Rejected by the annual Salon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec forged connections with the avant-garde that would provide the avenue to success. By the end of the 1880s, his unique blend of realism, caricaturish simplification, and biting wit placed him at the forefront of Parisian artistic circles. It was during this time that he focused his pencil and brush on Montmartre, a seedy working-class neighborhood rife with talk of revolution and percolating with creative energy. Entertainers, artists, prostitutes, and hustlers—all figures on the margin of polite, traditional society—supplied the content for his paintings and lithographs.
For Lautrec, the can-can dancer Jane Avril embodied the brash, raucous ambience of Montmartre, and her extraordinary popularity was due in part to his collaboration in the manufacture of her persona. In his lithographs announcing her performances (59.80.15), which were plastered all over Paris, he used radical silhouettes and dramatic viewpoints. Yet he was also a deeply sensitive portraitist, and his oil sketches of Avril are perceptive, empathic glimpses into her private identity. In the present portrait, Lautrec dispensed with the stage set, lights, and trademark colored petticoats seen in the lithographs. Rather, here Avril is defined by a web of exaggerated brushstrokes with only a few of her graceful features fully realized. And yet there remains a hint of her public persona in the thick white pigment on her face suggestive of stage makeup.
2024
