, sex, mass-market promotions, avant-garde delirium, shocking truth, celebrity, decadence and dazzle. That potent combination fuels the art world still.

One night in December 1891, 3,000 Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs were pasted up all over Paris. Part ad, part newspaper cartoon, part Japanese wood-block print, "Moulin Rouge: La Goulue" looked like nothing that Parisians had ever seen. La Goulue, "the glutton," was a young and supple dancer. Lautrec's flatly colored picture shows her on the dance floor. It is focused on her bloomers. La Goulue was known for kicking off the top hats of the gentlemen who neared her. Every now and then, to heighten the maneuver, she'd "forget" to wear her underpants. Lautrec's poster of her kicking made her famous, too.

They did as much for singer Aristide Bruant. Burant glowered at his listeners. Often he insulted them. Burant half-talked the songs he wrote in a near-impenetrable streetwise Paris slang. Historian Richard Thomson, who with the museum's Philip Conisbee led the team of scholars that put the show together, says Bruant's voice suggests pre-electric Dylan's.

Lautrec's posters made Bruant's costume -- the club, the tall black boots, the hat, the working man's black jacket, and the scarf, a bright blood red -- a sort of logo of the man.