HENRI de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
(1864-1901)
This poster is perhaps the most famous image in Lautrec’s graphic oeuvre. It was commissioned by Edouard Fournier, owner of the Parisian night-club (café-concert), Divan Japonais, to commemorate its opening in 1893. In the background is Yvette Guilbert (1865-1944), the club’s singer, who wears her distinctive long black gloves. In the foreground is Jane Avril (1868-1943), a celebrated dancer and beauty who was taking Paris by storm then, and Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949), a music critic.
The club was decorated in the so-called Japanese style with lanterns and mock-bamboo, which was fashionable in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. Lautrec echoes this Japanese design through the use of simple, bold silhouettes and flattening planes. Lautrec was considered to be unusually bold in his designs as Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a Neo-Impressionist critic, commented: ‘White, black and red in big patches with simple shapes, that’s him. There isn’t another like him; no-one can show the grimaces of the bloated capitalists like he can, sitting at their tables with their little whores, licking their chops to sharpen them’ (quote from the anarchist paper, Père Peinard, 30 April 1893).
The art of the colour lithographic poster had been initiated by Jules Chéret (1836-1932) the year before and was developed further by Lautrec. His subjects were drawn from the music halls, theatres, cafes and low life of Paris whom he identified with, having been cruelly spurned by his aristocratic family because of his disabilities. Though prolific - Lautrec produced no less than 325 lithographs, thirty posters, nine drypoints and four monotypes - his career came to an abrupt end when he drank himself to death at the age of thirty-six.
Copyright © Trustees of Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.
Extract taken from Prints, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery .