EXPLOSIVE ACTS

—The Painter of the Paris Night” emerges as a politically revolutionary and provocative artist inextricably linked with the volatile milieu of turn-of-the-century Paris. Sweetman (Paul Gauguin, 1996, etc.) probes the details and darknesses of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life in order to contextualize the artist’s paintings. The son of first cousins, Toulouse-Lautrec was afflicted with a range of congenital illnesses. When the young artist left the countryside for to live and paint in Paris, political revolutionaries, promoting an anarchistic view of social and intellectual life, shaped his ideological and aesthetic convictions. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Parisian lifestyle’studying in the ateliers of Leon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, cavorting in seedy brothels and the Moulin Rouge, associating with actors, dandies, and anarchists—imbued him with a zesty kinship for the downtrodden and the bohemian, the oppressed and the insouciant. Tragic and listless love affairs, including one with Suzanne Valadon, inspired Toulouse-Lautrec, as in his famous depiction of Valadon as the bareback rider of the Cirque Fernando. Sweetman also explores the populist appeal of Toulouse-Lautrec, who, with the advent of lithographic presses, effected a radical change in the availability of art. Despite his friend Oscar Wilde’s maxim that “art is the supreme manifestation of individualism,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s art is deeply concerned with human suffering, especially in his depictions of female despair. Such sympathy for the rough limits of the human condition illuminate his art as well as the strong loyalties of his life—his deep ties with Oscar Wilde when most had forsaken him and his alliance with anarchist FÇlix FÇnÇon. Both an eminently readable biography of a great artist and an exploration of how the fin-de-siäcle advanced new modes of artistic and political expression.