Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

In the dozen years before his death at age 36, the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—paintings, drawings and graphics—embodied the alluring nightlife of Montmartre, and in turn a popularized image-mythology for Paris in the 1890s as the European centre for modern art. Montmartre, as many have written, was a hybrid of the leisure and entertainment industries, and was superficially decadent and hardly anti-bourgeois. In this staged micro-culture, Lautrec was cast as a character - an artist from an aristocratic family, corrupted and in turn, a corrupting influence. His physical deformities and the lurid aspects of his personal life fed a romanticized and scandalous view of Lautrec’s work. But his legacy and his contribution to the language of modern art are better seen in the context of artist intimistes of the period, who included Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Théophile Steinlen, Félix Valloton and Édouard Vuillard.