THE GIANT DWARF

...For he did live and work in brothels, observing and sketching with devastating accuracy the inmates who learned to pay little attention to their guest's odd habit...

...His views seen from above, his technique of setting the main figure off-center in a scene, or giving the foreground unexpected importance in relation to the subject as a whole—these and other innovations he learned from Degas...

...The owner of the house, the prostitutes, the patrons, and, the hangers-on all provided Lautrec with motifs that he set down with the clinical precision his skilled hand was capable of, yet also with the excitability of a feverish mind that saw far more than a camera would have recorded...

...Much of what he saw as a paying guest of an establishment in the Rue des Moulins must have jarred the good taste of the artist and the sensibility of the well-bred aristocrat...

...Lautrec was not immoral for immorality's sake...

...All he wanted was "a short but intense life...

...But when all these things have been said —and set in their rightful place—what still remains of him...

...The Post-Impressionists, Fry declared, do not seek to give "a pale reflex of actual appearance," but to "arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality...

...Let the body be wrecked, let the individual be viewed as a criminal by polite society—it was more important to extend the range of one's sensation, to remove the blinders called normal intelligence...

...Van Gogh, Lautrec, and Modigliani in our time, and a host of other superbly gifted men failed to celebrate a fortieth birthday...

...Had Lautrec developed into what is called a "normal man," he probably would have led a different life, perhaps one like that of his father, Count Alphonse, an eccentric country gentleman well known as a great hunter and as an habitue of Paris clubs and race-tracks...

...A stroke paralyzed his legs...

...The poet Arthur Rimbaud, ten years older than Lautrec, had advocated the "long, immense, and deliberate derangement of all the senses," had declared it the duty of the poet to exhaust "all forms of love, suffering, insanity...

...These "documentaries" of the notorious maisons closes belong to Lautrec's most important works...

...Lautrec looked up with admiration to Degas, a grim recluse whose work constitutes a bridge from Impressionism, which tried to reproduce things as accurately as they appeared to the retina, to Post-Impressionism, which, by simplification, omission of details, and other devices, concentrated on what Clive Bell called the "significance of form...

...Unfortunately, Lautrec was not able to enjoy very long the freedom he bought himself with his drawings...

...Again the faithful Arsene Alexandre rose to the defense of his friend: "Certainly to those who see no more than the outward appearance," he wrote in Le Figaro, "Toulouse-Lautrec was a man who was physically deformed, a man who sought frequently to spice his conversation with the vulgarities of the populace, and who found the inspiration for his masterly compositions elsewhere than in the fashionable quarter of Saint-Germain...

...He was locked up in one yesterday, That insanity which has so long refused to admit its authorship of these paintings and drawings is now obliged to affix its signature to them openly and with official confirmation...

...What is missing in both novel and movie is an attempt to explain the artist's motivations, the reasons why he would rather live and work among society's outcasts than with the members of his celebrated family, whose line went back to Charlemagne's era...

...It may be true that out of a bitter sense of bravado and out of his need for escape he sometimes could be taxed with over-indulgence in stimulants...

...For several weeks he lay in bed, almost unable to hear or to speak...

...Today, everyone but a few prudes who dispute an artist's right to study the entire world admires the skill and daring of Toulouse-Lautrec...

...If Lautrec had been merely a Peeping Tom, he would not rate even a footnote in the history of art...

...In this particular painting, however, La Goulue appears only in the background...

...This Lautrec oil, incidentally, is a typical Post-Impressionist painting, even though that term was not coined by the British critic, Roger Fry, until a decade after Lautrec's death...

...There, too, is the heavily bearded, tiny artist and, beside him, his regular companion, his cousin Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran...

...He did mix the most amazing cocktails for himself and his numerous friends, and he did consume liquor in enormous quantities...

...To escape the tempting atmosphere of Paris, he made trips to Bordeaux and Le Havre...

...But in his own lifetime there were many who resented and rejected him...

...He was, rather, a disciple of the poetes maudits (accursed poets) who tried to open the gates of paradise with such keys as adventure, sex, alcohol, and drugs...

...This tragic death did not stop the slander of those Parisians who were not sensitive enough to realize that with him had died, not an irresponsible rake, but one of the most ardent chroniclers of his flamboyant times...

...Then one day he slipped on the polished floor of the castle's drawing room and broke his left thigh...

...Documentaries," too, are the pictures he painted on the basis of countless sketches made at the big Montmartre dance-hall, Moulin Rouge ("Red Mill"), at the Place Blanche, and the Rue Lepic...

...Perhaps it is impossible to rescue a man of genius who is bent upon self-destruction...

...Why—why...

...Triumphantly, one of the wrote: "Toulouse-Lautrec has always been a promising candidate for the lunatic asylum...

...Repelled by a bourgeois society and the machine age, these poets attempted to break through the limits of daily experience into a higher "reality," to attain to the essence of things...

...Nonetheless, here was raw material for fifty oils and five hundred drawings...

...One would think that among those who have dragged his name through the newspaper columns, there was not a soul who had ever known him...

...As a result of these two mishaps, Henri's legs remained disproportionately short, while his body grew normally from the waist up...

...There is little point in describing here, for the thousandth time, the "gay" life Lautrec lived in the cafes, music halls, bars, and bordellos on and around The Hill...

...Still, he would not give up...

...The Count, like his wife, Adele, lived to a ripe old age...

...Yet he was unable to lead a completely sober, simple life...

...Caravaggio among the Old Masters...

...Luckily, he had a steadfast admirer and defender in the journalist Arsene Alexandre who went straight to the "madhouse" to talk with the sick man, only to find, as he put it, "a lunatic full of wisdom...

...This painter for whom the maisons closes held no secret knew equally well the places of more sophisticated entertainment, such as the Opera and the Comedie Francaise and, in addition, his father's beloved race tracks...

...Somehow the bones never mended properly...

...Nor is it likely that he would have wrecked his health with drugs and a host of other dissipations...

...Modigliani, for instance, would allow no one to change his self-destructive manner of living...

...The Art Institute of Chicago owns one of Lautrec's finest pictures (At the Moulin Rouge), in the Moulin Rouge series of oils...

...In Le Figaro the courageous Alexandre wrote an article in which he accused the Parisians of burying a fellow Parisian without making sure he was really dead: "What has been written about Lautrec is beyond belief...

...later he accidentally stumbled into a ditch and broke his right thigh...

...Undoubtedly, Lautrec would have dabbled in drawing, for his talent was apparent at the age of three when he, unable as yet to write his name, wanted to inscribe himself into the register of those attending the baptism of his baby brother by drawing an ox...

...In his desire for novelty, Lautrec was unmatched...

...It does full justice to the artist—and to the man...

...A year ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art historian and critic...

...Lautrec died before his thirty-seventh birthday...

...Everything remains...

...There was not an aspect of him that was insignificant or futile . . . the least touch of color, the slightest trace of his pencil, expresses, through a great deal of animality, a great deal of humanity...

...Millions have read the novel based on Lautrec, Moulin Rouge by Pierre La Mure, and millions more have seen the Hollywood film in which the crippled artist was portrayed by Jose Ferrer...

...He might have prolonged his life for a while, had he strictly observed doctor's orders: no more wild parties, no more brothels, no more drinks...

...This, apparently, was what Lautrec wanted too...

...Nobody before him had studied his dismal world with this thoroughness, and the freakish-looking dwarf had a genuine fellow-feeling for the women whose souls were as crippled as was his body...

...In his restless curiosity, however, Lautrec by far outdid his "teacher," whose reserve kept him from many a place that was frequented by the less fastidious younger man...

...Financially independent and utterly indifferent to the attitudes of respectable society, he "ruled" the Parisian Bohemia for nearly fifteen years—from 1886, when the young student who had already produced indisputable masterpieces rented a place in the heart of Montmartre, to that tragic day in 1901 when, foreseeing the end, the mortally sick man asked to be taken to his mother and died a short time later in the Chateau de Malrome, the family estate...

...But with his family background it is unlikely that a "normal" Lautrec would have chosen the strenuous career of an artist or that he would have produced a veritable mountain of pictures...

...He was unable to complete what might have become one of his finest works, An Examination at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris...

...They all were coevals of that tragic cripple, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, to give the full length title of the stunted aristocratic genius...

...The wretched dwarf and the inspired artist seem to have emerged at the same time...

...But the last bit of strength soon vanished...

...For when he was confined to an asylum, some of the journalists believed that the artist, who had a sharp tongue and was feared for his repartee, would never emerge again from his prison...

...Nothing need be added to Alexandre's characterization of Lautrec...

...In some cases this was due to irrational accidents—like the bullets that killed the German painters, August Macke and Franz Marc, in World War I. In the case of Lautrec, there was an unfortunate combination of physical and emotional factors...

...The Post-Impressionists—especially the aged Cezanne and such younger men as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, and, of course, Lautrec—produced pictures with little regard for mere photographic truth...

...But he was, first and foremost, a keen student of human nature...

...Seated in the foreground are several of the painter's friends...

...When Lautrec was born, in 1864, no one at the splended castle of Albi in southern France could have guessed that this scion of a wealthy old family would become one of the most unhappy men of his era...

...If one wishes to study, with relish and delight, la belle epoque—the time prior to the outbreak of World War I—Lautrec's oils, drawings, and lithographs must be consulted...

...The giant dwarf by Alfred Werner A merica's Grandma Moses, the art historian Bernard Berenson, the painters Henri Matisse and Emil Nolde all passed away within the last decade, after unusually long and extremely fruitful lives...

...He had the peculiar satisfaction of being able to read his "obituaries...

...On September 9, 1901, he died, before his thirty-seventh birthday...

...From these works one can gather not so much how Paris and the Parisians looked, as how the denizens of the French capital felt about the world within and without...

...But Lautrec did not anticipate that his last few months would be a veritable hell...

...Through his physician cousin, Gabriel de Celeyran, he gained access to the operating room of a famous hospital and sketched him at work...

...They all survived him in good health by half a century...

...While both the novel and the movie here and there indulge in gross exaggerations, it must be conceded that the facts of his life—as recorded, for instance, in the memoirs of his friends, the Montmartre entertainers Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril, or in the sober writings of Lautrec's boyhood friend, Maurice Joy-ant—were as fantastic as the most uninhibited fiction...

...the historian asks...

...Fighting death, he tried to finish a portrait he had begun a year earlier...

...In its boldness the composition reveals how much Lautrec had profited from studying the works of his idol, Edgar Degas, as well as Japanese posters...

...The misanthropic Degas was sparing with good words for any fellow artist, but he encouraged the misshapen young man in whom others saw only a brilliant dilettante...

...To make the excursion into the world of the unknown, the mind had to be freed of the shackles of reason...

...The illusion of space is created by the converging diagonals of floor boards and balustrade...

...For years, Moulin Rouge was the most celebrated pleasure resort of tourists, thanks, to a large extent, to the performer, La Goulue, a brazen lesbian with an ugly face but a beautiful figure who danced like a demon...

...Until he was fourteen, Henri was considered a normal child...

...If the title "King of Bohemia" can be given properly to any modern artist, it is Lautrec who deserves it most...

...At the Moulin Rouge demonstrates that Lautrec learned from Degas to select aspects of reality that had never before been observed...

...Among his books are "Pascin" and "Modigliani the Sculptor...

...He did spend some time in a lunatic asylum—an expensive and comfortable one—where, from memory, he drew scenes from circus life with such stupendous mastery as to convince the alienists that he was no madman after all ("I have purchased my liberty with my drawings," he subsequently boasted...