Art: Montmartre Circus

In the 1890s the Moulin Rouge was the gayest dance hall in Paris. It had little Tunisian donkeys which bore cancan girls on their backs, an immense papier-mâché elephant which hid a troupe of dancers and an entire orchestra in its belly. It also had rough & ready Louise Weber (known for her lusty appetites as La Goulue—the glutton), who nightly exposed her shapely limbs and 60 yards of lace lingerie in hectic kicks and splits. To publicize her, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did his first poster.

Last week Parisians were crowding into a small Left Bank gallery to look at La Goulue and 29 other posters that had established Lautrec as the master poster artist of all time. The first complete set on view in many a year, the sprawling lithographs showed Paris in the ’90s, raffish and glamorously depraved.

Lautrec, an ugly and aristocratic dwarf descended from France’s powerful medieval Counts of Toulouse, had drifted among the confetti and champagne of Montmartre at its brightest, wandering in & out of bars, dance halls, brothels, sketching satchel-eyed lechers in boiled shirts and top hats, provocative cocottes in billowing pantalettes and immense bonnets. On his advertisements for nightclubs, books, magazines and plays, Lautrec had portrayed his disreputable and talented cronies with the subtlety of a Japanese print backed by the dash and action of a circus broadside.

In 1901 the 36-year-old Lautrec died, his delicate health overtaxed by Montmartre’s fast-paced night life. Demanding the best in printing, colors and paper, he had gained little from his excursions into “commercial” art beyond the satisfaction of a job magnificently done. But by last week his posters, which had at one time decorated kiosks, boulevard hoardings and alley walls all over Paris, were collectors’ items bringing prices up to $400 a copy.

Two months ago, after spending 20 years trying to round up a complete collection, Art Dealer Gustave Michel finally located Lautrec’s last and rarest poster, La Gitane, proceeded with plans for the Paris show. Later on, Michel hoped to send the show to the U.S., where few people had ever seen a complete set of Lautrec posters.*

* Though Lautrec had made Broadway. Dancers in the “Only for Americans” number from the current Sherwood-Berlin musical, Miss Liberty, all sport copies of gowns worn by the stars of the Paris music halls, as shown in Lautrec’s posters and other lithographs.