“You know what people come here for,” said our host, Waldemar Januszczak, conspiratorially. Showing less faith in his viewers than such a confident opening implied, he added: “They come… for this.” Cue dancing girls. We’re at the Moulin Rouge. He was right. We did know.Thanks to John Huston’s original film version of ‘Moulin Rouge’, in which tonight’s subject, the artist Toulouse Lautrec, was played with cruel pantomime by an actor with false shoes attached to his knees, we also know that the artist tended towards being short. “He was a leetle man,” confirmed a Parisian vox pop. “A meeniscule man.” Januszczak, who all but allows the waters to break in the pregnant pauses for which he apparently knows of no contraceptive, was on hand to add the voice of authority. “This… little man… who hurried about here getting notorious.” Short, you say? “Yes, he was short. Yes, he drank. And yes, he did live in a brothel. But that’s just an itsy bitsy bit of his story. Toulouse Lautrec’s… tragedy… is that no one takes him… seriously.” The viewers’ tragedy was that they were not being taken seriously by a man they could not take seriously.
Still, it would be unfair to insinuate that Januszczak told us little more than Lautrec’s lack of height. There was also what the family did rectify it. Electric shocks and hanging weights, gruesomely enough. And, showing us around the family home, the amiable son-in-law of the wee man’s great niece also informed us that: “The mother, she learned English to her son.” “Taught him English,” corrected Januszczak, an itsy bitsy bit ironically.
The mother also learned her son that he could become France’s greatest artist, and packed him off to Paris for some formal training by the aristocracy’s favourite portrait man, Leon Bonnat. Cue a city-surveying Januszczak. “Whichever cliché you choose to bestow upon this steaming cauldron of depraved creativity,” he began, in somewhat ungainly haste to bestow his own. The classy option might have been not to bestow one at all.
So Lautrec decamped to the bottom of the road to Montmarte. Or, in Januszczak-speak, “Paris’ naughty quarter, with historic qualities of bad influence and temptation.” Not everyone’s history books, it would seem, lead to Rome.
When Bonair’s studio closed, master Lautrec’s new tutor encouraged more naturalistic observation, and up the road to decadence – and a revolutionary approach to painting - he walked. It was here that he developed a penchant for gauche American cocktails. Januszczak was surprised. Afterall, he reasoned, “you know what the French are like about their drink.” Showing a heroic level of graciousness, the Frenchman to whom he addressed this remark was kind enough to concede that, yes, he, too, knew just what they were like.
And so to the paintings themselves. Traditionally, of course, this is the area where the art historian would earn his corn by forensically teasing out a subtext in the work far beyond the reach of the casual viewer. With that in mind, here is Januszczak casting his eye over the tender portrait of the prostitute who took Lautrec’s virginity. “What really makes this an… interesting painting is what he’s done to her face. Look… she’s got her finger up to her mouth as if she’s sucking her fingers. And all this hair falling over her… eyes.”
Many are the Januszczak lovers wont to compare their hero to Sir David Attenborough. Sadly, that would only be valid if the Knight of the Creased Khaki were ever to stride garrulously into shot and offer enlightenment on the level of: “An… enormous animal… feeding its bulk by way of a trunk, swinging away there at the front of its large… grey body…”
It is, frankly, not enough. So, in the spotlight next week? Allow me to hazard a guess. “This… deeply troubled… one-eared man… In this painting, the interesting thing is that the sunflowers are yellow. And… look… they’re in a vase…”
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