Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge paintings and posters
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Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge
Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge are often mentioned together for good reason: the work he did there was the high point of his career and the Moulin Rouge would have been just another Montmartre entertainment venue without Toulouse-Lautrec’s creative spark. Let’s look at three of his Moulin Rouge inspired creations.
The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889. The impresario owners promoted it as an upmarket dancehall. The publicity campaign spoke of an audience of ladies, artists and people of quality—all the advantages of Montmartre without the inconveniences of having to rub shoulders with the riff-raff.
It wasn’t just a dancing palace, there were also distractions and activities: a huge plaster elephant left over from the 1889 Paris World Fair, shooting galleries, donkey rides, belly dancers and clowns.
From the opening Lautrec was a regular. The place was a few hundred metres from his front door at the top of the street. It was perfect for him to observe Paris at play.
At The Moulin Rouge: The Dance
The new Moulin Rouge soon inspired Toulouse-Lautrec to paint one of his most ambitious works: At The Moulin Rouge: The Dance. The picture dates from 1889-90.
A typical scene at the Moulin Rouge
Toulouse-Lautrec throws us right into the middle of the Moulin Rouge action shortly after its opening. We see a modern, spacious, well-illuminated venue frequented by top-hatted well-dressed bourgeois men. People are promenading on the Moulin Rouge floorboards, the place is busy but not packed. One man is actually leaving the frame of the picture to the left suggesting that there is more to see over there outside the picture’s viewpoint.
The men we see are observing a new dancer learning her paces. They mill around whilst two women in the foreground—one in a bright pink outfit—also scrutinise the trainee. Behind the figures are some slender supporting pillars, globes of light, windows and vegetation. Lautrec has played with the effect of light on the windows and the branches to suggest more dancing figures. Even the trees from the garden behind the Moulin Rouge are captivated by the magic of the place.
Valentin ‘the Boneless’
If we follow the pink lady’s gaze we spot the lithe, sprightly frame of the famous dancer Valentin ‘the Boneless’, so called for his springy flexibility. Valentin the Boneless was the Moulin Rouge’s male star. He is going through a rehearsal with a female dancer. She is energetically kicking her left leg in the air. She’s learning the chahut or can-can for which the Moulin Rouge became famous.
The two figures that really stand out from the soberly dressed male spectators are both female—the trainee under instruction from Valentin who flashes her red stockings in the middleground and the woman, in her pink outfit, who dominates the foreground. That woman dressed up in pink appears to be giving the dancer a condescending look; she at least does not have to dance for her living.
Gentlemen! The picture is saying, come for a night to the Moulin Rouge, thrill to the high-kicking daring chahut and mingle with alluring single ladies and spirited dancers.
Little wonder that the owners of the Moulin Rouge bought the painting and hung it above the bar next to another of his works the Montmartre circus Performing Horsewoman. The impresario owners could not have asked for more in terms of favourable publicity had they commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec themselves.
Photographic evidence that At The Moulin Rouge: The Dance was executed at the studio in Rue Caulaincourt
We can be sure that this painting was executed in the studio at Rue Caulaincourt because there is clear evidence of Toulouse-Lautrec working on it there. The writer Gerstle Mack took a photograph of him working on At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance and called it Toulouse-Lautrec in his studio Rue Caulaincourt.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster Moulin Rouge: La Goulue
On the strength of At The Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Lautrec was commissioned in 1891 to design the new poster for the Moulin Rouge. What he produced was one of Lautrec’s and indeed Montmartre’s most famous images: Moulin Rouge: La Goulue.
The subject of the poster is similar to the At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance. We see the inside of the Moulin Rouge, a dancer and the elegant customers. Unlike the first picture this is no rehearsal, it’s now full-throttle showtime.
A female performer is shown in the middle of the chahut or can-can. Chahut in French suggests chaotic energy. The dancer is raising her leg, showing off her powerful thighs, which are covered by billowing, brilliant, white petticoats. This is the Moulin Rouge’s star turn: La Goulue (the Glutton).
The floor has been cleared and the lights have been turned up; all eyes are on her as she brings the Moulin Rouge to a standstill. Toulouse-Lautrec has caught her in mid-turn, energised, balanced and concentrated.
La Goulue’s moment in blazing light
Everyone but La Goulue is in shadow or silhouette. There is only one pivotal figure illuminated by blazing light: La Goulue.
The electric lights have now been stylised to a series of linked hovering yellow globes, magnetised by the Goulue’s uninhibited performance and erotic charge.
Valentin the Boneless, the Goulue’s regular dancing partner, is present but only as a pale foreground silhouette. For the moment the limelight is on the Goulue. He is in danger of having his top hat knocked off by La Goulue’s flailing boot as she stamps, springs and turns on the Moulin Rouge’s floorboards.
A radically streamlined image
Lautrec has adapted his technique to suit the medium. This is an advertising poster which has to make an impact in the blink of an eye as you pass it on the street. Lautrec has radically streamlined the image, reducing detail to the minimum and concentrating the viewer’s gaze on La Goulue’s star performance.
Lautrec chooses to drop the individual characterisation of his audience we saw in the At The Moulin Rouge: The Dance painting, instead all are now reduced to inky black. We can tell that the continuous frieze of silhouettes in the background is a quality audience by the gents’ top and the ladies’ fancy feathery hats.
That is all we need to know because the audience is no longer important. Representing the spectators as uncharacterised shadows shows the influence of the Japanese prints which Lautrec and many other artists admired. Silhouette and its dramatic possibility was also on show at the ingenious shadow play theatre of the Chat Noir cabaret which Lautrec was known to frequent.
Come and experience the thrill of La Goulue’s sensational performance, witness the novelty of electric light and mix with an elegant crowd at the Moulin Rouge is what this poster is saying.
The Goulue poster made Toulouse-Lautrec famous
With the lightning impact of this great poster Toulouse-Lautrec found himself in the centre of a modern advertising campaign. Printing took his posters directly to the streets of Paris. Modern lithographic techniques facilitated a wider colour palette, better reproduction and mass distribution. Toulouse-Lautrec was able to quickly adapt his artistic technique to get the most out of the advances.
Lautrec’s art became a contemporary popular phenomenon which anyone could see, appreciate or criticise. He was suddenly famous outside the closed world of art connoisseurs, gallery owners and buyers. La Goulue too became a celebrity.
The Moulin Rouge: La Goulue poster was so new and popular that a friend of Lautrec’s describes seeing it being drawn along by a horse and cart in the Avenue de l’Opera. He was so captivated by it that he had to jog along just to look at it longer.
Lautrec’s posters became so famous that no sooner had they been pasted up in the streets of Paris than they disappeared again, still wet, into a collection or the parallel economy.
Lautrec’s greatest painting: At The Moulin Rouge
In the painting At The Moulin Rouge from 1892 – 1893, Lautrec chooses to show a more subdued scene. We peer into a VIP area and see a select group of performers and regular clients. These include a self-portrait with his cousin Dr. Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran.
The mood has certainly changed from the La Goulue poster. The spotlight has gone and now the electric light has turned the scene into a series of sombre browns and sickly greens.
In the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue poster, the lines of the floorboards invited our eye to admire The Goulue’s energetic performance and brilliant, billowing, foam of fresh petticoat.
In At The Moulin Rouge our visual passage is blocked by two elements: a sturdy, wide balustrade and a formidable cropped female presence who suddenly appears to step into the painting from the right.
She is an unsettling presence. She wears deathly white plastered grease paint make up and blood-red lipstick, a sinister green shadow is cast on the upper part of her face from the side lighting. The inquisitive tilt of her head means that if we want to go any further into the picture then we will have to get permission from her.
Unlike the earlier Moulin Rouge works where, as spectators, we had the freedom to wander the floor and look where we pleased, now passage is blocked and the defensive barriers are back in place.
We’d love to hold on to the good times of the first two Moulin Rouge works but we too are excluded here. We can’t eavesdrop on the conversation or look any closer by the balustrade and the uncanny confrontational female presence in the right foreground.
The illusion of the Moulin Rouge
We see a seated group: the men are regular clients and friends of Lautrec’s and the women, including the flame haired Jane Avril with her back to us, are dancers.
Behind the main group we see La Goulue looking in a wall mirror, adjusting her hair. Still in the background we see Toulouse-Lautrec and his cousin who appear to be glumly stalking out of the picture.
Lautrec has accentuated his own features and made his cousin a stooping presence by his side. Once again, as in many other of his paintings, he is exploring the graphic possibilities of caricature. The two exit the unreal atmosphere of a late night at the Moulin Rouge.
A table where the conversation has stalled
The table appears silent and unanimated. The conversation has fizzled out, people look into space and avoid eye contact. The dancer sitting opposite Jane Avril looks puffy and tired; Lautrec has given her a jaundiced yellow tone. She looks as though she is at the end of her career.
Lautrec has caught a late-night scene after the adrenaline of showtime has subsided and the alcohol has dulled the senses. We have come back to the disillusion of plain reality. Real life has really kicked in.
That reality includes the fact that communication between the bourgeois patrons and the lower-class performers is difficult. The people in this painting find it hard to step out of socially imposed roles. In fact the accepted limits of status, hierarchy and culture make it almost impossible.
Bourgeois and working-class people existed in different social orbits with limited overlap. Identifying this mutual ignorance between the two social groupings helped the impresarios behind the Moulin Rouge to seize on the commercial potential of theatricalising one class so that it became acceptable and consumable by another.
The commercial transaction between people of different social status
The table we see here is not spontaneous or convivial. It is simply a by-product of the commercial transaction between people from different social backgrounds with nothing in common. They have been thrown together by the artificial spectacle of Montmartre, where better-off people can watch poorer people perform.
What we see in At the Moulin Rouge is the downside of show business—it is all just an illusion, a performance and a pretext for people to spend and make money. The performers are quickly consumed and passed over.
With this great painting Toulouse-Lautrec has, at a stroke, illustrated the conservatism of contemporary French society and—like his doctor cousin—dissected the commercial principle behind the Moulin Rouge.
So is Toulouse-Lautrec criticising bourgeois decadence? Perhaps, he was after all an aristocrat himself, but just like his cousin treating patients, Lautrec had learned to keenly observe and keep his distance from judgment. He has captured the end of the night at the Moulin Rouge and invited us to look in. We may judge. He preferred to paint scene and capture mood.
La Goulue’s fairground hut decorations
By 1895 the Goulue was no longer entering the Moulin Rouge except as a paying customer. Her career there had come to an end. Although she was no longer the Moulin Rouge’s star turn, La Goulue still danced.
She rented a fairground hut close to the Moulin Rouge to perform a belly dance which also featured her trade mark high-kick. She asked her friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to decorate the outside of the structure.
Lautrec’s advertising for La Goulue
Lautrec was by now famous and it says much for his loyalty that he was willing to devote time and energy to develop and execute a series of essentially advertising/decorative panels for a fairground hut. He knew that these would be open to the ravages of the weather and be exposed to the public.
Lautrec was used to seeing prints of his posters displayed in the streets of Paris but the Goulue panels were original works.
He was perhaps aware that his fame as an artist had much to do with the image of the Goulue and her prowess as a dancer. Their fame went together. To his credit it looks like Lautrec’s conscience would not allow him to meanly drop her once the tide of her fortune was on the turn.
The result is the lively and humorous Goulue’s Fairground Hut Decorations which can be seen at the Orsay Museum in Paris.
Lautrec’s friends and Moulin Rouge regulars are the audience and once again Lautrec is featured, this time next to his favourite dancer Jane Avril. Oscar Wilde is there too.
Point 8, the Moulin Rouge, Montmartre, 2018. Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and posters made it world famous.
All photographs © David Macmillan except: (1), (2), (3) (4), (5).
All Wikipedia photographic attribution courtesy of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons Attribution generator :
(1) Albert Kahn, Paris 1914 Moulin Rouge, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
(2) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French, 1864 - 1901 (1864 - 1901) – Artist/Maker (French) Born in Albi, France. Dead in Langon, France. Details of artist on Google Art Project, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French - At the Moulin Rouge- The Dance - Google Art Project, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
(3) Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (1864 - 1901) – Artist (French) Details of artist on Google Art Project, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de - Moulin Rouge-La Goulue - Google Art Project, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
(4) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec artist QS:P170,Q82445 Details of artist on Google Art Project, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - At the Moulin Rouge - Google Art Project, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
(5) Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, Toulouse-Lautrec - La Goulue arrivant au Moulin Rouge, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons