Toulouse-lautrec And Montmartre

The arts community of Paris in the late 19th century has been gutted, stuffed, studied, and fetishized for so many years now that one could easily think there are no mysteries left to wring from this era, as exceptional as it was. This handsome title focuses on the relationship between the ribald, booming, bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's work(1864-1901). It places his art so squarely in context that it rushes back to life and relevance. This is no mean feat, and the picture depicted in these four scholarly and engrossing essays is much clearer, stranger, and more sordid than Hollywood’s botched tribute. As discussed in Phillip Dennis Cate's essay, all manner of artists commingled in Lautrec’s dens of exploitation (circuses, dancing halls and whorehouses): Nabis, Symbolist, and post-Impressionist painters, absurdist humorists, caricaturists, anarchists, musicians, scene painters, and even proto-conceptual artists. As Mary Weaver Chapin explains, Lautrec was a pop artist before pop, with his appropriations of handbill imagery, his affinity for famous performers, his elevation of the "low" poster medium to "high" art, and his interest in perpetuating his own fame. It's easy to understand the attraction of this era; after all, so many of the cultural seeds of the 20th century were sewn in such a brief time in Paris' 18th arrondissement by (let's face it) a bunch of horny drunk dudes messed up on absinthe. --Mike McGonigal