Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born on 24 November 1864 in Albi, into an old Occitan aristocratic family. His parents Alphonse and Adele were first cousins: that consanguinity gave him a genetic bone fragility. At 13 he broke his left femur, at 14 his right. The bones never set properly. He stopped growing at 1.52 meters. His legs remained those of a child while his torso became that of an adult. He was already drawing, encouraged by his uncle Charles who painted as an amateur.

He moved to Paris in 1882, to the studio of Leon Bonnat, then to Fernand Cormon's, which also hosted Vincent van Gogh, Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin. There he met the painting that would mark him: Degas, raw naturalism, the Japanese print. He left the studio in 1886 and took a studio on rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre. The neighborhood, then half countryside, half red-light district, became his exclusive subject.

October 1891. Charles Zidler, manager of the Moulin Rouge open for two years on the place Blanche, commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec for a poster to relaunch the winter season. He delivered in three weeks a four-color lithograph, 191 by 117 centimeters: La Goulue with her legs in the air, Valentin le Desosse as a black silhouette. Three thousand copies pasted on the Morris columns of Paris. Before Toulouse-Lautrec, the poster imitated Jules Cheret. After him, it became what we now call a poster: flat color, black outline, compressed perspective, a direct debt to the ukiyo-e prints he collected.

Thirty-two posters came out between 1891 and 1900: Jane Avril (1893), Aristide Bruant (1893), May Belfort (1895), Divan Japonais (1893), Confetti (1894), La Revue Blanche (1895). Toulouse-Lautrec drew directly on the lithographic stone, with no preparatory drawing. He picked his pigments himself, watched the print run. His subjects were his friends: he had dinner at the Mirliton with Aristide Bruant, followed Jane Avril backstage, painted Yvette Guilbert at the Divan Japonais. That familiarity gives his posters their hold: a human truth under the graphic composition.

He died on 9 September 1901 at the château de Malrome, at 36, worn out by alcohol and syphilis. His mother in 1922 donated the studio holdings to the city of Albi, which opened the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum in the old Berbie Palace, the only monographic museum in the world devoted to a poster artist. A Toulouse-Lautrec print lives on a respectful wall. Thin matte black frame to pick up the outlines, interior palette rather dark (English green, burgundy, teal) under which the yellows and oranges of the posters come forward. Above a low sofa, in an entrance hall, or facing the front door.