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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (artist) French, 1864 - 1901 A Corner of the Moulin de la Galette, 1892 oil on cardboard Overall: 100 x 89.2 cm (39 3/8 x 35 1/8 in.) framed: 132.4 x 122.6 cm (52 1/8 x 48 1/4 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1963.10.67 On View |
The seamy underside of the Parisian demimonde, the singers, dancers, and patrons of Montmartre nightclubs, the notorious whores of the district and their clients were Toulouse-Lautrec's principal subjects. Scion of one of France's great aristocratic families, Lautrec was afflicted in youth by injuries that stunted his growth. He was encouraged to draw during his long convalescence and permitted professional training in an academic studio, which he deserted to embrace modernism. Lautrec particularly admired Degas and emulated his unusual perspectives and gritty social realism. He mastered the new medium of color lithography and produced an impressive body of posters and printed illustrations which share the incisive linear quality of the design of this painting.
Isolated by his painful physical deformity, Lautrec became an alcoholic and a denizen of dance halls and nightclubs in Montmartre, a poor working class neighborhood untouched by Baron Haussmann's renovations of Paris. Insight gained from his handicap and his emotional remoteness from his subjects gave his depictions special force, bitterness, and sympathy, while the artifice of his preferred settings and the disguised role playing of his subjects could alter reality amusingly or grotesquely in his work. Lautrec was an observer, a voyeur rather than a participant, and alienation is endemic even in the crowded Corner of the Moulin de la Galette.