Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French painter and printmaker, made his name with a single poster. In December 1891, at least 3,000 copies of his advertisement for the Moulin Rouge, a Paris cabaret, were pasted up across the city.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam says the sheet "made Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec famous overnight." He went on drawing the singers and dancers of Paris nightlife, and those images kept his name in front of the public.
The Moulin Rouge stood at the foot of Montmartre, the hill of dance halls and cabarets on the northern edge of Paris. Lautrec knew it well. The son of an old aristocratic family from Albi, in the southwest of France, he had settled in Montmartre to study painting and rarely left the district.
At the Moulin Rouge he was a regular. The cabaret kept a seat for him and hung his paintings on its walls. He was easy to spot: as a teenager he had broken both thighbones, and his legs had stopped growing.
When the director, Charles Zidler, wanted a poster to launch the season, he turned to Lautrec, who had never made one before. The cabaret already had a poster by the artist Jules Chéret, but Zidler found it too tame.
Lautrec filled a sheet of color 1.70 meters tall with the cabaret's star, the dancer La Goulue. She kicks up her leg in the cancan, her blonde hair piled high, her white petticoats drawn in a few lines on the bare paper. The name of the cabaret runs three times across the top and leads the eye down to her.
Behind her, the crowd is reduced to a band of dark silhouettes, flat shapes without faces. The device recalls the Japanese prints then in fashion in Paris.
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The man in front of La Goulue
In front of La Goulue, closer to the viewer than anyone else, stands a man in a top hat, seen in profile, in shadow, one hand raised to his mouth…
What You'll Discover
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