Cammy Agrimson, “Toulouse-Lautrec and the Creation of Self-Identity,” BOZetto, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2018), 7-10.

 

For Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the construction of identity was a complex process, often at odds with his reality. He was something of an anomaly, an artist descended from aristocrats, physically handicapped, and often criticized for his expressive, realistic portrayals of the people of Montmartre’s café and red-light district during the late nineteenth century, an era which art historians refer to as the Post-Impressionist Period. By comparing Lautrec’s painted self-portraits to photographs of him and to the self-portraits of his contemporaries, we gain a better sense of how he manipulated his image to negotiate his roles as aristocrat, artist, and consumer.

 

As a child, relations between Henri and his father, Alphonse Charles, comte de Toulouse-Lautrec, were strained at best. Alphonse was an avid outdoorsman who often spent days and weeks away from his family for the purpose of hunting. Prolonged absences made Henri’s mother, Adèle (née Tapié de Celeyran), upset, but Henri was fascinated by the mysterious man when he did finally arrive home and command attention. Alphonse helped his son develop an appreciation for the countryside, horsemanship, and falconry, the last of which was affirmed in the gift of a book inscribed “Everything which is imprisoned dies.”[1] At the tender age of thirteen, Henri had fractured both of his femurs, neither of which healed properly. For most of his life his body presented the aspect of a well-developed torso supported on child-size legs. These injuries caused great pain for Henri, not only physically but also emotionally. He required a cane to move about and he imagined himself an outcast among the ultra-virile country gentry.

 

Immersing himself in art, Henri, now a young man referred to as Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec (or the pseudonym Tréclau), studied in the studio of portraitist Léon Bonnat in Paris and gravitated to Montmartre district, replete with artists and writers.  He drew and painted portraits in the dignified surroundings of his family home as honestly as he portrayed the brashness and vulgarity of Montmartre’s cabaret scene.[2]  He selected dancers, prostitutes, and entertainers as subjects for his portraits and genre scenes and in his depictions showed empathy without idealization—they were worthy human beings in their own right.

 

One example is Seated Dancer in Pink Tights (1890), a virtual portrait of a tired ballet dancer sitting in a frothy costume. Inspired by the many works of Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec shows her in wonderful detail, cool-toned against a vague, warm background. The dancer’s face conveys a sense of the fatigue and loneliness that she feels.  At this time, ballet dancers were often exploited and objectified; their skirts got shorter and shorter, audience members ogled and catcalled, and sex work became a part of the dancer’s life; they were regarded as almost the equivalent of a prostitute.[3] Lautrec contributed an original perspective which is best seen in comparison to Degas’s approach.  Whereas Degas preferred an idealistic portrayal, which propelled his art into a realm loosely objective and intellectual, Toulouse-Lautrec preferred a poignant realism in order to connect with deep human emotions which shows an understanding of the human condition.[4]  Whereas many of Lautrec’s friends and colleagues saw the dancer as luminous performer operating on the fringe of society, he identified with her in an intimate moment as if he had knowledge of her character and dispositions.

 

Judging from Lautrec’s oeuvre, it is clear that as he aged, he found himself increasingly frequenting the company of Montmartre’s destitute, particularly prostitutes. Among the most painted was Jane Avril, the redhead at the center of Henri’s spatially distorted Au Moulin Rouge of 1892-1895 (Figure 1). At first the painting seems off-putting, due to the brown balustrade cropping the lower left edge and the artificial green lighting that distorts the figure’s face at the right edge, but these abstract devices drawn from Japanese woodblock printing and photography eventually lead the eye in, forcing us to look more closely at what is going on in the middle and background. Gradually overcoming initial apprehension, the viewer realizes that this is an altogether different, self-contained world. Avril appears from behind, sitting somewhat apart from a group of friends or acquaintances, her head lowered as if engaged with a beverage.  There is a sense of enjoyment and comradery: from the faces of the figures and the glasses on the table it is clear that these friends are inebriated, but they are having fun. These undistinguished people are not only human, but also exist in a world entirely their own, registering a different kind of daily pathos and joy. In the background, a dancer fixes her hair in one of what seems like a wall of green-tinted mirrors. Moving towards the left are two men, side by side, of which the taller is Lautrec’s cousin, Dr. Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, and the shorter is Lautrec himself. By including himself in the picture, albeit circumscribed by his cousin’s profile and at the back of the room, Lautrec attempted to identify with this world of night creatures and outcasts. But it is a reticent move that suggests that he did not quite fit in with the people of Montmartre either. That he could not show himself seated among this company of friends suggests a deep insecurity.

 

Though Lautrec did not paint many self-portraits, those that he did paint convey a sense of self-consciousness. Self-Portrait Before a Mirror, done in 1883 (Figure 2), provides a much more intimate view of the artist and the artist’s view of himself than his self-insertions in genre paintings. Not only is this a portrait, but the mirror, reflecting Lautrec back to himself, provides insight into how Lautrec saw himself. In this work, we see Lautrec’s face at three-quarter view; traditionally the aspect that reveals character, here it is mostly cast in shadow. Furthermore, he represents only his upper body—everything below the waist is hidden, blocked from our view by a mantel laden with a clock and candle holder. Going to such lengths to hide his face and lower body suggests great dissatisfaction with his appearance, and its suitability for a self-image. In addition, he has loosened his brushstrokes to create a blurred effect in the mirror—we are tempted to believe that he has even removed his spectacles!  The function of the mirror is to aid the viewer not only to gaze at the artist, but also to gaze with the artist back at someone or something. This is reminiscent of Velazquez’s Las Meninas which employs one of Velazquez’s most popular illusionistic techniques in order to exchange gazes: the viewer is not only looking at the artist, but in looking allows the artist to consider the viewer as the subject of his gaze.  We are thus the subject of Lautrec’s penetrating gaze, and as such we are permitted no close scrutiny of him.  Clearly the artist had an aversion to depicting himself; as he looked into the mirror and saw himself, he chose to paint himself as he wished to be seen; he employed shading and cropping to indicate an acceptable but indecipherable fragment. This portrait is very intimate: Lautrec’s illusion of virility comes at the cost of revealing his discomfort with being scrutinized.

 

In Self-Portrait, Caricature, 1885, Lautrec took his self-image in the opposite direction. Instead of obscuring or cropping any features he was unhappy with, he greatly exaggerated them, perhaps intending to use humor to admit that which he was ashamed. His nose and mouth are disproportionately large, emphasized by a heavy black line, while his glasses are replaced by a monocle.  Laurence Loeb describes the relationship between wit and hostility in caricature and observes that "caricature seeks to discover a likeness in deformity....it serves the purpose of unmasking another person, familiar to us as a technique of degradation.”[5] The caricature pokes fun at Lautrec’s physiognomy and simultaneously manages to obscure his deformed legs with a long coat. This is in line with photographs of Lautrec (Figures 3 and 4), one of which shows the artist at bust length in a Pierrot costume staring directly at the viewer, and another of which shows him at full length in traditional Japanese costume, his eyes crossed and the robe arranged so as to completely cover his legs. These examples show that Lautrec had a difficult time with his self-image, and compromised either by hiding behind humor, or disguising or distorting his image.

 

Henri Rachou painted a rather precise portrait of Lautrec at full face in 1883 (Figure 5) and stature. Rachou depicted his friend as he appeared with glasses and bowler hat, seemingly at ease leaning forward on a couch and mixing colors for an unseen canvas.  There is something honest and endearing about the portrayal, suggesting that Lautrec won friends by force of his personality and ease of work movements. Carolus Duran also painted a portrait of Lautrec, though the date of the work is unknown. A very refined portrait of a mature Lautrec, the likeness required that he be shown sitting at an angle to the viewer, his head turned back, exposing his face to the light. Duran chose to downplay the amplitude of Lautrec’s nose and mouth and to omit the lower body as if Lautrec rarely allowed himself to be painted in entirety or without idealizing passages.

 

Lautrec’s forced disconnection between his actual and painted appearances implies a parallel tension between the concepts of the Self versus the Other as articulated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel considered the Self to be one’s personality, the essential characteristics of one’s personal identity, while the Other was the body, or the superficial characteristics of one’s personality – constituted as an alter ego.[6]  Hegel explained that the realization of self-consciousness is really a struggle for recognition between two individuals bound to one another in a relationship of dependence. Hegel explains that self-awareness arises as one begins to see oneself through the eyes of another (or through the image they suppose others hold of them). Applying this to Lautrec’s self-portraits, particularly his Self-Portrait in a Mirror, we see a clear disparity as Lautrec has obviously modified his self-image and shrouded or omitted everything else because he refuses to acknowledge the Other as a worthy representative of the Self. Yet some photographers and painters saw him in an entirely different way, as somebody at ease with the demands of work and the vogue of culture.  So what would account for Lautrec’s own lack of a resolution? 

 

Even after leaving home, he seems to have been surrounded by or reminded of people with varying feelings about him: his father, who secretly saw him as a disappointment, and was often absent from the artist’s life; his mother, who coddled him even into adulthood, believing he needed an excessive amount of care; the prostitutes and entertainers who befriended him and invited him into a sensual world he could never fully share; the consumers of his artwork, who were both impressed by his art and indignant at its subject matter.[7]  Julia Frey described Lautrec’s self-image, saying, “His perception of his role was prophetic, since renown would finally come to him not as a performer, but as an observer…although his deformity may have been the image, which affected him most, and certainly drove him to accept the passivity of the artist‐observer…”[8] Lautrec was more comfortable with the role of observer than that of the observed, putting himself at the edge of every social circle, rendering every social outcast with the fullness of life, allowing them to speak and move as a representative public.

 

In the end, it is likely that this irreconciliation between Self and Other, which limited Lautrec’s own negotiation of daily life (nightly life?) drove him to alcoholism and an early death.

The negotiation of identity, one’s perception of oneself in relation to the perception of oneself by others, is difficult for anyone, but for the artist it appeared to be unbridgeable, as he was trapped in a body that he could not accept mentally. Clearly building a world of one’s own, identifying with and walking among people on the edge of existence has its own limitations. In this respect, we remember the words of his father: “Everything which is imprisoned must die.”

 

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Laurence Loeb, “Psychopathography and Toulouse-Lautrec,” American Imago, 16, 3 (1959): 213-224.

 

[2] Henry S. Francis, “La Blanchisseuse by Toulouse-Lautrec,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland

Museum of Art, 40, 3 (1953): 51-53, 55.

 

[3] Lynn Garafola, “The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet,” Dance Research Journal,

(1985): 35-40.

 

[4] Francis, 1953, 51-53, 55.

 

[5] Loeb, 1959, 17.

[6] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 5th ed. A. V. Miller trans., J. N. Findlay analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 98–9. 

 

[7] Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (New York: Viking, 1994).

 

[8] Frey, 1994, 34.