Lautrec had personal as well as artistic reasons for choosing this sphere. He had an ardent, almost febrile, desire to live fully and furiously. He was deformed; he had a man’s head and body on a child’s legs—the result of incompetent bone-setting in his youth. His family was a very old and noble one: his father was a sportsman, a lover of horses, a sculptor in his leisure moments. All the pride of race and dignity of class tumbled from its pedestal in this young artist. He had worked in the schools of Bonnat and Cormon, had met and admired Forain, and had finally been revealed to himself by Degas who led him to the theatre. He drank much, one suspects, to forget his deformity, just as Van Gogh drank to forget disease. He sought solace in the ephemeral, visionary life of the cafés; and no action, no type, no expression escaped his probing notice. He had many friends to whom he confided. “I am only half a bottle,” he would say. He adored women impersonally and romantically, but in his own station of life they looked upon him askance. Consequently he lived where money would always buy attention and where good-fellowship was repaid with good-fellowship.
Lautrec was an indefatigable worker, but his pictures possess little of the surface beauty of a Degas. Rather do they attest to a love of exaggerated and uncommon form, as do Chinese paintings. But in him is more order than in Degas. Compare Une Table au Moulin-Rouge with Degas’s Café-Concert. In the first the character in the physiques of the principals harmonises with the character of the faces; and the female figure’s hair, hat and fur-trimmed coat indicate the artist’s love for grotesque and beautiful abstract form. There is more than balance here: there is the rudiment of an instinctive composition which Degas never had. Beside this picture the Café-Concert seems flat silhouette, sprightly and entertaining, but far from profound. The nucleus of composition can be found in all of Lautrec’s best canvases, especially those he painted after his return from Spain. Toward the end of his life he worked, for the most part, with a full brush and rich colours. Before this, however, pencil, chalk, lithographs and water-colours had claimed him. His greatest fluency was in the use of separated hachures of rich greyish colour on neutral backgrounds. This method of application permitted him line as well as colour; and with his lines, summary and economical though they were, he caught the animality of his subjects with as sure a hand as Monet caught the light and Degas the action.
Lautrec, with Chéret, revolutionised the poster art. There are few men today in this field who do not owe much to him. His love of the eccentricities of his model was an ideal gift for the poster-maker, and he had himself sufficiently in hand not to be led into the grotesque. He was a caricaturist in that he exaggerated characteristic traits, just as Matisse did in his sculpture. He always noted fully the uncommon, and his love of every manifestation of life gave him a wide range of inspiration. Life was his great adventure; his art was merely his diary. He is a historian of the theatre of his time and has left salient portraits of Loie Fuller, Polaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne and Anna Held. His types of the raptorial woman of the past—the kind that today is found in the hidden corners of Les Halles, at the fortifications and about the “Rue de la Joie”—are as real as the female characters of Balzac, Daudet, Augier and Prévost. They live in his pictures because one feels that they once were realities: his caricaturisations of them, as of his clowns and dancers, only intensify their intimate humanity. To some it may seem strange that Lautrec should have liked Massys and Memling. But in the first he found trenchant characterisation, especially in such things as Head of an Old Man, The Courtesan and Portrait of a Canon. And he was temperamentally akin to Memling in such arrangements as the latter’s The Casting of the Lots (a detail of Calvary) and Our Lord’s Passion, at the Museum in Turin.
That the illustrators of this group were decadent is borne out in their subject-matter as well as in their methods. Since the earliest recorded antiquity artists have been attracted to the moving, the glittering, the brilliant; and the human occupation which embodies these three qualities most obviously is dancing. The men who are in love with life and not art and who paint and draw pictures merely to record their impressions, have always been hypnotised by the colour, the grace, the fluent movement and the rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable to analyse their emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the pattern, the arabesque. They thought that in portraying the dance literally they would arrive at its motive significance. But in this they failed. Had they done their figures in clay or stone they would have approached nearer their desire. But even this more masculine medium has, with few exceptions, resulted in failure. The dancing girls in the Grottoes of Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant masters of form as friezes or shapes to fill in and ornament a vacant space. The Tanagra figurines are a purely decorative endeavour. In Greece it was not the men of Praxiteles’s calibre, but the smaller talents like the potters who used the dance in their designs. Even a man as slight as Hokusai leaves it to a Toba Sojo to make his models caper. But the feminine talent of Degas finds in the dance absolute and unordered expression; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust than Degas, though minor and ornamentally illustrative artists, are seduced into portraying it often.
Louis Legrand was more of the “maker” of pictures than were his two contemporaries. His nature leaned toward the heavy and boisterous Sodoma rather than toward the Latin ideal of Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic racial penchant in him explains why the bestiality of his subject-matter is so often done in the manner of Goya, with broad black and white masses, not with the suggested line and the attractive matière of his master, Degas. There is much Teutonic blood in Spain, and Goya, while being far the greater artist even in his slightest etchings, is the nearest approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes. Goya paints moral decay with disgust and genius, whereas Legrand, with his slight gropings after order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard uses it as a temperamental means. The Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula of draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an end. His shallowness is at once apparent when we compare his Maîtresse or his illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s tales with etchings like Donde Vá Mamá or Buen Viaje. Psychologically he is intimately related to the fin de siècle movement in England; and, although a better and more healthy workman, he has a temperament singularly akin to that ineffectual Victorian academician, Walter Sickert.
In J.-L. Forain we have a man of different stamp, one who, knowing his ability for certain things, clings to them and does not attempt to thrust himself into the rank of artist. By developing his small potentialities to their highest actuality he has achieved as much as his confrères have by extraneous tricks and appearances. And there is no doubt that he comprehends art much better than they. His iconoclastic and acidulous cynicism, his ability to wrench from behind the veil of mundane hypocrisy the real motivation of an action, and his probing analysis which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have touched on many sides of contemporary life—politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the beau monde, prostitution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he builds up a type of the blustering parvenu Jew, the mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a “M’as-tu-vu?” and depicts him as with that phrase ever on his lips. Baudelaire Chez les Mufles is one of the world’s greatest monuments to human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is standing in the centre of a small gathering reciting Baudelaire’s verses. Around her are grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, all pretending, like the speaker herself, to be feeling deeply the hidden spirituality of the poem. Some of the men have their heads raised high, others bowed low, for purposes of concentration. The whole picture is rough-hewn as though done with an axe in a square of clay. With the simplest means the artist gives us the impression of rugged stone and, at the same time, completion. The titles to his drawings are in the exact spirit of the pictures themselves, succinct, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the second greatest caricaturist the world has produced. He was not the artist that Daumier was, but as a serious creator of types and as a highly intelligent critic of contemporary shams, he is a master, even as Daumier was a master of a realm far above him.
Forain perfected what he set out to do, and for this praise is due him. That his ambition ran along a subpassage of æsthetic endeavour, as did that of his three confrères, he would be the first to admit. As artists these men cannot be judged either by the surface quality of their works or by their penetration into life and character. Such considerations have nothing to do with æsthetic emotion. No matter how much we may eulogise such painters—for they must be judged by their own standard rather than by a criterion set by a Rubens—our praise will never place them in the rank of plastic creators. They will ever remain in the realm of nearly perfect workmen with literary apperceptions. Toulouse-Lautrec, because of his love of formal distortion for its own sake, probably comes nearer the higher level: there is in his work a slight æsthetic element. Degas will ever remain the piece of old velvet in a frame; Louis Legrand, the illustrator of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the expositor of life’s pretensions.
It is these men who have given the greatest impetus to realistic illustration in all countries. Viewed from this standpoint they were a salutary, as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrowing down into the depths of material existence they made unimportant such poetic men as Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good illustration after them took on a deeper meaning. It ignored the mendacious surfaces of things and strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie at the bottom of human actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain comes directly the best illustrative talent in both Europe and America. Without these four men we would not possess the best work of Max Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows, Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez, Carl Larson, Albert Engström, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe, Boardman Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is unquestionably the most artistic illustrator in either America or England.