Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Divan (detail), circa 1893, oil on cardboard, 54 x 69 cm, São Paulo, Art Museum of Sao Paulo seated Chateaubriand © Museu de arte de Sao Paulo / Photo © João Musa

Three rejections condition the current vision of Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901): he would have despised the values ​​of his class, neglected the art market, exploited the world of Parisian nightlife and priced sex, looking down on it. . The liberation of forms and the satirical verve of the best of the work would be the proof. This conflicting vision of its modernity, typical of the 1970s and 1980s, must be replaced by another, more positive one. This exhibition - which brings together around 200 works - wants to both re-register the artist and bring out his singularity.

The contradiction is only apparent, as Lautrec himself acted simultaneously as an heir, a man of network, conquering public space and an accomplice of the world which he translated with a unique force, a leniency sometimes fierce, making more intense and meaningful "the present life" without judging it. Rather than affiliating him with the caricature which seeks to hurt, even humiliate, he must be linked to a very French line of expressive, abrupt, funny, direct realism (Yvette Guilbert would say) whose names include the names: Ingres, Manet , Degas. Like them, moreover, Lautrec makes photography his ally.

More than any other artist of the XIXth century, he associated himself with photographers, amateurs or professionals, was aware of their power, served their promotion, appropriated their effects in the search for movement. The photographic archive of Lautrec joins, moreover, the practices of the aristocratic play on appearances and identities which one exchanges with pleasure, means of saying that life and painting do not have to bend to ordinary limits, nor to those of the avant-garde. "Everything enchants", summarizes Thadée Natanson.

Since 1992, the date of the artist's last French retrospective, many exhibitions have explored the links between Toulouse-Lautrec's work and the “culture of Montmartre” of which he would be both chronicler and contemptor. This sociological approach, happy by what it tells us about the expectations and concerns of the time, has reduced the scope of an artist whose origins, his opinions and his open aesthetic preserved from any inquisitive temptation. Lautrec never set himself up as an accuser of urban vices and the impure haves.

By his birth, his training and his life choices, he rather wanted to be the pugnacious and comical interpreter, terribly human in the sense of Daumier and Baudelaire, of a freedom that it is a question of making the public understand better. today. By dint of privileging the weight of the context or the folklore of the Moulin Rouge, we have lost sight of the aesthetic and poetic ambition with which Lautrec invested what he learned, in turn, from Princeteau, Bonnat and Cormon.

As his correspondence attests, Manet, Degas and Forain enabled him, from the mid-1880s, to transform his powerful naturalism into a more incisive and caustic style. No linear and uniform evolution for all that: real continuities can be observed on both sides of his short career. One of them is the narrative component which Lautrec shies away from much less than one might think. She was particularly active at the approach of death, around 1900, when her vocation as a history painter took a desperate turn.

The other dimension of the work that should be linked to its learning is the desire to represent time, and soon to deploy its duration rather than to freeze its momentum. Encouraged by his passion for photography and the dubbing of Degas, electrified by the world of modern dancers and inventors, Lautrec never stopped reformulating the space-time of the image.

As soon as the work falls into the striking synthesis of the 1890s, opened by the revolutionary poster of the Moulin Rouge, Lautrec develops a strategy between Paris, Brussels and London, which the exhibition underlines by distinguishing the public face of his work from the side. more secret. Lautrec renounces the official Salon, not the public space, nor the large format. Proof that he was looking, like Courbet and Manet before him, for a change in history painting by exploring modern society in these multiple faces, often in defiance of decorum. That he enjoyed the spectacle of Montmartre, that he celebrated the aristocracy of pleasure and the priestesses of vice in the manner of Baudelaire, is undeniable. The brothel even offers her a space where women enjoy a unique independence and authority, however paradoxical they may be.

Insatiable enthusiast, Lautrec quickly perfected the means of communicating the electricity of cancan, the harsh brilliance of modern lighting and the fever of a clientele given over to excess. The movement, which nothing restrains, decomposes before our eyes, leading to the most dynamic posters, such as prints by Loïe Fuller and panels by La Goulue, also cinematographic. There is here a madness of speed and a pre-futuristic capacity which brings together the gallop of the horse, the rowdies of cabarets, the velocipedic fever in the automobile. However, even the magic of machines does not manage to dehumanize his painting and his prints, always embodied.

Like his chosen writers, who were often familiar with the Revue Blanche, Lautrec managed to reconcile the subjective fragmentation of the image and the desire to lift modern life towards new myths.

Linking painting, literature and new mediums, the exhibition finds its way, as close as possible to this involuntary midwife of the XNUMXth century.

Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, practical info

Duration:

• Monday, Thursday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 20 p.m.
• Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 22 p.m.
• weekly closing on Tuesday

Fees :

• 15 €, TR 11 € (16-25 years old, job seekers and large families)
• free for children under 16, beneficiaries of social minima

access:

• metro line 1 and 13 "Champs Élysées-Clemenceau" or line 9 "Franklin D. Rossevelt"

information and reservations: www.grandpalais.fr