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Artist or Maker: de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri (1864-1901)
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Provenance: Michel Manzi, Paris.
Mme Roy, Paris.
Georges Bernheim, Paris.
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Paris, New York and London.
Alfred Lindon, Paris, by whom acquired from the above in 1935, from whom confiscated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in 1940 and transferred to Germany, then returned to France and restituted to the Lindon Family in April 1946.
Jacques Lindon, New York, by descent from the above.
Acquired by the family of the present owner before 1968.
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Exhibited: Chicago, The Art Institute, Paintings, drawings, prints and posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, December 1930 - January 1931, no. 4.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Tenth loan exhibition: Lautrec, Redon, February - March 1931, no. 4.
Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Modern French Paintings, February - March 1934, no. 34 (titled 'At the cafe').
Geneva, Musée du Petit Palais, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1947.
Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Toulouse-Lautrec, December - March 1968, no. 11.
Geneva, Musée du Petit Palais, Montmartre vivant: de Toulouse-Lautrec à Utrillo, February - May 1996 (illustrated).
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Literature: C. Zervos (ed.), Cahiers d'Art, 1931, no. 2, p. 110.
M. Joyant, Lautrec, Paris, 1931, p. 262.
M.-G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, 1952, no. 2 (illustrated p. 4).
P. Huisman & M.-G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, London, 1964, p. 77 (illustrated p. 76).
M.-G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre, catalogue raisonné, vol. II, New York, 1971, no. 285, p. 128 (illustrated p. 129).
G. Caproni, Toulouse-Lautrec, Milan, 1977, p. 99, no. 198 (illustrated).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium
Toulouse-Lautrec is renowned, as critic Gustave Geffroy wrote in 1914, as '...the quintessential chronicler of Paris, as it is understood by those who come here seeking bright lights and wild pleasures' (G. Geffroy, 'Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. XII, no. 4, August 1914, pp. 91-92). Over the course of his short artistic career, Lautrec executed innumerable scenes of the Parisian demi-monde, focusing his attention in the late 1880s and early 1890s upon the popular entertainments of Montmartre -- the circus, the café-concert, the cabaret, and above all the bal or dance-hall. Au bal masqué de l'Elysée Montmartre of 1887 is a characteristic study of the Parisian nightlife that so fascinated Lautrec, which was selected to represent the artist's most important works in the celebrated retrospective exhibition organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930-1931. In this work, Lautrec depicts a moment of repose in one of the most infamous of these bals, the Elysée Montmartre, rumoured by historians to have been the very first venue of the legendary dancer of the chahut, La Goulue (The Glutton).
In 1886 Lautrec moved to 27 rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, where he would remain until 1897. Letters to his father reveal the conflict between his attraction to la vie bohème and his parents' desire to have their son live in one of Paris' chic quarters such as the Champs-Elysées or near the Arc de Triomphe. Yet, in Montmartre there was not only the atelier of his teacher Cormon, whose students included Van Gogh, Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, but also the café-concerts that would become the trademark of Lautrec's oeuvre. The Elysée Montmartre, in the Boulevard Rochechouart, was a working class dance hall and theatre, notorious for its disreputable, rowdy patrons. Huisman and Dortu have described the venue as, 'the original pleasure garden', which had opened in 1840, and after renovations by Deprez in 1880 became a hugely popular destination for visitors from the Right Bank: 'This dance hall was frequented by the young men of Montmartre who danced with their girlfriends, or else with the young women clearly eager to attract their attentions. Those who were of a solitary disposition or excessively cautious resisted the impulse to dance to M. Doufour's frenzied orchestra, and contented themselves with watching can-can, enthralled by the spirited dancers and the rustling of the lacy underclothing and voluminous petticoats' (P. Huisman and M.-G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, London, 1964, p. 86).
Distancing himself from the aristocratic world into which he was born, but through which he could never circulate due to a congenital deformity that left him dwarfed and disabled, Lautrec embraced this bohemian milieu, with its blithe belligerence and voyeuristic enchantments. 'It is not surprising,' Julia Frey has observed, 'that he was more comfortable in brothels, café concerts, and cabarets than he was in fashionable gatherings. In the former, 'kindness' was eliminated. Nothing was given away there; there was no pretence that the women loved their clients. The interactions were straightforward; everything was for sale. No one was being nice to him because they felt sorry for him. He, like any client, paid for drinks, amusement and sex. He owed no emotional debts and could choose to accept or decline what he was offered' (in Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 341).
If Lautrec owed no emotional debts to these desultory prostitutes of the world, he often found in their companionship, and in that of their madams, pimps and clientele, the easy fraternity of the similarly ill-fated and the fleeting thrills of celebrity. In Au bal masqué de l'Elysée Montmartre, Lautrec depicts the easily procured women of this popular dance hall of the Left Bank, awaiting invitations from undecided gentlemen. As the title indicates, this pensive scene is taken from a masked ball, one of Paris's latest, sexually-charged fads. The anonymity afforded by costumes generally enabled discreet encounters, and its exhibitionist allure naturally fascinated Lautrec, who loved to dress himself up in the costume of personae as varied as a Japanese gentleman, a choirboy, and a Spanish señorita. The intrigue and innuendo of the masked ball and its 'accompanying reputation for libertine behaviour--a happy combination of bordello and circus,' Frey has noted, was hugely popular (ibid., pp. 244-45).
Anonymity may have generally prevailed at these events, but all the figures in In Au bal masqué de l'Elysée Montmartre are exposed. The lady dressed in a white dress and bonnet forms the focal point of the composition. Of all the figures in this scene, she possesses the most highly defined features, her downcast eyes avoiding the appraising glances of her somewhat distanced, though desirous, male companions. Behind her, another female with a top-knot coiffure wears the low-cut bodice, short full-circle skirt and red stockings typical of a cabaret dancer, and bears a close resemblance to the performer La Goulue. She was a pretty sixteen-year-old girl when the painter met her in 1886 and she would become a favourite subject of his for years to come, along with her dance partner Valentin le Désossé, who may be identified as the angular, top-hatted male figure on the far right.
The period of 1887-88 was one of experimentation for Lautrec, in which he assimilated the techniques of the Impressionists and went on towards Neo-impressionism, sweeping him into the forefront of advanced art. It was also during this time that Lautrec began to explore the expressive qualities of colour. The yellow-green tint of Au bal masqué de l'Elysée Montmartre lends the scene a heady atmosphere, as if the room was viewed through a glass of absinthe. Indeed, the colour of the painter's favourite drink may have had an effect on Lautrec's work, who commented that: 'To me, in the colour green, there is something like the temptation of the devil' (cited in J. Adams, 'The Drink that Fuelled a Nation's Art', Tate Etc., issue 5, Autumn 2005).
In this painting, Lautrec replicates a technique learnt from the popular illustrator of cabaret scenes, Jean-François Raffaëlli, using unprimed paper or board for the principle tone of the composition with sparsely applied, diluted pigments to outline and highlight form and mass. This highly improvisatory style contributes a vigour and spontaneity to the surface, and provides an added sense of luminosity and space. Lautrec had practiced the illustrative art of caricature as a sideline to his academic studies and the subjects and techniques of illustrators like Raffaëlli, who often depicted the riotous dances of Elysée Montmartre for publications like Paris illustré, were perhaps the single-most important and tangible formative influence on the young artist. It is not only Lautrec's familiarity with his subject but also his remarkable proficiency as a draughtsman which makes works like In Au bal masqué de l'Elysée Montmartre so effective at capturing the atmosphere of Montmartrois leisure. As Claire Frèches-Thory comments in the catalogue to the 1991 Hayward Gallery exhibition of Lautrec's work, 'The speed of execution, evident from every brushstroke, is the result of long, deep and close observation of scenes so fleeting that they must always be caught on the wing: a world in which Lautrec has no rival' (exh. cat., Toulouse-Lautrec, Hayward Gallery, London, 1991, p. 272). Taking the themes of the contemporary press into the realm of high art, Lautrec's deftly rendered figures provide a psychological snapshot of the social ambiguities of the Third Republic, much maligned for its alleged fall into decadence and moral degeneracy. In this painting, Lautrec does not reveal the desires and intentions of these seasoned players, but leaves the outcome of this tantalizingly suggestive scene ultimately unknown.
