What the artist judged as most important is expressed through non-finito, thus named after the last sculptures of Michael-Angelo. The sincere nature of the subjects eclipsesthe perfection of the forms. This aspect of his work is what also gives it strength; the remorse, the lines he leaves, deliberately visible, lenda unique perspective of life to his style.Whether Monsieur Warner (1892), La femme aux gants (1890), Les deux amies(1894) or other works, the non-finito  expresses with assurance the furtive, authentic and immediate aspect of these fleeting scenes. Lautrec goes directly to the essence. 

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec suffered from a congenital bone disease, pycnodysostosis. Family members intermarried in order to maintain their lineage.  His parents were German cousins. After fractures to his right and left femur at the age of 14 and 15 caused by falls, followed by long periods of convalescence, Henri stopped growing at 1.51m. His father knew he would never be the horseman or the hunter who he dreamed would accompany him and the affection he felt towards his son considerably cooled. Henri felt it even more than a man who loved horses and sport. He learned therefore to live with his handicap as a man who was quasi-dwarf and lame.  As an adult, his pince-nez and his round hat were an integral part of his image.  Sitting in front of his easel, a box on his knees with his brushes and colours, he provides a glimpse into the universe of ‘closed houses’ and filles de joies, or the prostitutes of Clichy pulling up their stockings. To him, the artist-Count, the provincial bourgeois who had inherited precarious health caused by inbreeding and which finished by his contracting syphilis, put his talents to the service of ‘real’ people. This end-of-the-century Paris which came alive at night with singers and dancers of the Moulin rouge, with cheerful people going to shows and men in top hats visiting cabarets without their bourgeois wives, were his subjects of choice. 

 

In all of these situations Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was only a spectator himself. He was too small to see everything and by nature a drop-out. He neither possessed the physique of the nobility nor its authority and that made him a bit of a clown. He became the interpreter of many, of the personalities of the moment, of those men and women he met of an evening, of artists and prostitutes. He would observe their demeanour, their postures, their feelings, their expressions. Lautrec was a painter of the moment. 

His first drawing teacher was the animal painter René Princeteau (1843-1914) a friend of the Lautrec family who was deaf and dumb. He taught his students with gestures and sounds. Henri was only 8 but already gifted, he had even developed the habit of drawing little caricatures in the corners of his text books when he was at school. So, in 1881, aged 17 he decided he would be an artist. The following year he moved to Paris and took academic courses at Cormon where he met his loyal friends: Louis Anquetin, François Gauzi and Charles Laval. Here, he would also make the acquaintances of Emile Bernard and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1884 he moved to Montmartreafter leaving the maternal residence, although not without the outraged protestations of Mother.

 

Paris was the ‘infamous capital’ according to Baudelaire. Haussmann’s major works had been under way for more than 20 years. Lautrec was alone there, yet he hardly complained and even entertained others. The presence of the prostitutes whom he frequented helped him hide his distress. When he was an adolescent he would draw caricatures of himself: a huge head and a tiny body sitting on a chamber pot which he signed: Lost. As an adult, he preempted opportunities to mock his physical appearance by describing himself as‘huge bottom and potato nose’. Lautrec was considered by singer and dancer Marcelle Lender as: “A smiling dwarf who would look at us from behind his pince-nez, the sight of which made us secretlydelighted.” He was also described as: a joyful soul and uniquely candid”, and even his lisp through his thick lips charmed his entourage. Among artists he found his true place without class, on the margins. He left the bourgeois world with which he didn’t identify. Drinking became habitual. 

 

At the end of his courses at Cormon he ‘had learned his trade’. The teacher there, who had also taught Picabia and Vincent Van Gogh, wanted to offer him the post as successor of his studio but Lautrec was not interested. He preferred to live in the heart of things.He stoodfor reality and for modernity,of which Baudelaire also said, “Is a drug which one has to continually increase the doses of or change the poison.” Lautrec was the ‘hyphen’ between the upper classes and cabaret culture. 

 

The news of his friend Vincent Van Gogh’s death on 29th July, 1890, came as a sharp shock to the community of artists in Montmartre. Whilst in Auvers-sur-Oise,Vincent had shot himself with a revolver but had failed, dying from his injuries three days later. Lautrec had once drawn his portrait (Vincent Van Gogh, pastel on paper, 1887). After leaving Holland and Anvers to live in Paris and attend classes at Cormon, Van Gogh had made several friends such as Anquetin and Gauguin. He had always wanted to travel elsewhere, notably to Japan,   and he asked Henri to accompany him there, but Henri suggested he went to Arles instead to find the light and sun. The last time they saw each other was for a Parisian lunch with Théo, Vincent’s brother. Later, they walked to Henri’s studio to see the portrait of Mademoiselle Dihau (Mademoiselle Dihau at the piano, 1890). Van Gogh found this painting, “really astonishing.” Edgar Degas, an aloof man who lived nearby at 18 bis Fontaine, had also drawn a portrait of Mademoiselle between 1869 and 1872. Another neighbor at 7, rue Tourlaque was Suzanne Valadon. She was a model for Renoir, Degas and Puvis de Chavanne following her circus accident (she had been an acrobat), and also sat for Henri, becoming his companion for two years. 

 

Between 1889 and 1892 Toulouse-Lautrec was ‘the painter of the Moulin Rouge’. He frequented there and had a regular table. ‘Les petites femmes de Paris’ danced the French cancan, drawing crowds, initially thanks to the posters of Jules Chéret (1836-1932) which Lautrec greatly admired. In 1891, a time when the Moulin was experiencing a crisis, the directors Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller commissioned Lautrec to create a new image for the place and reestablish its reputation. The couple ‘La Goulue’ - Louise Weber and Valentin le Désossé (Edmé Etienne Jules Renaudin, dancer and contortionist) - were the stars of the poster which Lautrec produced as a lithograph.  The latter was the opposite in design to Chéret’s, taking its inspiration both from Japanese prints then very fashionable, and from a Bonnard poster for France Champagne. Once again, he focused on the essential elements, omitting the superfluous. His visual message through the simplification of line and the impact of colour aroused admiration as the ‘genius inventor of the modern poster and of lithographic illustration’ as well as the ‘prince of the ephemeral and unpredictable, inseparable from a certain frivolousness.’ Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) said about it: “It possessed the distinct brazen, dissolute fashion of the time, while he possessed the rest.”