Review: High Kicks & Low Life: Toulouse-Lautrec prints at the Walker Art Gallery.

Art I spent this morning amongst this selection of surprisingly rare poster art in lithograph form mainly from the mid-1890s. Like anyone else who’s visited Paris I have a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard on my wall but I’ve always been very aware of him. My secondary school art sketch book contains a rather duff pencil copy of one of his Yvette Guilbert portraits (one of the examples in this exhibition I think) so I must have seen this work in my teens and his famous portrait of Aristide Bruant with the bright red scarf was the model for Tom Baker’s first costume in Doctor Who.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s technique is deceptively haphazard. At a distance many of his images don't make much sense.  Only on looking more closely do you see that what he's doing is creating startling impressions of movement using single, deliberate lines. But the forms are all there and clearly defined and haven’t quite reached a Picasso level of abstractness, were the position of objects becomes irrelevant. Often prints like Divan Japonais or May Belfort will be dominated by a single colour but some, like Marcelle Lender en Buste (pictured) include eight different shades which at that time required eight different stones and an intense level of concentration from the printer so that the mix of red, pink, orange and green did not lose definition.

As ever, it’s only when confronted with a brace of a man’s work that you can really appreciate his accomplishments. Like the best of the post-Impressionists, he’s somehow able to capture the essence of a scene and the people within it without slavishly presenting every aspect. Over and over again he places dancers like Jane Avril at the centre of the picture, in vivid motion or calm rest, in evening ware and surrounded by elements of whichever club or theatre is being advertised including a somewhat sleazy bearded man of some description.  The viewer is immediately transported to that place and in hindsight, time.

Perhaps the most impressive and suprising images are those created for Elles, a collection of drawings of the local prostitutes. As the accompanying information notes, he deliberately ignores the lascivious in favour of presenting those moments the men that visit them don't see, the preparation for their call, applying make-up, straightening hair, the sagged shoulders and disappointment of the final cash transaction and the moments before going to bed. I hadn't otherwise considered that a figure like Lautrec might have been an early feminist, but the empathy presented in these drawings suggests that might just be possible.