Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-siecle Book

With this handsome book, David Sweetman, a biographer of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, brings together the dissolute lives of various artists who came to represent decadent fin-de-siè:cle Paris: Wilde, Fénéon, Jarry and, of course, Toulouse-Lautrec. As the author tirelessly reminds us, poor imitations of the latter's work adorn the walls of aspirationally Gallic bars worldwide and have become a shorthand for sanitised debauchery. Lautrec--absinthe drinker, brothel frequenter--was instrumental in the development of the poster, but what is his legacy to our century, beyond that aesthetic curse of the 1980s, Athena? Although Lautrec dominates the title, Sweetman's sweep is much grander. This is due in part to an absence of revelatory correspondence from the Frenchman--he was, it appears, a guarded soul--and also to the fact that Julia Frey's first-class Toulouse- Lautrec from 1994 still endures as a definitive text. In much the same way as Lautrec, Sweetman proves a sympathetic host to the women of Montmartre, tragic figures such as La Goulue, Jean Avril and Suzanne Valadon, and he is particularly insightful on the singer Aristide Bruant's influence on the fledgling artist. However, the amount of tertiary detail, allied to an ambitious attempt to run a parallel life of Oscar Wilde, tends to over-egg the pudding while revealing little of the man. Sweetman's claims for Lautrec's art to be taken more seriously, for people to look beyond the scenes of dancing and drinking, appear overstated, especially when the painter appears, at best, morally mercenary. Of course, Lautrec was more than a "deformed man who saw ugliness in everything". His work influenced Picasso, Seurat and van Gogh and was part of a vanguard of realism in French art which swept it into the 20th century and helped establish graphic art as the people's art. It also had the dubious distinction of paving the way for popular culture as we know it. Hamstrung by a lack of colour plates, though, Sweetman's book wears a correspondingly monochromatic air, providing a worthy and well-told account of a pivotal time, without ever quite finding its soul. --David VincentRead More