Marcelle Lender doing the bolero

 

Marcelle Lender doing the bolero by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

Some years ago I was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to pay a visit to one of my favorite paintings. I rarely took advantage of Washington D.C.’s fantastic offer to its citizens and visitors when I lived there – i.e. the free access to the gorgeous Smithsonian collections – but when I did (say, once a year), I’d always make sure to see Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s painting “Marcelle Lender Doing The Bolero In Chilperic.”

I don’t know attracted me to her. I say her because it is really the dancer herself, portrayed in this beautiful work, who caught my attention. I love Toulouse Lautrec’s paintings because of the mood they convey and because of his ability to capture a sense (a soul) of a place with emphatic brushstrokes, but I found this particular work compelling primarily because of its protagonist.

I am not sure why. She is neither very beautiful – her angular features in sharp contrast to say more feminine performers portrayed by Degas – nor is she particularly graceful. But she possesses vivacity and wildness, and it is perhaps these attributes that I recognized in her and that I wanted to experience over and over again.

Toulouse Lautrec would have been 150 some days ago (24 November 2014), and Kunstforum Wien commemorated his birthday with a collection of paintings, drawings and lithographs on display until January 25, 2015. I went there to see if perhaps Marcelle had made it to Vienna, but she had not. My dear friend is, I believe, still in Washington D.C.

Toulouse Lautrec is often described as one of the most humane, compassionate post-Impressionist painters, who rendered the fascinating and grimy world of brothels and cabarets into life stories even we – who are watching these scenes unfold on canvas from a distance of over a century – can easily access. Come in and make yourself at home, his works say, because you’ll see that this world is little different from yours, populated by same human preoccupations: joy, sorrow, loneliness; colour, grayscale.

Much of his work focused on this underground realm and much of it was about dance. Like for example, the protagonists of Moulin Rouge performances: talented, long-legged divas like Jane Avril and their dexterous male counterparts, whose feats on the dance floor and the suppleness of their bodies earned them stage names like Valentin “the Boneless”. This world is both bright and dark; light-hearted and sombre; brazen and muted; both extraordinary (an endless party!) and mundane (the day after) and the painter – with his gentle gaze – immortalized it all on canvasses that I love.

On Toulouse Lautrec’s birthday Jonathan Jones wrote for The Guardian in an article (very appropriately titled “Why Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is much more than Google Doodle’s poster boy” considering that when I tried to search for news of his birthday, the top hits led with Google’s choice of a doodle celebrating the artist):

“People [in his paintings] are strange, rough silhouettes, and dance is a self-destructive orgy of senseless energy, in these great, shocking paintings that put you right there in the real, dangerous Paris of the 1890s.”

In an otherwise lovely and a very interesting piece commenting on the darker side of this painter largely known for his lithographs glamourizing the “sex and the city”, I took issue with the author’s perception of the dance as “self-destructive” and “senseless”.

We can certainly agree on wild. But I would also say that the dance – and by extension the Toulouse Lautrec’s dancers – are embodiments of freedoms celebrating the new liberties of the new times as well as the artist’s release from the confinement of his own, crippled body. Rather than self-destructive, they are in a way healing. The beauty of art, of course, is that we can read into it our own interpretations, draw our own conclusions.

A genetic disorder attributed to family’s history of inbreeding and brittle bones that never healed properly after they had been broken at the age of 13 and 14 caused Toulouse Lautrec’s legs never to grow to an adult’s size. Even as a child, he was fascinated by movement – fast, raw movement. What he could not do himself he tried to capture in his art. First the wild, galloping horses of his aristocratic childhood; then the wild can-can dancers of his adulthood spent in cabarets.

He painted with neither an obvious yearning or resignation – rather, with a fascination, an appreciation and perhaps a bit of gratitude of someone who found solace, belonging and freedom in this demi-world.

So, I would agree on wild. But the energy of his paintings, of those frantic movements, of the fast life he himself led, makes a whole lot of sense to me.