Toulouse-Lautrec danced with the demimonde

THE National Gallery of Australia's fine exhibition on Toulouse-Lautrec shows a dark and even desperate edge to the world he inhabited.

The Sofa by Toulouse-Lautrec

IN the early 13th century, the civilisation of southern France, with its great romanesque cathedrals and troubadour poets who made Provencal, the langue d'oc, the first modern vernacular capable of literary expression, was devastated by war.

The invaders were part of the only crusade launched internally within the Christian world and their aim was to root out the heresy of the Cathars, also known as the Albigensians, from the city that was their capital.

Exactly what the Albigensians believed and what they did remains obscure because their enemies destroyed so much and left us a deliberately lurid picture of unbridled sexual licence and various sacrilegious or obscene cult practices. But it seems they were influenced by the Manichean heresy, which had already affected the church earlier in its history, holding that while God had made the soul, Satan had made the body, which was thus inherently corrupt. This had serious consequences for Christian morality, but especially for theology, since it made it impossible to believe in the dual nature of Christ.

The Cathar resistance, eventually overcome and followed by tens of thousands of executions, was led by the Count of Toulouse, a powerful independent prince before the destruction of the south. More than 600 years later, his distant descendant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), was born in Albi. Stunted physical development resulting from inbreeding - his parents were first cousins - made him a natural outsider, and whatever the truth about his ancestors, Lautrec became the artist par excellence of the moral decadence of his own time.

Paris in the later 19th century was an ocean of prostitution, which extended from the most expensive mistresses and kept women of the demimonde to dancers and actresses, shopgirls and barmaids and, finally, the residents of the maisons closes, the brothels, which ranged from quality establishments to cheap and sordid knocking-shops for a poorer clientele, staffed by correspondingly older and less appealing veterans of the trade.

The situation was not new in itself, except that the growth of the urban population provided more clients for the brothels and that of the middle class meant more demand for mistresses and kept women. But what was new at the end of the century was a fascination with this world, which was no doubt partly the corollary of the tightening of standards of Victorian respectability; the theme of the double life is also prominent in such books as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). A generation earlier, with Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire had been a precursor in evoking the dark fascination of prostitution, while Manet's Olympia (1863) baldly stated the facts of the profession in all their banality.

It was Degas who initiated a sustained interest in the lives of dancers and prostitutes, and he is also the most important stylistic influence on the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, as we can see at once in Jane Kinsman's fine exhibition at the NGA: Degas's emphasis on the figure - with an instinctive feeling for movement - rather than the landscape, which sets him apart from the other impressionists, his linear brushwork, alive with attention, and even some of his characteristic colour harmonies are everywhere visible.

But while Degas had painted the world of the dance, in which graceless proletarian girls could momentarily be made beautiful by the magic of art, and revealed the boredom and claustrophobia of brothel life, it was Lautrec who discovered the new world of cabaret that was flourishing at the end of the century on the hill of Montmartre, north of Paris, and beyond its city limits. Here - in a special zone excised from normal life and given over to pleasure, like the Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo - sexual indulgence was combined with a new kind of boisterous fun in the dance and comedy routines of the performers Lautrec often helped to discover and then immortalised in his prints and posters.

For who would even know of La Goulue, Valentin le desosse, Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril, Aristide Bruant or Caudieux without these extraordinary images? It is touching to compare Lautrec's pictures with surviving photographs of his subjects: here we have, ostensibly, the literal imprint of their features, which Lautrec frequently distorts in his own work, and not necessarily in order to make them more beautiful, and yet they are so small, so ordinary, so pitifully lacking in animation. What Lautrec has represented is not the woman, who often ended her life miserably, but the performance; not Louise Weber but La Goulue, not Jeanne Beaudon but Jane Avril.

From the earliest items in the exhibition, his gift for portraiture is striking and it underpins all his subsequent work. It is apparent in the sensitive picture of the young Emile Bernard, his fellow-student at Cormon's school. An early masterpiece is the portrait of Madame Fabre, sitting in a deckchair in her garden and holding a little dog in her lap. Lautrec has a remarkable, almost uncanny sensitivity to his subject, but perceptiveness is untempered by flattery, so that he had little future as a portraitist of the kind of women who expect to be flattered.

As important as the observation of the sitter's features is the instinctive feeling for the movement of her body, in this case the particular way the torso is thrown forward as she tries to sit upright in the deckchair, causing a slight turning back of the head in compensation. All of this suggests the particularity of a moment captured in transition, and the same effect is conveyed in the style and handling of the paint. The picture is almost a drawing in oils, and the handling of pigments is idiosyncratic: highly diluted with turpentine and applied to absorbent cardboard, they soak in and form a flat effect almost like gouache.

No effort is made to cover the whole pictorial surface and, punctuated with a few stripes of paint, the bare cardboard becomes the canvas of the deckchair. The overall effect, sketchy and unfinished, evokes the impermanent and the ephemeral, and this remains an important element of Lautrec's work in all media; his lithographs can be even more sparing, leaving large areas blank or implicitly transformed into skin or fabric by the lines around them.

Lautrec's pictures of prostitutes and brothels draw on such fragile, ephemeral and unfinished effects to convey the impression of lives lived largely in a state of boredom, occasionally touched with glamour and often weighted with weariness and the apprehension of encroaching age.

His view of his subjects is uniquely sympathetic without being sentimental, which means he neither revels pruriently in degradation nor edits out ugliness. Once again, there is perceptiveness, which entails empathy, but without flattery.

Images of theatre and cabaret naturally exploit the sense of the passing moment, often enhanced by the artificial illumination of the footlights, casting upside-down shadows on the face as the performer leans out towards the audience.

But it is above all in his ability to capture the most characteristic movements, the most fleeting but distinctive configurations of torso and limbs that Lautrec conveys the stage presence of each of his subjects; in their very nature, these are not attitudes that can be held as a pose, but which must be recalled by the artist almost in a single calligraphic gesture.

The skill is akin to that of the caricaturist, and it is in the same way that his posters convert each of the performers already mentioned into what are in one sense monumental caricatures. But if they are perhaps his most memorable creations, it is because Lautrec here combines his gift for movement and his sense of the momentary and insubstantial with a vivid simplicity of design, based on the dramatic silhouettes borrowed from Japanese Ukiyoe prints.

His first and biggest poster is a masterpiece of simplification in a complex composition. It was for the then newly opened Moulin Rouge, where there was no stage and the performers danced in an open space surrounded by patrons: hence the shadow fringe of spectators in the background. The centre of the composition is occupied by the figure of La Goulue seen from behind with one leg in the air and turning to see our reaction to what her upturned dress has revealed, but which is here left to the imagination as blank paper.

The composition is framed in the foreground by the shadowed silhouette of her dancing partner Valentin le desosse (literally, "boneless"), a gentleman amateur who performed for pleasure and not for money.

La Goulue is also seen, incidentally, in a painting of the same year, arriving at the Moulin Rouge accompanied by a younger dancer with the suggestive stage name "Nini les Pattes-en-l'air" (Nini with her paws in the air, no doubt alluding both to her dancing and other skills). La Goulue herself looks weary and unutterably jaded; again, Lautrec had an unerring eye for the difference between the performer on and off stage, in and out of character.

Other famous posters include two different versions of Aristide Bruant with his hat and red scarf, although a smaller black and white lithograph recalls the sardonic character of a performer whose specialty, apparently, was to insult the audience. I knew the owner of a cheap restaurant in the Rue Saint-Denis years ago who was like a last embodiment of the same tradition, and who entertained his patrons by insulting them at random and conducting an improvised verbal Punch and Judy show with his wife while we ate.

There is the portrait of Caudieux too, in his white tie and tails, and the famous image of Jane Avril, and a much more sinister poster advertising the popular contemporary novel La Reine de Joie, which shows a cocotte kissing a fat balding Jewish banker on the nose; this was just before the Dreyfus affair, contemporary with the Panama Canal scandal in which financial fraud and political scandal led to the first great outbreak of modern anti-Semitism.

There is always a dark and even desperate edge to the world that Toulouse-Lautrec depicts. Poverty, disease, abuse and alcoholism were the realities behind the illusion of pleasure and gaiety; but no one could capture the animation and excitement of that world as effectively as he did, without ever glossing over the perennial presence of death as its necessary and ineluctable shadow, hinted at in gaunt features and exhausted bodies.

There are some further contemporary French posters in the main collection, by Cheret and others, which only serve to confirm Lautrec's unique genius in this medium. For all their virtues, they fall constantly into kitsch and grandiloquence, and they are explicit to the point of platitude; only Lautrec, in conjuring up the floating world of Montmartre, knew how much to leave out.

Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and The Moulin Rouge, National Gallery of Australia, to April 2